This will sound like a provincial and insulting question, but it’s not meant to be: Do people in the American South still eat dirt? I’ve read at various times that devouring soil was a custom, especially among children, in the region. I’m sure the earth has plenty of nutrients, but is it passé at this point? From William E. Schmidt in the February 3, 1984 New York Times:

“CRUGER, Miss. Feb. 9— It’s after a rainfall, when the earth smells so rich and damp and flavorful, that Fannie Glass says she most misses having some dirt to eat.

‘It just always tasted so good to me,’ says Mrs. Glass, who now eschews a practice that she acquired as a small girl from her mother. ‘When it’s good and dug from the right place, dirt has a fine sour taste.’

For generations, the eating of clay-rich dirt has been a curious but persistent custom in some rural areas of Mississippi and other Southern states, practiced over the years by poor whites and blacks.

But while it is not uncommon these days to find people here who eat dirt, scholars and others who have studied the practice say it is clearly on the wane. Like Mrs. Glass, many are giving up dirt because of the social stigma attached to it.

‘In another generation I suspect it will disappear altogether,’ said Dr. Dennis A. Frate, a medical anthropologist from the University of Mississippi who has studied the phenomenon. ‘As the influence of television and the media has drawn these isolated communities closer to the mainstream of American society, dirt eating has increasingly become a social taboo.'”