Eating clay is not an eating disorder

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 affair, but a continual nibble), and packed some in a tissue for later. All along this walkway on the mountain are tributaries and waterfalls where clean icy cold sweet mountain water is ready to quench your thirst and help you wash down your serving of clay. Her craving was textural: the way the moisture had seeped in, the transition of moist to sodden, hardness into softness through eager teeth. She salivated, recalling her story, smacking her lips; you could still see the desire for that iron-slatey clay.

This craving exists around the world but is mostly known as an African custom. In South Africa, pieces of clay are sold at medicine stalls, at taxi ranks, by fresh produce hawkers, and so on, eaten sweet with a sprinkle of sugar or sprayed with some salt water (even sea water). Word on the street is, it is not considered an eating disorder but a common enough foodstuff. This land is so rich in all kinds of clay that the recognition goes beyond cultural and human–animal separations. What is this desire we have, all of us creatures who eat – dogs consuming concrete, people’s stories of craving old plaster – a kind of cool damp mineral need?

Mineral cravings take us to literal heights, from Alpine ibexes, climbing cliffs to lick salt deposits, to my coworker driving up the mountain. We crave that mineral clay, so much so that we should recognize it as an edible thing, as a food, if you will.

The medicinal regard for clay is perhaps better known than clay as a foodstuff or cooking ingredient. Clay is recommended in cases of light poisoning where it is said to bind to the consumed contents, or as a detox, particularly for heavy metals, and in general for stomach or gut ailments, as it can stick to toxins and regulate the digestive tract. It is also used to dry out mouth ulcers or wounds. What a magic thing this clay is, to adhere to your loose stool while also being the main material of your toilet bowl and the tiles that surround it. Clay is the finest of geological components and can take some million years to form. It flows the furthest with water and will settle at the ultimate destination; to find clay, it is often just about following the flow. Clay stays suspended for a very long time, needing hours or days to settle after the water stills; it will stay in suspension as long as the water is in suspension too. It’s like a down feather dancing on a never-ending warm summer breeze. There’s a soft delight in this, in the plumage of clay in water.

The past few years I’ve been focusing on working with the terracotta-red clays that come out of Devil’s Peak, the mountain I grew up on and that my and my husband’s family grew up on. We have many stories of forced removal in our family, in our communities, and working with the land directly has helped to unlock some of the silent sounds I’d been picking up, distant calls through the veils, calling me. There’s a soft and deep listening, so clear but silent, so audible but only inside my mind. Hearing silence through inside ears, I try to find what I’m looking for as I walk this field I’ve walked so many times before. I imagine I can trace the lines of where the bulldozers moved, I see them in their chaos and through the crying and screaming of the forcibly removed. I see this all in the calm of day, walking to where my grandparents’ house was, where they refused to leave and were among the last to do so.

My grandfather always had this steely resolve, and I imagine how much this period influenced the rest of his years, till when I eventually met him two generations later. Something in him broke that day, as it must have in everyone when they were told to move from this neighbourhood to make space for white people who never moved in. The Group Areas Act of 1950 was a way the Apartheid government of South Africa could actualize their Apartheid Spatial Planning, architecturally designating the entire City of Cape Town (and the rest of the country) according to racial segregation, forcing entire communities out in order to create spaces for ‘Whites Only’. District Six is one such area, well known as it sits under the spectacular vista of Table Mountain, our Wonder of the World. Speaking with anyone who was from District Six, the value of this neighbourhood was the community’s wellness, the archetype of what Apartheid was trying to destroy: multicultural, multi-racial, a mix of religions and designations; people got along famously, neighbours cared for one another, children did not go hungry, even at strangers’ homes. There was always a place to rest your head, as my uncle would tell us. That all changed as people were moved. Less doors opened for weary travellers, pots stopped being placed on the stove in the early hours to ensure food for those who may need it. Apartheid, as part of the colonial project, aimed to destroy Indigenous ways of knowing and decimate the sense of community that was part of the natural solidarity of people who lived under severe oppression.

Much has changed since then, but scratching beneath the surface, not much has changed, too. This land still lays fallow, never being forged into a suburb for ‘Whites Only’; I’ve walked here over and over, wondering about the dirt my mother kicked up with her friends, and, perhaps a couple hundred years before, what hyenas or lions or baboons had kicked up in their scuffle. Some millions of years before all of them, prehistoric animals stepped exactly where my mother later stood, regardless of what the land was doing at that time. We know that this land has been roughly the same for at least 1.5 million years, when the mountains were still an island and as the oceans receded.

