Soil is a strange soup of minerals, organic matter, gases and liquids, bound to mediate between lower and higher strata. While one can think of soil eating as bizarre, one can also imagine taking minerals in a form of a pill and why one wouldn’t eat forest soil or soils outside polluted areas? It gives life to so many creatures, why not humans? 

Geophagy is a behavioural adaptation that occurs in non-human animals, primarily for protection from parasites, to provide mineral supplements and to help metabolise toxic compounds, but it also occurs in humans, most commonly among children and pregnant women; the latter is believed to be connected to anaemia. Despite being regarded as “food for famine” or, in other contexts, a disorder, earth eating also has a place in rituals and traditions and can be a pleasurable practice. While soil can be lethal to ingest, as it can carry parasites and metals, earth can have, especially clay, positive effects as it binds and flushes toxins from the body. For earth eaters, eating earth is a culture. There is a global community, supported by distributors of edible soils, where you can provide yourself with a sample.

We speak with Dr. masharu from the Museum of Edible Earth, which holds a collection of over 350 earth samples from all over the world, where the reports on the culture of earth eating have been acknowledged. masharu say there are very different tastes to earth. Some of them might be salty, some might be sour, some sweet, and they can resemble different foods like chocolate, cacao, or cookies, besides more earthy flavours and gritiness. There is a great variety of tastes and structures. The Museum focuses on collecting stories, on instances of spiritual, medicinal practice and habitual ingestions. Them will explain what reasons lie behind their practice.

How would you describe soil?

My project is called Museum of Edible Earth and not Edible Soil, because I’m not per se focused on soil. There are very different definitions of what earth is, what the soil is, and what compost is. There are scientific definitions, sometimes metaphorical connections to these notions, or I observe, farmers refer in different ways to what, for example, compost is. So my starting point was working with the ground, the material which is underneath our feet (which is not very directly made by humans recently) and then this material being edible. And I referred to this material as earth, because it is a very broad definition, and it is also a somewhat poetic definition, referring also to the planet Earth.

The materials I worked with at the start were actually mostly clay, chalk and limestone – so these are materials with little organic matter, which is necessary to fit the scientific definition of soil. Nevertheless, in my journey, I see that people define it in very different ways.

But right now, I work more with soil-like substances, as I also work with compost and have met people who eat topsoil. When we use the word soil, we mostly refer to something fertile. Not that my work is disconnected from soil, what I’m trying to say is I am working with a kind of a broader notion, which I refer to as earth.

But then, how would you describe earth?

Earth is actually many things because Earth is something that is holding us as humans, it is our planet and a place where we live. Earth is also giving us food. And we also “return” to earth as humans, eventually. Earth is also something that is holding our ancestors. For me, earth is important as some kind of a more-than-human entity, which plays a big role in our lives, whether humans want to embrace it or not. I’m focusing a lot on interaction with earth.

Could you tell us what urges you to collect, eat and research the culture of earth eating? 

It started with my personal desire to eat earth as a kid that continued to my adulthood and so I started to search for different samples, discovering the taste, the structure and understand more about it, realizing I am not alone and that earth eating is connected to many subjects like cultural traditions, norms, taboos, marginalization, policies, intercultural tensions, but also environmental issues and the relationship between human and more-than human, which is earth in this case.

There are different reasons for eating earth, it can be a spiritual practice, making a connection with ancestors, with Earth, connection with the place … There are medicinal reasons, there is also earth as food, especially in times of famine – the bread made of turf was eaten during the 2nd World War in Germany, but this is just one of many examples.

While you present “the earth eaters’ story” as quirky-fun, it holds loads of serious implications, which are less fun, that we wish to boil down. For example, medical geology is a discipline researching the connection between the health of organisms and their geological context, overexposure or deficiency of certain elements. Have you ever come across any connection between soil bingeing and impoverished nutrition? Why are there not more earth-eating practices outside polluted urban and agricultural areas? 

Actually, there are a lot of earth-eating practices across the globe and were also present historically – there is a book Craving Earth by Sera L. Young, which talks about it. Things have shifted significantly in the last hundred years with the use of pesticides and because of pollution. In my interviews, farmers from different countries told me that they used to taste the soil to understand its quality. Also, in past, people ate more soil involuntarily, for example, not washing the carrots before crunching on them.

And this impacts how humans are developing their auto-immune system due to poor microbiome – the microbiome of soil is very similar to that of humans. Of course, soil has microorganisms that are not desirable, but many are. Especially for people living in cities, their autoimmune system collapsing due to a poor microbiome is common and can be dangerous.

There’s still a lot of earth eating practices outside of the Western world, but here, it is marginalised by the officials as a psychological disorder. And of course, right now, the earth is so polluted that I wouldn’t go out and eat earth here in Amsterdam.

What I found most interesting is the potential to create soils by deliberate composting. You literally create earth with taste varieties for the practice of eating. 

Honestly speaking, making edible compost is new for me – I started this project in 2022, and I am still learning about it. The journeys to organic farms, speaking to people who are very conscious about how they interact with the land and how they are engaged in composting practices, for me, was a very powerful experience. With them, we brainstormed how to make compost that would be good for humans and not just to make earth more fertile.

We haven’t started yet producing lab-controlled compost, only experiments, as I am still in the process of learning how to approach it, but it feels quite empowering that humans can create healthy earths. For now, we have tried different ways of composting. We’ve been working with an organic farm that specialises in composting. We use ingredients from the farm, making the compost of edible plants, and we made a recipe based on the carbon and nitrogen ratio in compost, different vegetables, bamboo, nettle … This is not earth yet because it lacks the inorganic matter unless added. Don’t wish to speculate what is needed for compost to become earth, but I am trying to create earth-like edible substance from which something can grow. It’s quite tasty, but we need to examine how healthy it really is.

The biblical name Adam comes from Hebrew adamah, meaning earth. Thus, Adam translates as the one created from the ground, providing the connection between humankind and the earth. While this link is broken in Genesis, have you encountered any world cultures where soil is a part of their creation story and thus used in the practice of eating? 

Of course, in Christianity and also as far as I know in Islam, the narrative is that human was created by God out of clay. For the connection with ancestors, I’ve been hearing more about pre-Christian and pre-Abrahamic practices. In terms of the creation story and earth-eating, I am not aware of any particular story.

Eating earth from the grave of a saint was a practice in the Netherlands, but was more connected to miracles than spirituality per se. Another example is the famous Lithuanian earth eater Stanislava, who says she had an intuition to stop eating food and eat earth instead, after doctors told her she had cancer. She lived another 10 years instead of the expected 2 months. While this is not directly connected to spirituality, it speaks of belief and healing.

So, the last question, how do you see humans?

This is even more difficult to say than how I see earth, right? My teacher of geography in primary school told us that there is a theory that earth is a living being and humans are parasites on its surface. This is what I think of now, in the context of what is happening right now on the Earth, and the context of our conversation.