In the beginning of the 1970s, the Danish hippie Jacob Holdt hitchhiked
his way through the States. Holdt hitchhiked through vast stretches of
the country wearing his short-hair wig so as to get lifts more easily
and avoid being harassed (this was a time when long-haired men in the
South would be shot at from cars). His remarkable ability to open
himself to his surroundings meant that his journey was not only
geographical but also one that cut through the various social, racial,
and political strata of the US. His letters to his parents back home
were so unbelievable that they sent him a camera to record what he was
experiencing. The images were later collected in a book called
American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass.
American Pictures exposed an indescribable misery within
the borders of the "world's richest country." Some of the poorest
citizens in this country were in fact eating soil out of hunger. This
practice is mentioned in only one passage of the book but nevertheless
remains an unforgettable sign of extreme poverty. In North Carolina,
Holdt meets a professor in geophagia (soil eating) who describes how
widespread the phenomenon is around Wilmington. Holdt himself never saw
the soil eaters of North Carolina but when we asked him by email, he
writes back that he did witness blacks around the Mississippi River eat
clay from the riverbed.
Within this framework, soil eating is poverty and hunger's most extreme
outpost. It is an activity that is charged with a strangely archaic
quality where a lack is miraculously turned into a surplus. In his
febrile state of hunger, the soil eater transforms the clay of the bed
river into filling food. He is set within a hallucinogenic landscape
where the very ground he walks on is transformed into nourishment.
For science, geophagia is a hard nut to crack. The phenomenon is
located at the intersection of sociology, medicine, and religion, and
studies of soil eating need a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach.
The delineation and definition of the phenomenon itself follows an
interestingly complicated path. First and foremost, science has to
define what soil is. The researcher N. C. Bradey makes an attempt in
The Nature and Properties of Soil (1974):
A collection of natural bodies which has been synthesized in
profile form from a variable mixture of broken and weathered minerals
and decaying matter, which covers the earth in a thin layer, and which
supplies, when containing the proper amounts of air and water,
mechanical support and sustenance for plants.
The next step is to define how the soil will enter the digestive tract.
Since soil can be airborne, people who breathe through their mouths can
breathe in soil. This is especially relevant in the case of those who
live in deserts. The distinction is therefore made between inhaling
soil and ingesting it.
Conscious ingestion is assigned the term "pica" in standard medical
reference books.1 Pica is defined as
"a drive toward eating anything that is not a food substance,
especially clay."2 Some researchers
narrow this definition and speak instead of "a perversion of the
appetite."3 Pica is said, for example,
to affect pregnant women who can get a sudden and irresistible urge to
eat mortar, rubber tires, shavings, or soil. Already here, we see that
documented medical cases have mixed with myths and oral stories. Pica
is an umbrella term for nine distinct scenarios, each based on one
substance that is ingested manically. Geophagia is specifically about
soil. The term "pica" is contradictory because, in addition to a
"perversion of the appetite," the concept also refers to the unwitting
ingestion of soil as well as ritual and traditional soil eating.
Anemia and the lack of iron have been proposed as causes of geophagia.
But treatments with minerals and placebos has not often resulted in
patients refraining from ingesting soil. Some researchers have claimed
that iron deficiency and anemia are in fact the result of soil
ingestion. Other factions within geophagia research point to
developmental disturbances and a compulsive persistence of infantile
hand to mouth behavior as the explanation of geophagia. The habit of
eating soil is often attributed to the poorest regions of the world.
But it is not clear if starvation can fully account for geophagia. It
looks as though in some countries, geophagia is part of a cultural
pattern among certain groups. In Ghana, for example, clay is sold as
medication, and in Guatemala, clay briquettes with cathedral designs on
them are sold to pregnant mothers. What makes geophagia even more
complicated is that clay can in fact have a benign effect on different
kinds of stomach problems and poisonings. In the US, the majority of
geophagia cases have been among the poor black population in the south,
but there have also been cases in New York City. Two different
researchers (W. H. Crosby and R. P. Wedeen) propose the surprising
theory that soil eating can no longer be connected to specific
socioeconomic factors but has spread to a larger, less definable
segment of the northern urban population in the US.
