There’s an old saying in the South, “A child’s gotta eat their share of dirt.” I remember a trip my parents took me and my brothers on when we were young. We went to North Carolina to visit our family and my mother wanted to show us where she live when she was a young child. It was an old two room shack just a stones throw from the highway. Through the years the old building had deteriorated. The door and shutters had long since weather away and for the most part it was just a frame with a rotten porch. My mother walked around the familiar place and then headed towards the highway. She got to the side of the road and beckoned us to join her. We came upon a small hill topped with wiry grass. Decades of rain had eroded the mound and a soft even layer of red clay rolled down to the black tar highway. “This is what we ate instead of candy,”my mom said as she scoop up a bit and offered it lovingly to us. We looked at each other and started laughing. “No thanks mom,” and ran back to the car where we had our store bought snacks. Mom threw the handful of dirt back to the ground and walked back to the car, where she promptly gave us a lecture on how good we had it.
For generations, the eating of clay-rich dirt has been a curious but persistent custom in some rural areas of Mississippi and other Southern states, practiced over the years by poor whites and blacks. Some people attribute the origin of the practice in the South to slaves brought over from Africa. But experts say it origins date back much further than the slave trade. Hippocrates wrote about women eating earth in ancient Greece sometime around 400 BCE, and this is just the first written record. The practice may have existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that. It did and still does popularly exist in Africa. Geophagy, is the technical term for deliberately eating earth, soil, or clay. Yet in many parts of the world, this is not considered strange or rare, but a culinary past time. Dr. Dennis A. Frate, a medical anthropologist from the University of Mississippi who has studied the phenomenon says nearly every culture has passed through a phase of earth eating. Dr. Frate said dirt eating is one of the few customs surviving among some Southern blacks that can be directly traced to ancestral origins in West Africa. Dirt-eating is common among some tribes in Nigeria today. He also said it was not uncommon for slave owners to put masks over the mouths of slaves to keep them from eating dirt. The owners thought the practice was a cause of death and illness among slaves, when they were more likely dying from malnutrition.
Does eating clay have any nutritional value or is dangerous to participate in a practice dating back thousands of millennia? Well there two schools of thought. Some of the clay has a substance called Kaolin. If anyone has ever taken Kaopectate for stomach ailments, you’ve probably eaten kaolin. It has the ability to replace lost or damaged stomach lining, and sooth digestive problems in moderation. But too much can block your intestines, leading to sever or fatal outcomes. You also risk that there may be lead or parasites in the clay. Fine clays have a tendency to adhere to lining of the intestines and can pack your colon. So it seems the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Still history and family is a hard thing to ignore. You can still purchase red clay for consumption in small markets down south or order it on the internet.
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