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The soil-eaters

By Ehsan Masood

It’s lunchtime somewhere in rural tropical Africa. You’re hungry, but the nearest restaurant is too far to walk. There’s no Italian, Chinese, Indian or fast food and the telephone pizza delivery company is a little reluctant to send its dispatch rider beyond the city walls. Moreover, you’re on a tight budget. What are you to do? The answer, quite literally, may lie in the soil directly beneath your feet.

According to two researchers from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, UK, the tradition of soil consumption is still very much alive in the African tropics, India, Jamaica and it has also been reported in Saudi Arabia. Despite the advent of modern religions and the end of the slave trade, soil eating is not uncommon, though mostly confined to the poorer sections of society.

The reasons for soil consumption are many and often misunderstood, say the researchers Peter Abrahams and Julia Parsons. But geophagists – as soil-eaters are known – on the whole are regarded as quite ‘normal’ to most but outsiders.

“Despite the widespread distribution of geophagy, both today and in the past, it is largely unknown, under-reported, misunderstood or ignored by most people in the developed world”, say Abrahams and Parsons. [This is why] “the adjectives ‘eccentric’, ‘perverted’, ‘odd’, and ‘bizarre’ have all been applied to geophagy”.[...]

(Nature News Service, 1996)

Qual é a explicação de Abrahams e Parsons para o uso de adjetivos como “eccentric”, “perverted”, “odd” e “bizarre” para caracterizar a geofagia?