Kaolin-eating is often associated with pregnant women, correct? It's not just a Southern thing. Kaolin is a culinary habit for many pregnant African-American females in the South, but it's also popular with younger children around the world. There's a term tossed around out there for a small group of geophagists of European descent mostly found in South Carolina known as "sand-lappers." Elephants, parrots, grizzly bears, rabbits, squirrels, and many other animals practice geophagy too.

Some people attribute the origin of the practice in the South to slaves brought over from Africa. Has this past influenced its present? I would describe the origins as much older than the slave trade. Hippocrates wrote about women eating earth in ancient Greece sometime around 400 BCE, and this is just the first written record. The practice may have existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that. It did and still does popularly exist in Africa, but there are currently accounts of human geophagy from nearly every country in the world. I think the practice has survived because it is much more pervasive than we may realize. It has survived in the American South because its a generational practice. Most people I spoke with said they eat dirt because that's what their mother did. Historically, it has been practiced by pregnant women, and people just write it off as something that pregnant women do. I hope that this project gives the phenomenon the respect and attention that it deserves.