Craving Earth: Understanding Pica: The Urge to Eat Clay, Starch, Ice and Chalk by Sera L. Young (review)

In the new collection on medical cultures of the Spanish early modern, Maríaluz López-Terrada contributes an interesting essay on oppilation, the early modern diagnosis of organ blockage often associated with amenorrhea (absence of menstruation) and poor color in women, thought to have been caused by the custom of chewing clay (Slater, John, Maríaluz López-Terrada, and José Pardo-Tomás, eds. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014, 173, 176). In her essay, “‘Sallow-Faced Girl: Either its Love or You’ve Been Eating Clay’: The Representation of Illness in Golden-Age Theatre,” the medical historian describes the literary representation of the condition of oppilation and its treatment with “steel water” (or red wine) in which hot iron had been plunged (167-87; 173). She references Góngora’s allusion to the condition in one of his letrillas, echoing the folk wisdom of contemporary song, “Niña del color quebrado, / o tienes amor, o comes barro” (“Sallow-faced girl; either you are in love or you’re eating clay”):

Que la del color quebradoculpe al barro colorado,      bien puede ser;mas que no entendamos todosque aquestos barros son lodos,      no puede ser.

(173, citing Jammes ed, Letrillas 55)

An additional use of the condition as a trope by Góngora also comes to mind, from Góngora’s first draft of the fourth stanza of the Polifemo, in which he describes the cornucopia of fruits in the giant’s bag. This first draft of the passage was commented on by Dámaso Alonso in his essay on the Polifemo in his volume, Poesía española (Madrid: Gredos, 1976):

La delicada serba, a quien el henorugas le da la cuna, la opiladacamuesa, que el color pierde amarilloen tomando el acero del cuchillo.

(348–58)

The trope is interesting because it recharges poetic language with contemporary scientific vocabulary, playing on possibilities for interaction within the Humanist curriculum.

The cultural context of the trope merits greater attention, however, as the curious habit of chewing clay calls for further explanation. The historian John Elliott makes a reference to the custom in his classic volume of Spanish history, in the context of describing the persistence of Moorish habits related to the role of women (Imperial Spain: 1469–1716. NY: New American Library, 1963):

The Spanish upper classes had inherited the Moorish custom of keeping their women-folk secluded, and the women themselves still retained many of their Moorish ways. They crouched on cushions instead of using chairs; in all Spain, except for the north and northwest, they remained semi-veiled, in spite of frequent royal prohibitions; and they had an extraordinary habit, which may perhaps have originated in Africa, of nibbling pieces of glazed pottery—a choice of diet which may account for their notoriously poor complexions.

(305)

It turns out that eating clay is not only a Moorish or early modern Spanish custom. In her recent monograph on the practice, Craving Earth: Understanding Pica, medical researcher Sera L. Young makes a case for the evolutionary basis of pica as a human behavior. Like the medical cultures volume, Young’s book is interdisciplinary, adopting a ‘biocultural’ approach to the phenomenon.

Young argues that pica was historically associated with aberrant behavior in women and other subaltern populations. In the Renaissance it was considered a “women’s disease,” linked to female inferiority; it was punished in slaves and in the indigenous, and it was later associated with the “deranged” cravings of pregnancy and with mental illness (78, 73, 82). Nonetheless, Young critiques the stigma associated with the practice by contextualizing pica within a spectrum of types of earth ingestion, including the traditions of medicinal and sacred geophagy.

Terra sigillata, or stamped earth, was produced in ancient times on the Greek island of Lemnos; the dried and stamped clay...