Sunday, September 11, 2011

Eat Dirt, Sucker

I vaguely recall 'eat dirt, sucker' being a put down of some kind in high school. Something that would be said by the victor to rub in one's loss at some competitive activity.

I've posted quite a bit now on delicious foods in Kenya, so at the risk of glob appearing to become a one dimensional food blog it turns out that one of these is, well, dirt. Here's the photographic proof, a bag of baked clay that Min picked up at the local supermarket (Nakumatt) for 30 shillings. We all sucked on these clay chips for dessert last night.

Min, source of all wisdom, and having read up on wikipedia regarding 'geophagy' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy) informed us that we were playing a dangerous game sampling this fare, since many people, particularly in central Africa and the American South, are addicted to it.

A couple of obvious questions arose over dessert:

Max: If you want to eat dirt why buy it at Nakumatt? Why not just eat the delicious looking stuff in our backyard?

Keith: If this is addictive why is the price so low? You'd think rapacious traders would corner the market and make people pay through the nose for high quality stuff. Was the clay aisle at Nakumatt full of rampaging competitive shoppers like the sugar aisle? At least you got fresh dirt, look at the label, it was packed only a week ago, and is good for another 12 months!

Alex: This isn't very tasty. Do you think grade '1' might be the cheap stuff and grade 2 might be for the real connoisseurs?