My friend Shelby showed me how to taste dirt.
"I eat dirt," she said out of the blue. I wasn't sure what she meant at the time, and waved off the statement in favor of a more tangible course of conversation. But when she invited me out to watch a sawmill in action, I was inducted into the practice of tasting soil for it's composition and texture.
While she isn't a geophagist , although she admits to spooning red clay down her gullet in the past, when she was anemic, and still harbors a predilection for crunchy New York shale, Shelby looks for the aspects a good soil needs for gardening: clay, to supply good drainage, silt, which is rich in organic matter, and sand, which aids in drainage and heat retention. In my Master Gardener class they taught us to look for these elements by massaging the soil in our hands. Oh, but it's so much more fun to taste it!