There is a lot to witness in this place of nothing, with its makeshift housing and overgrown grass, boulders sticking out, the undulation of land as it cascades down the foot of the mountain. There are big witnessings and tiny ones too. I trace the new arrangements of sandstone rocks as people remove them or rearrange them over a beloved pet’s grave. I come to harvest fennel pollen in the warm times and clay in the seasons when the rain is just beginning. I come to listen to new stories: maybe the wind has remembered something for me, or the antlions have caught a new anecdote in their sandy trap. I trace the lines – this clay is leading me, from a Deep Time-line to all the forms this clay wishes to be – and I follow these lines and check for knots, check for breakages, let it all land inside me and manifest in the practice of making (whatever that making may be). Oftentimes, it feels as if my making is not up to me, so I sculpt and I make chalk and record sound and plan terracotta make-up palettes – what is all this, if not methods of storytelling?

This clay alludes to satisfaction, a textural perfection not found in many other edible things. It settles in the space of insipiphilia, a nothing taste that is full of texture – so astringent, it claims all your water for itself. Kind of slimy but smooth, a smodginess, if you will. Not as plastic in texture as you’d prefer for sculpting, but not impossible. This clay is so alive and raw, some excavated from deep underground and some superficially harvested. The invisible microbial worlds are fermenting it in wild ways. I have stored these bags of processed clay with just a bit too much water content so that fermentation kicks in and bubbles its way through the heart of the wedged clay loaves. They are growing, truly, more than any processed clay I’ve lived with; algal blooms, fungi, even a happy little slug are making their home there. The bubbling fermentation I cut through when I open a new bag makes me think of how the invisible ancient microbes who must still live in this clay, or at least in the now-aerobic environment they find themselves in, are being consumed by aerobic bacteria. We crave that mineral, after all.

Working with this clay is an immediate time machine. Forming over millions of years, not able to be synthesized, this clay must know things beyond our humble evolutionary assumptions. I wonder what the soil remembers and what stories these clay bodies would tell, and I’ve been focusing on letting the land know that we remember too. We live in a time of polycrisis – a time when crises upon crises are part of our lived experience – and, as is argued within epigenetics (the study of heritable traits), these crises and traumas are being passed on to generations who have not lived them. I see the trauma lingering in our communities, overlain by further traumas of modern-day extractivism and labour enforced simply to survive in this world. I see how lost I feel and how walking these lands offers me some sense of belonging, offers some answers to questions I don’t yet know how to ask. Our colonial heritage brought with it rounds of genocide, both through European illnesses and also mercenaries who, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, were sent to hunt and kill large animals by decree, including our people. They discovered there were cheaper ways to kill our people besides ammunition; they used parts of the land, like the rocks that had been here for millennia.

I learn these moments of history and I need to mourn. I need to return to the sea or to parts of the land and ask forgiveness on behalf of my humanity, to stress that we have not forgotten these stories and we will not rest until we right these transgressions, no matter how many generations it will take. We are hundreds of years away from that violence but we are still uncovering transgressions. We still feel it, we still discover it. We have had three rounds of colonial rule in our part of the world, ending with an unspeakably cruel Apartheid. This violence even seems tame in comparison with the apartheid and genocide we witness in Palestine today, enacted by Israel and largely funded by America, which keeps Palestinian lands, people, plants and animals in a constant state of separateness. With the transition to democracy, South Africa quickly accepted a free-market economy as a global trade value system, despite its severing of many people’s livelihoods as foreign investment with foreign gains entered South Africa, only benefiting those who had the money or the means to make this work. So still, we find ourselves ruled by extractive external powers, holding on to the threads of our own survival as the weight of the world’s crises keep the struggles alive.

Somehow, my heart beats strong through all of this. My father’s family has cardiac weakness; they have died from heart attacks or broken hearts. I have learnt that our hearts inherit our spiritual stories, that they hear ancient tales and hold space for the emotional wealth that has been built up over generations. To grieve with this land is also a type of familial healing, an acknowledgement and processing of pain. Working with this clay, I have learnt a lot about my heart. It’s become a muscular metaphor for the processing of trauma, of becoming, of transitions, of relationships finding their ways in the world.

This clay goes through processes where it is wild and alive, full of stone and egg, insect carcasses and bacterial microworlds. It sits in my garden where so many different animals come to visit, poop in the clay, eat the clay, take clay away to build their own homes. Then I process the clay, refine it, separating the sand or stone detritus of forced removal from the microparticles of pure clay and metal minerals. Then, it sits for months as I carry on with the daily grind of family care. The processed clay gets wedged to remove any air pockets, which weaken the structural integrity once formed into sculpture, and sits for more time, amalgamating. Ideally I’d let it sit for years, but months will have to do. Sometimes it reaches a year or two and the clay is remarkably smoother and more pliable.

