Transcript 11/23/09 Donna Bittman

[ghostjmf]

BobJuch says:

My point was that the clay here that sandlappers ate has kaolin.

OK

Do you suppose the show knew, when they had a Q on that term (I gotta go back & check if they really used that term; they used something with "sand" in it) it was derogatory? I didn't, & even the cursory lookup I did when you used it didn't tell me.

By the way, the 1st I heard of this phenomenon ("dirt eating") which has some clinical name I'm not remembering is when a friend in Arizona almost 40 years ago said "I wish they had some dirt here I could eat"; after which they explained this is what people did sometimes back home; back-home for them was not SC

By the way, various medical people have postulated that "dirt eating" & "metal eating" is done by people with metabolic deficiencies who are subconsciously going after what they know will replace an item for which their body has a deficit. But I dunno that anyone has ever proved a metabolic need for aluminum. The current TV show "Three Rivers" recently used a patient's iron-object-eating trait (which of course included intestine-puncturing scissors as well as simple nuts & bolts) as a clue that the patient had an iron deficiency due to some real medical condition (I forget its name).

[Bob Juch]

BobJuch says:

My point was that the clay here that sandlappers ate has kaolin.

OK

Do you suppose the show knew, when they had a Q on that term (I gotta go back & check if they really used that term; they used something with "sand" in it) it was derogatory? I didn't, & even the cursory lookup I did when you used it didn't tell me.

By the way, the 1st I heard of this phenomenon ("dirt eating") which has some clinical name I'm not remembering is when a friend in Arizona almost 40 years ago said "I wish they had some dirt here I could eat"; after which they explained this is what people did sometimes back home; back-home for them was not SC

By the way, various medical people have postulated that "dirt eating" & "metal eating" is done by people with metabolic deficiencies who are subconsciously going after what they know will replace an item for which their body has a deficit. But I dunno that anyone has ever proved a metabolic need for aluminum. The current TV show "Three Rivers" recently used a patient's iron-object-eating trait (which of course included intestine-puncturing scissors as well as simple nuts & bolts) as a clue that the patient had an iron deficiency due to some real medical condition (I forget its name).

No, they probably didn't know it was derogatory. The medical term is geophagia. The explanation I read for people around here eating clay was simply to relieve hunger.

[ghostjmf]

BobJuch says:

No, they probably didn't know it was derogatory. The medical term is geophagia. The explanation I read for people around here eating clay was simply to relieve hunger.

As someone who has actually known & talked to a geophagic (thanks for the term), I can tell you that they said its "because it tastes good" (though they could tell they weren't exactly convincing me). The habit may have had its roots in hunger, or in missing metabolic factors, but as passed down to my friend's generation, which is roughly the same as mine (age 58; we were both in our early 20s when we had this conversation) it was done for taste. Kind of like a liking for potato chips or something.

[Peyton Farquhar]

When I was in elementary school, there was a song in our song book for music class that began "strawberry jam, cream of tartan, tell me the colors in your garden...". I know "tartan" isn't "tartar", but it was close enough to confuse me.

[Bob Juch]

I discovered there's a Sandlapper Elementry School not far from me.