Good taste in the world outdoors

Betty Culpepper
The Norman Transcript

January 11, 2007 10:47 pm

— I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the natural world around me. At age 5, there was the clear spring from which my mother and father dipped our water for drinking, cleaning the house, washing clothes and for bathing.
That clear, sparkling spring-fed pool was an enchanting place. It was located at the bottom of a deep ravine, sometimes the clear water became muddied by a visiting turtle.
My whole life, I’ve been fortunate in that during the summers and after chores entire days often were spent roaming the nearby hills and creek banks observing the plants and animals that lived in the water and fertile banks of the creek on our property and beyond.
Our family’s lack of electricity and piped in water never bothered me until the late 1940s when our neighbors began to experience the delights of electric lights and refrigeration. (We did at least have a battery-powered radio and by this time a well with pump just outside the backdoor.) Still, since I didn’t get to go to town often and very, very seldom got to see a movie, I sought the natural world for entertainment and solace.
The curiosity I cultivated as a child has stayed with me into my declining years. This desire to know something about everything led me to sample some of that orange-red dirt that the county road grader had recently cleaved asunder. Spring rains had darkened its color to a deep red-orange and the texture was not unlike warm taffy. I scooped out a spoonful and put it in my mouth. I can still remember that moment and the unexpectedly smooth, pleasant almost sweet taste of the clay. I doubt that I shared this experience with anyone because even at 8 years old, I knew one didn’t eat dirt. Does one?
Well, yes they do. Many, many peoples from every continent, especially in Africa and in the Southern United States eat dirt (clay) on a regular basis. There’s even a fancy name — geophagy — for the practice of eating earth for nutrition, to fill the stomach during famine, as a reminder of home during long absences and sometimes as a symptom of psychosis.
The clays commonly eaten in Africa and parts of the South contain important dietary nutrients such as phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, copper, zinc, manganese and iron. People around the world also eat clay as a cultural tradition for religious ceremonies or to treat diseases or neutralize toxins. The tradition of geophagy was introduced to the United States with the slaves.
Indigenous peoples of South America who live at high altitudes in the Andies Mountains serve a sauce consisting mostly of clay and water that they dip the potato in before eating it to neutralize the alkaloids of the feral potatoes that they cultivate at altitudes of up to about 14,000 feet.
A 1942 survey in Mississippi revealed that at least 25 percent of the schoolchildren habitually eat earth. There are good sites for nutritional clay in the southern United States from which many families send clay to their expectant mother relatives in the northern United States and elsewhere.
Are you aware that you’re eating kaolin (the white clay from which our sinks and commodes are constructed)? If you have ever taken Kaopectate, then you’ve eaten kaolin combined with pectin. Kaolin products have many uses in the medical field such as to alleviate the symptoms of diarrhea, the stomach and intestinal spasms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) as well as kidney spasms.
This state contains seven orders (broad classifications of soil types) of soil with their diverse ecosystems. The soil type, along with yearly rainfall averages and its history of the use or abuse determines what plants and creatures will populate each region. Of course there are micro ecosystems within each of these broad ranges.
Oklahoma has a wonderfully diverse and lovely topography from the sere extreme northwest of the Panhandle where dinosaurs once roamed to the extreme southeast’s moist mostly clay wetlands with its oak and hickory forests.
The most common of the soil types known as Mollisols are deep, very darkly colored soils that formed under grasslands. They are some of the most important agricultural soils in the world: cotton in the southwest to irrigated grains in the Panhandle and mixed crops in the east.
The information in this article about the soils of Oklahoma has been derived from a fascinating new publication, “Historical Atlas of Oklahoma,” fourth edition by Charles Robert Goins and Danney Goble. It is published by The Oklahoma Press, Norman, Copyright 2006. This is a handsome edition of the history of Oklahoma, its peoples, topography, geography, minerals (not just oil and gas but uranium, lead, etc.) and much, much more.
Thanks to my friend Patricia Folley for giving me such a wonderful taste of Oklahoma in this Centennial year. Before I received the book as a Christmas gift, I had no idea of its existence.