A Craving for Clay : Some Can’t Kick a Dirty Eating Habit

LEXINGTON, Miss. —  Onece Johnson tried hard to kick the habit. She took up smoking. She began eating laundry starch as a substitute. But the old craving still lingered.

Johnson has to have a daily fix of dirt, particularly her favorite crunchy clay.

The 38-year-old woman is one of a dwindling number of clay eaters in America, perpetuating an African custom brought to this country by slaves.

“I’ve tried to wean myself away from it,” said Johnson, showing a visitor the site of the best-tasting dirt in her native Holmes County, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta. “On a daily average, I’d say I’d eat a tablespoonful, just enough to get a taste in my mouth, like pinching tobacco.”

An authority on dirt-eating is Dr. Dennis Frate, a medical anthropologist and program director of the University of Mississippi’s Rural Health Research Program in nearby Goodman.

“It’s analogous to eating potato chips,” Frate said. “A snack food is what it is.”

Johnson, a staff member at the state’s Shelter Workshop for the Handicapped in Lexington, said dirt tastes like . . . well, dirt.

“It really doesn’t have a significant taste,” she said. “You know when it rains how the earth smells? It tastes to me similar to what it smells like.”

Frate conducted a study in 1971 that found that one out of four adult women in Holmes County ate dirt regularly. He said dirt-eating has been reported throughout the South, though he knows of no recent studies.

For unknown reasons, Frate said, few men eat dirt in America, whereas men and women eat dirt pellets sold today in the markets of West Africa.

Although there is a slight risk of ingesting parasites or impacting the colon with large amounts of clay, Frate said the practice generally is not harmful to health.

Frate conducted a follow-up study of dirt eaters four years ago, which was published by the New York Academy of Sciences. The study showed that most Holmes County dirt eaters had switched to potentially harmful substitutes such as laundry starch or baking soda, which have a texture similar to the dirt.

He said the substitutes are particularly threatening because they contribute to high blood pressure.

Johnson said doctors told her that women, particularly when pregnant, craved the dirt because of a nutritional deficiency. But she never believed that because she eats a balanced diet and continued to want dirt long after her babies were born.

After studying blood samples of dirt eaters and non-dirt eaters, Frate concluded that the nutritional status of the two groups did not differ statistically. The study refuted the long-held belief that malnutrition contributed to the practice.

“Cravings? Well, sure,” Frate said. “I’m an Italian-American and I get cravings for pasta at least twice a month. I’ve got to have my pasta. It’s the same thing. There’s not a physiological urge that tells me I need this. I just like how it tastes.”

But Frate said dirt-eating is probably going out of vogue, even in the rural South.

“I think when this generation of women--those 45 and older--is gone, it’s going to be unheard of.”

But Johnson noted that there is visible evidence that dirt eaters are far from extinct. She pointed to a scooped-out hillside along Mississippi 17 about two miles southeast of Lexington. It’s one of two sites she knows of where local people continue to get dirt to eat.

Not just any dirt will do. It has to be the right kind of crunchy clay. Frate said the most popular eating dirt is a light-brown clay known scientifically as “red-yellow podzolic soil.”

Frate attributed the craving for dirt simply to early childhood eating habits. Johnson agreed. She said her children do not eat dirt because they grew up in urban Jackson.

“It’s a universal practice,” Frate said. But he said he does not expect the practice to survive for too many years, even in Africa.