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Eating clay is not an eating disorder

 

Zayaan Khan explores the qualities of clay - as food, as body, as memory, as witness, as story teller, as time machine. Khan’s encounters with clay, specifically that found at Devil's Peak in her home town of Cape Town, emerge from different forms of situated knowledge - scientific, sensorial, material and emotional. Closing with a recipe for Talbinah, a milky barley porridge, Khan pointedly asks: ‘What can I eat to fortify a broken heart?’

The act of eating things outside of what we consider food has the generalized label of pica, often seen in young children who explore the world through their mouths, but also in many older people who have the compulsion to eat non-food items that may be damaging to their health: spoons or other metal objects, soap, concrete, paint peeling off plaster (which may contain lead), even soil (which may be contaminated) – all of which may lead people to need urgent care or even surgery. Pica’s cravings have a sensory element. It is considered an eating disorder, listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and subdivided into an array of Latin-worded disorders such as hyalophagia (the eating of glass, which brings up vivid memories of watching the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and the wonderful crunches when they eat the teacups) or lithophagia (the eating of stones). There is a distinct dissonance around eating these non-food items, which gets everything grouped together under the banner of ‘disorder’, immediately creating a sense of othering. Imagine the stresses new parents go through when their mouth-sensory-seeking child is labelled as having an eating disorder when they explore the world and cannot differentiate between what to swallow and what not to swallow. Easy to simplify in black and white, but I would like to make some room here to think beyond the usual categories around or assumptions about what it is to eat that which is not considered food.

Pica is taken from the Latin name for magpie, Pica pica, birds known around the world for their intelligence, for their cultural practices, particularly around

grieving, and for gleaning the shiny and the curious. Within a myriad of beliefs with folkloric and mythological associations, the magpie represents both good and evil in equal amounts: immense luck but also bad luck, depending on who you speak to. Kind of makes sense, then, the sweeping grouping of the eating of non-food items under this one banner. Still, I am motivated to make some space in this definition to claim that eating clay is not an eating disorder – that, in fact, we should nominate clay as a valid ingredient.

At the same time, I would like to create space for a new kind of eating: the deep satisfaction and craving for, the love and appreciation of foods with minimal flavour, especially delectable if they’re soft like air or paper. Like puff chips, but the lite version, minimally flavoured air chips – just a dusting of punch. There’s a sweetness of nothing there, or perhaps a sweetness in the nothing. My mother loves food like this, my mother who is also well-known for her most delicious traditional cooking skills, with spice and mountains of ingredients – but give her, let’s say, Japanese fluffy sponge cake (known around here as bread, even with its sweetness) and she will melt, not so much for the flavour but for the way the food seems to disappear as you bite into it, a solid food you can breathe in.

I nominate the love of these foods as insipiphilia – yes, insipi- as in ‘insipid’ but not in a negative way. Definitely not ‘lacking interest’, as dictionaries tell us, but inspi- as in, along the spectrum of ‘tasteless’. Have you ever craved rice paper? Or clay?

At the shop across the road from our house we used to buy rice paper for half a cent a sheet, an amount accessible to very young children. The way it would be ripped off its cardboard backing as it hung on the shelf in that dark and dirty old shop, then the softness it melted with as you manipulated it past your teeth – it satisfied the textural and sensorial cravings, but ultimately tasted like nothing.

Paper UFOs, the rice- or wafer-paper outer with delicious sour-sweet sherbet inner, the paper, offering a beautiful textural weight of nothingness, balancing out the sweetness and short shock of sour. White Rabbit Creamy Candy and other milk sweets of our childhood, toffee goodness wrapped in dry and also creamy rice paper. You meet a moment of nothing, of minimal flavour, in this salivation that mixes with the sweet milkiness.

This desire is so specific – for a texture more than a flavour perhaps? Or for the group of foods that lie along the nexus of soft–light–delicate in flavour and in taste (these being two different things).

Then there are the cravings that have mostly to do with texture, those where flavour or taste don’t really feature, those dubbed pica and considered an eating disorder. Twenty years ago I worked in retail and one of my coworkers on the cosmetics floor was pregnant and in her third trimester. She fondly told the story of how her husband drove her up to Devil’s Peak alongside Table Mountain, Cape Town, to where the old road led past an area of red slate. Here, after a short walk with incredible views of the city and harbour, she would harvest some of the clay, which was slaking off in pieces as the watery wall kept the slate soft. She recounted how she’d pick off pieces with glee to eat them right there with her front teeth (here she was specific: this was not a chewing

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