DailyDirt: Eating Actual Dirt

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

People eat a lot of weird things: bugs, fungus, all kinds of fermented stuff. However, the craving for dirt is a real phenomenon, and people do actually eat various kinds of dirt. There's some evidence that our ancient ancestors -- 2 million years ago -- (aka homo habilis) ate dirt. Dirt is even sold for eating in the USA right now. If you'd like to learn more about eating dirt, here you go.

• People in the southeastern US eat "white dirt" -- a soft, chalky clay also called kaolin. No one really knows why people started eating dirt, but there are some suggestions that dirt could have protected people from poisons. That's probably not a good reason to start consuming dirt now, though. [url]
• Pregnant women sometimes crave dirt or mud. Eating dirt is "geophagy" or is called "pica" as an eating disorder. Some people think women crave dirt while pregnant in order to get pre-natal vitamins. [url]
• In 2008, poor Haitians resorted to a traditional remedy for hunger -- cookies made of dried yellow mud. Apparently, these mud cookies cost about a nickel each -- and leave a lingering aftertaste. [url]
• Maybe we've eliminated a bit too much dirt from our diets, and the lack of exposure to various microbes is causing an increase in the prevalence of allergies. Gut microbes may be important to our overall health, and consuming a narrower population of microbes might be problematic. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: dirt, eating, edible, food, geophagy, kaolin, pica, white dirt

DailyDirt: Weird Foods That Are Also Natural And Organic

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In the strict chemical sense, it's actually not that easy to find inorganic foods (ie. foods that are not organic). But you might find some if you practice geophagy. Here are just some examples of foods made from all-natural ingredients.

• Coffee made from beans excreted by civets seems to be pretty popular. But the knock-off coffee made from chemically-digesting coffee beans (in lieu of the animal-digested beans) doesn't sound so bad, actually. [url]
• How about some artificial-meat made out of protein... extracted from human feces? When they're extracting the protein, maybe they should also extract the undigested pharmaceuticals while they're at it. [url]
• Eating marine mammals like dolphins might be a growing trend for poorer nations. Making dolphin hunting illegal, however, is probably not the right response. [url]
• Eating dirt is called "geophagy" -- a practice that expectant mothers sometimes engage in. Yum! pfft! [url]
• Speaking of mothers... A flavor of ice cream with a "yuck" factor twist: Baby Gaga ice cream is made from human breast milk. It's also probably the most expensive ice cream you've never wanted to taste. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: baby gaga ice cream, coffee, dolphins, food, geophagy