Consuming the Inedible

<p> Everyday millions of people eat earth clay nasal mucus and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors utilizing anthropological nutritional biochemical psychological and health-related perspectives examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners. This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices and vice versa. Ranging across diversity of disciplines <i>Consuming the Inedible</i> surveys scientific and local views about the consequences - biological mineral social or spiritual - of these food practices and probes to what extent we can generalize about them.</p>