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I feel like there's a decent difference between dirt and clay. Like the title made me imagine the same dirt that's in a lawn with bugs and stuff; clay I imagine as being cleaner and more similar to eating wax or play-doh.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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That would explain a lot, actually.
Eat dirt all y'all!
I mean, I drink my urine for the sulphur qualities in alchemy, which are a different thing entirely than what sulphur is in chemistry. Makes my teeth hurt less, I find. Must be good Karma in a yellow spectrum of frequencies. Don't eat your poop though. That's a bad idea, kids.
Are they preparing the subjects that eating dirt is "American", and they should get used to it, as the prices are going to rise even more?
I really don't think it was "common" up to the 80s. I remember reading about this in high school around 1970, when it was described as an old practice, uncommon and eccentric but still found among a few rural poor. I remember they used the term "sweet dirt" to describe dirt they considered edible.
Drinking acid out of cans is still super common tho.
Only because they took the drugs out.
Explains a lot
peak south USA
I knew some animals would "eat" dirt once in a while, but this sounds like desperate hunger to me
When I read about this practice a long time ago it was talked about more as an eccentric preference, like gum or tictacs, not a desperate means of nourisment - although it might have been driven by deficiency cravings. And what I've read about it didn't mention baking, so it seems like a great way to ingest parasites.
More likely pica which is a symptom of severe iron or other nutrient deficiency.
Man that make some scenes in Yellowjacket make so much more sense...
Sometimes I scroll through, see an obvious shit post in what should not be a shit post sub. I go into the comments and they are all "yeah, it's true (personal example)" and I feel convinced a group of shit posters are just brigading the sub for the luls.
This is one of those moments.
I can understand that.
However I grew up in the US south. My response was "Yea... that sounds about right..."
as a white Englishman, key and peele have such a knack for writing a sketch that teaches me about a culture and makes me get and laugh at the joke about something I didn't know was a thing until I saw the sketch.
This and the "gimme that OLD school" sketch are among them.
When I first saw this skit, all I could think of was the jar of pickled pig's feet that would get cracked open at family gatherings.
thats why its called Humus, and not HUMMUS. eating dirt is a good way to get infections, especially parasites, like raccoon roundworm.
Can those survive the baking process?
we're getting punked, right? this is citogenesis? someone just made it up? does anyone have a primary source??
Human geophagia is a form of pica – the craving and purposive consumption of non-food items – and is classified as an eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) if not socially or culturally appropriate.[6] Sometimes geophagy is a consequence of carrying a hookworm infection. Although its cause remains unknown, geophagy has many potential adaptive health benefits as well as negative consequences.[5][7]
Pica is the name to Google
I don't have a source, but when I was younger there were a few black kids in my school from super poor families, and their parents would put sugar and spices in clay for them for breakfast. It had some flavor and filled them up, even if there wasn't much nutritional value.
Then they finally added breakfast (instead of just lunch) to the free meal program for poor families when I was in late elementary, and they'd just eat at school.
A lot of kids only reliably get meals from school. In college, I got involved in a program with the food bank where we'd go to schools during their last period on Fridays and place backpacks full of food in the lockers of children from the poorest families. The blue bags we used were cheap and obvious, and we'd frequently find the previous week's bag still full. The kids were too embarrassed to get on the bus with the bags that identified them as poor.
So we had a fundraiser to buy 3 cheap but normal identical backpacks for each kid in the program. One for their everyday use, and 2 for the weekend food (we'd drop off a new one and take the previous week's bag for refilling). That way they'd swap their regular bookbag in their locker for the food bag and nothing looked unusual on the bus ride home.
I hadn't thought about that in a while. I need to make a donation to the food bank.
Also - give the food bank money, not food. They can buy food cheaper than you can, and they know what they actually need.
It had some flavor and filled them up
Ok, but why not, for example, wood, straw? Them are mostly inert and even somewhat healthy. I don't know about clay specifically but eating pebbles exposes you to high levels of toxic minerals.
wood, straw?
Availability, ease of mastication, ease of swallowing.
If you had sawdust spices and and water you might have a decent shot, but that's not all that easy to make without tools.
Clay, sand and soil are pretty easy to get to.
People who are soo poor they've resorted to eating clay to feel full may not be in a position to know the healthiest way to temporarily the body into thinking it's not hungry.
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NYT is a reliable source.
Absolutely. Always on the right side of history.
Hopeful they did it far from outhouses.
Dirt is loaded with parasites even today, in countries with poor sanitation.
That's what the cooking is for I imagine
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My grandparents are from Yazoo city, and my mom used to talk about how her grandmother and aunts used to eat dirt, specifically red dirt from a hill on the farm. I've never seen it, and never even thought about it until seeing this post.
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