This clay is so precious to me: in my practice, I learn how it leans into some forms better than others, recycling it over and over again. Hardly anything of what I make goes through the intense heat of the kiln’s furnaces, where it turns to ceramic once all traces of water are removed – I would say only about 30 percent. I prefer to make new forms, and when they dry, I break these clay bodies into a bucket of water, and they soak it up into every crack and pore, meeting every molecule to stay bonded. Clay, as opposed to ceramic, is raw and wild, soft and powdery when dry, and stone-hard when appropriately baked. In clay, there’s something about the relationship between water and land, where all the sounds of both the invisibles and the visibles enter the material; there are clues and hints from a time long before harvesting it, which settle in my ears as I work. In the digging and excavation that exposes this clay through the sandstone sediments, am I hearing some Deep Time memories?

I am convinced by clay, convinced by its satisfaction. I trace new recipes with it, why not, tempted to involve the clay in recipes for the heart. What can I eat to fortify a broken heart? When faced with questions beyond our immediate knowledge, I turn to our heritage to see where answers may rise up. Growing up in Islam has taught me immensely about the scope of acceptance grief will give you; how much it stretches your capacity to love, how much it is necessary to heal. There is also a particular calm to the fact that there is a sunnah recipe for grief11.Sunnah, the way of living and being in accordance with Islamic principles and the example set by the Prophet Muhammed, peace be unto him., for deep sadness, based on barley flour, milk, a touch of dates or honey, and the simple act of making porridge22.This has even been shown in clinical trial; see Manal M. Badrasawi et. al, ‘Effect of Talbinah food consumption on depressive symptoms among elderly individuals in long term care facilities, randomized clinical trial’, Clinical Interventions in Aging, vol. 8, 2013: pp. 279–85; available at: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. – recipes dating back at least 1,400 years, which stay humble in their simplicity. This Prophetic Medicine helps to form a road map for adopting recipes as ways to navigate worldly problems, as digestible methods of processing grief.

In the time I have been learning from this clay, I have been learning about love as an ancient force, about romantic love and familial love and the way souls meet each other in a sacred place before landing in our fallible earthly bodies. I have also been pregnant in this clay time, and can’t help but acknowledge metaphors of our bodies being made of clay, now that I understand what clay truly is: just the mineral detritus of all life in a particular place and time, contained in and passed through geological Deep Time, the slowest, most reliable time. Much like souls and much like love, there is something about the way my heart became clay in this time, too, especially when I recycle the sculptural work I’ve made, placing it into water to rehydrate, and I put my ear to the water and hear the gradual slaking of the clay as the water enters its body. It’s like the process of a gentle heartbreak, where you are still held in the support of all this perfect water, but you, or the clay, gently fall, falls, apart, fizzing and whizzing, bubbling and collapsing into a fine powder, becoming one with the water, eventually settling at the bottom of the bucket, ready to be dried and wedged and sculpted into new, more powerful forms. This process is much like the aches we inherit and the breaks we go through in our fallible bodies in our fallible lives, where, when the heart breaks but is not broken completely, when it is made anew, there is more potential for fortitude.

In this process of renewal I find myself needing to go back to knowing nothing, to be led instead of leading, to lean on other recipes and not create my own. But still, this clay is asking to be yielded, asking to be met with satisfaction, which relays a kind of reciprocity in the relationship. I wonder about a full circle in the metaphoric of being clay-made and of eating clay, as opposed to eating out of clay. Clay is no longer only the food vessel (or wall or floor or roof dressing, among other home necessities), it is remembered as the vessel of our bodies, while we are also eating clay. A strange cannibalism, perhaps, but really a longing for connection, for reclaiming our place in a world run according to necropolitics in the guise of sustainability goals or economic empowerment.

In this moment, I offer a recipe as an attempt at reconnection, as an offering for some ease: Our recipe for Talbinah, the gentle milky barley porridge, with a generous dusting of the clay from this land.

Ingredients:
One cup of milk

Two to three tablespoons of barley flour. We prefer to toast it a little bit before, freshly ground is best.

An offering of prehistoric clay, a spicing of memories, stories and secrets. Just enough to draw in astringency but not enough to detract from the creaminess.

One teaspoon of ghee

One teaspoon of honey

One deseeded date

Method:
Heat up the milk gently and as it climbs, dust in the barley flour, sieving the hard bits out. Stir after each tablespoon, this ensures even texture.

Serve with a teaspoon of ghee and a teaspoon of honey. Garnish with a date when the porridge is still piping hot, let the date collapse and soften.

May this warm your heart and enrich your future memories.