Would You Like a Side of Dirt with That?

May 25, 2012, 8:00 am by Scientific American: Health

In the fall of 2009 a group of biology students at Tufts University sat down together and ate some dirt. They ground up small clay tablets and swallowed the powder to find out, firsthand, what clay tastes like. This unusual taste test was part of a Darwinian medicine class taught by one of us (Starks). The students were studying the evolution of geophagia--the practice of eating dirt, especially claylike soils, which is something animals and people have been doing for millennia. [More]

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