In parts of the rural South, some down-to-earth people get together to dish the dirt at snack time.

To the ordinary traveler, the scrub-covered dirt bank cut into a hillside along Highway 17 about two miles southeast of Lexington is like any other in this rolling, pine-studded section of rural Mississippi.

But to Joann Travis, it is the source of a rich, golden-brown soil that she savors and eats as an after-meal treat.

“It’s sort of like people wanting cigarettes after they’ve eaten,” said Travis, 28, a slender, attractive mother of three. “I’ve even put dirt over ice cream. I know that sounds crazy, but I like the taste of it. It tastes like earth smells after a good rain. At one time, I was eating up to four glasses a day.”

Here in Holmes County, a predominantly black county of 22,970 residents that straddles the cotton-growing Delta area of north-central Mississippi, studies by medical anthropologist Dennis A. Frate in the 1970s found that one out of four local adult black women regularly eats dirt.

“It’s a cultural tradition that is practiced almost exclusively by women and young children,” said Frate, who heads the University of Mississippi’s Rural Health Research Program in nearby Goodman. “It’s one of the few customs that survived the cultural change as slaves were brought from West Africa to the United States.”

Although the practice may seem odd, Frate said, historical records of earth-eating in Europe date back to the ancient Greeks. Today, it is most prevalent in West Africa, Latin America and the rural South of the United States.

The practice generally is not unhealthy, he said, although there is a slight risk of impacting the colon if excessive quantities are eaten.

In a typical dirt-eating ritual, Frate said, two middle-aged women will gather on a front porch an hour or two before sunset and will nibble from a bag or bowl of freshly dug earth set on a table between them.

In Holmes County, the most favored dirt is a finely textured, slightly sour-tasting soil found in the upland regions about a foot-and-a-half below the surface, where it is usually free of parasites, Frate said. Many women first bake the dirt, sometimes adding vinegar or salt before cooking to enhance the flavor.

The average daily consumption is about 50 grams, Frate added, or about a “heaping handful.”

100 Dirt Sites

There are more than 100 sites in Holmes County that provide the types of earth most popularly consumed. Among them is the dirt bank on Highway 17 just outside Lexington, a town of 2,630 and the county seat of government.

“Whenever I ride by it, I always think: ‘There’s no reason to be passing it by,’ ” said Onece Johnson, 38, a county social worker and mother of five. “So I’ll stop over and scoop some out into a paper bag or some other container to take home.”

Many Holmes County residents even ship “care packages” of their dirt to transplanted relatives in the North.

Donald E. Vermeer, chairman of George Washington University’s geography department and a pioneer in the field of geophagy (pronounced gee-AWF-uh-GEE), as the practice of dirt-eating is called by scientists, says the custom may be rooted in part in folk medicine.

The commercial anti-diarrheal medication Kaopectate, for example, is made from kaolin, a white clay mined in central Georgia and prized by earth-eaters in that region, he said.

A grayish-colored clay from Nigeria and marketed all over West Africa as a traditional cure for diarrhea is remarkably similar in pharmaceutical properties to kaolin, he said.

“When I first went into Mississippi for my research,” he said, “a white public health nurse there with a master’s degree in public health told me: ‘Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, I am also an earth-eater. Don’t look strangely on those black folks. I do it too.’ ”

Frate says that recent studies he has conducted indicate that dirt-eating may be declining among blacks in Holmes County as a result of increasing social pressures. Ironically, however, many women are turning to such potentially harmful commercial substitutes as baking soda and laundry starch, which have a texture similar to the soil, he added.

Baking soda, for example, is high in sodium, which contributes to high blood pressure--a widespread health problem in the rural South, particularly among black women.

“I don’t condemn the practice of dirt-eating and I don’t promote it,” he said. “But the dirt is certainly a lot healthier than the substitutes many women seem to be switching to.”