In 1958, a global study of geophagia titled Geophagical Customs
was presented by Swedish researchers Anell and Lagerkrantz. Their book
presents another account of soil eating's relation to lack of minerals
and to poverty. Their four categories of soil eating do include hunger
as one factor but the other three address soil as a spice and as a
delicacy; as a medicine; and as the substance of ritual ingestion.
Anell and Lagerkrantz claimed that in Africa specially, geophagia was
widespread and fulfilled a variety of functions. It is thought to cure
syphilis and diarrhea; in some regions, young girls eat soil at the
onset of puberty; pregnant women eat soil to guarantee a painless birth
and dark skin for the child. In certain areas, criminals are forced to
eat soil. The sacred earth is supposed to administer justice—if the
condemned criminal is in fact guilty, he will fall sick or go mad.
But what is at stake in which perspective on a phenomenon (soil eating,
in this case) becomes dominant? Why argue at all about such
definitions? The answer is that the "problem" will be handled in very
different ways based on which point of view gains support.
From the biologistic point of view, a diagnosed disease means a whole
chain of preventive measures and consequences. The phenomenon is placed
within a clinical universe. Traditions, rites, and psychological
factors are transformed into the consequences of physical disturbances.
If an extreme socio-anthropological point of view dominates, the
corporeal and the biological will be either "overcome" or integrated
within culture, myths, rites, and traditions. The behavior will be
stamped as cultural. From a third perspective—which we could call Jacob
Holdt's perspective—the entire phenomenon can be reduced to hunger,
which is itself a result of poverty. Social existence determines all of
a person's existence. Eating soil—in a strange way a very basic
activity—eludes all these definitions. It is the hungry's last
desperate attempt at assuaging their hunger. At the same time, extreme
hunger does not automatically trigger a reflex to eat soil. In
descriptions of the origins of geophagia, there is a complicated weave
of sociology (traditions, rites), psychology (hand to mouth behavior),
politics (poverty), and biologism (manifestation of deficiency).4
We are in the space where culture and disease overlap.
While walking through the streets of Johannesburg last year, doctors
Alexander Woywodt and Akos Kiss were surprised to find small briquettes
of red soil being sold among food items at the market. The soil was
bought by young women as natural medicine. They wrote a report in a
medical journal.5 In the report, they
want to alert South African doctors that geophagia is widespread in the
region. They write that this anomaly—if it is an anomaly—cannot be
understood from the explanatory perspectives offered: extreme poverty,
culturally sanctioned behavior, or eating disorder.
But the questions can never be answered. The researchers go out on the
streets. They discover something astounding: humans are engaging in
unusual activities. There are people out there eating soil. They alert
their colleagues but cannot explain it. The diagnosis vaporizes.
Geophagia slides back into myth.
Translation: Sina Najafi
1 — In her book Nostalgia (Stockholm: Bonnier,
2001) on the history of nostalgia within medical history, Karin
Johannisson writes that in the 18th and 19th centuries pica was
classified in a category of illnesses termed "oddities" or "misdirected
or abnormal desire." Pica is here aligned with bulimia, panic attacks,
various phobias, nymphomania, and satyriasis. The same framework is
also used in Frenchman François Boissier de Sauvage's enormous
Nosologica Methodica (1768) which lists 2,400 diseases, and in
Englishman William Cullen's A Methodological System of Nosology
from 1808.
2 — See Taber Medical Dictionary (Thomas: 1993).
3 — P. Lanzkowsky, "Investigation into the Etiology and
Treatment of Pica," Archives of Disease in Childhood , nr.
34, 1959, p. 140.
4 — We have to a large extent followed Steven L. Simon's
overview article "Soil Ingestion by Humans: Review of History, Data,
and Etiology with Application to Risk Assessment of Radioactively
Contaminated Soil," Health Physics, vol. 74, nr. 6, (June
1998).
5 — Alexander Woywodt and Akos Kiss, "Geophagia: A Forgotten
Diagnosis?, South African Journal of Surgery, vol 38, nr.
2, (May 2000), p. 42.