(This is the first draft of an essay I wrote for my Food Writing Class, my interest in non-genre writing has produced this, a Food Memoir on my experiences with non-food.)
Don’t Eat That
The essential feature of Pica is the eating of one or more nonnutritive substances on a persistent basis for a period. of at least 1 month. The typical substances ingested tend to vary with age. Infants and younger children typically eat paint, pIaster, string, hair, or cloth. Older children may eat animal droppings, sand, insects, leaves, or pebbles. Adolescents and adults may consume clay or soil. There is no aversion to food. (American Psychiatric Association 103)
My name is Ernie, I have an eating disorder.
You’d be surprised at the things they have support groups of, even this thing I do, others like me all over the world are sharing their experiences on eating the non-nutritive. I’d join these support groups, but that would mean I WANT to get rid of my Pica, or that I see it as a problem. I don’t believe eating paper, wood, tiny rocks, plastic, dirt (not soil, that’s disgusting), hair, pus, that sticky stuff that gets left behind when you peel off sticky tape, rubber, and I’m getting a bit carried away, is all that bad. I do recognize that it’s not exactly health food, but if you ignore the fact that these things aren’t really food, these are actually Vegan!
It started as a kid, as it usually does, when I would press my finger between those cracks in the walls and floor of our old home and nibble on the tiny concrete crumbs that stick to my fingertips, crunchy. I’d gnaw on the feet and hands of my sister’s Barbies, leaving them looking like victims of a zombie attack. I actually believed it was cool to be eating paper, little did I know that my so ‘friends’ back in grade school we’re charging people to see me eat an entire sheet of paper. It took me sometime to realize that it was socially unacceptable to eat these things, not that I cared.
I have been queried lots of times about what paper (the most common of my non-nutritive snacks) tastes like, and my answer has always been ‘it depends’. See, paper is like any other food, it varies. Table napkins have no taste, but some types do have that powdery feel on your tongue and as if you can smell baby powder from inside your mouth. Typical white paper has no taste too, but they stick to the top of your mouth and roll into balls real quick, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing because they get chewy. This happens to most paper but much more often to white paper for some reason. Mimeograph paper is tougher to chew but has a peculiar bitter taste, newsprint is bittersweet, and if I consciously avoid eating yellow paper because it tastes like ink. The best paper, and I’m not just saying this to gross you out, is a bus ticket, those punched bus tickets, that you have kept in you jeans pocket for at least a day, a nice mix of salt and bitterness. The worst is ATM receipts, has some sort of plastic film that makes it gummy and too bitter it actually feels like poison.
I’ve never been properly diagnosed, the closest thing to an actual diagnosis was when I confessed to my Professor in Abnormal Psychology that I think I have Pica, and that I consciously partake in non-nutritive snacking (she didn’t act shocked then but I found out that she started telling my story to her other classes). But in my totally biased views of the DSM-IV-TR criterion (105) I fit four of the four conditions for Pica. Pica is commonly diagnosed to children, there are very few adult, or even adolescent, cases of it. I’m one of them. It’s hard to say how you get Pica, it is mostly related to Mental retardation but I wouldn’t believe myself retarded. I mean, how would’ve I gotten to this premiere university? There are no specific biological patterns among us who have it, but in some instances zinc deficiency is observed, not that I know what that would mean.
I don’t know about other people with my condition but aside from paper, I’m not meticulous how these things taste. The closest thing to paying attention when I eat them is the particular sensations in the mouth I get. The brittle crunch of tiny rocks, the satisfaction of flattening bits of plastic pen caps with my teeth, the feel of balling up thread with your tongue, and sometimes it even goes less that the sensations, just the wanting, like I’ve been eyeing this line of ants on the wall by my desk, crushing them against the wall then eating those that get stuck on my finger.
Other things normal people wouldn’t think of eating; plastic bags, when you chew on a plastic grocery bag (or even those types you get from the market) long enough you get a white string like jumble of plastic, it doesn’t matter what color it was in the first place, it turns white. Nails, I also bite my nails, even my nail clippings I pick off and eat, snapping satisfyingly as I clench on them with my molars, the nails clippings from the smallest toe is always softer than any other nail, for some reason they don’t snap too, they fold. Those price label stickers commonly found on notebooks and other stuff you buy at stationary stores, double the satisfaction of peeling the damn things of in one piece and folding them so the sticky part stays in and doesn’t touch the inside of my mouth.
I’ve gotten all sorts or reactions too, from the expected disgust to amazement to mockery (the ‘yeah right, of course you do’), admittedly I sometimes do it to see the reactions I cause. Like a Filipino would describe balut to a foreigner to see him grossed out and then insist “No, no, it’s good food! Helps with the arthritis!” half laughing.
I do get concerned about how this affects my health, I’ve done research (watched TV shows and searched the internet) about bezoars, and how they form inside your stomach because of stuff you couldn’t digest. I read about lead poisoning, and wood splinters getting stuck in my throat, but the threat is as big as the threat of fish bones getting stuck in my throat so nothing to worry about, I’m fine. Come to think of it, how different am I from people who eat copious amounts of cholesterol laden food or rare meat or carcinogenic barbecue? How different is wood, rubber and plastic from the hamburgers you get from McDonald’s, the processed foods they sell on the streets and the junk they sell at Pre-school cafeterias?
Sure, I worship bacon like any other guy, I enjoy a good burger and French fries combo, I don’t know what the deal is with blue cheese, it just so happens I have other stuff on my palette too. Who gets to declare what is food anyway?
Works Cited:
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourth ed. Text Revision. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Print
