I’m sure you’ve never been asked this before, but is it OK to eat clay? I’m a student at the Art Institute, and I’ve been eating clay for four years. You are probably not familiar with the process of clay, so I will briefly explain. When the clay is completely dry but has not been fired it’s called greenware. That’s when I eat it. But I once ate a whole teacup after it had been fired (bisqueware). I don’t have anyone to ask, because they’ll think I’m crazy. Please give me an answer. –Marian, Chicago
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No question, telling people you eat teacups does have a way of bringing conversation to a halt. But be bold. Say to yourself, it’s not weird–it’s performance art. What you’ve got is a form of pica, the craving to eat the inedible or to eat normal food in obsessive quantities. If you think teacups are a little over the top, try toilet air-freshener blocks, which one lost soul used to consume at the rate of one or two a week. Some cravings are so common they have names of their own, such as pagophagia, a hankering for ice (one sufferer admitted to a five-tray-a-day habit supplemented by bags of crushed ice obtained at convenience stores); xylophagia, a yen for wood toothpicks; coniophagia, a lust for dust from venetian blinds; and my personal favorite, gooberphagia, pathological consumption of peanuts. Other cravings include ten bunches of celery a day, a peppermint Life Saver every five minutes, salad croutons by the handful, coal, foam rubber, and worse. One woman, a nonsmoker, reportedly “would burn cigarettes to obtain the ashes,” and when her husband smoked would follow him with cupped hand to catch the ashes as they fell.
Then again, maybe you just like clay. Admittedly the stuff isn’t as weird as the match heads and such that some folks go in for. And given that kaolin, a type of clay, is the active ingredient of the well-known childhood remedy Kaopectate, I’ll venture to say you don’t suffer much from diarrhea. Still, a fair number of clay eaters have shown up in emergency rooms with obstructed or even perforated intestines, a particular risk if you start eating fired teacups in quantity. It’s all very well to obsess, but let’s try to do it in moderation.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
