h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mud is also a delightful foodstuff, if you are clinically insane.


I ate mud and pebbles ground in a pestle and mortar for a couple of years, and yes, I did go through several pestle and mortar sets made from marble before finally settling on a cast iron one. The taste is truly something that has to be experienced to be believed. For a long time the high spot, indeed the zenith, of my existence was to go outside into the front garden and gather some wet dirt, and a side order of sedimentary rocks.


I would leave these lying on a plastic bag to sun-bake on my windowsill, and, when fully dry, would transfer small quantities to an old 8-bit computer game box for direct consumption.


A friend of mine, on being exposed to this practice, expressed his delight and interest thus:


"It was mud, George, real mud. *sob*".


Who amongst us has not experienced the stomach-turning awfulness of uncovering a nest of slug eggs, nestling in their bed of earth? the intense shock of pushing aside some overgrown grass, only to have a large frog leap out at one? the brain-crunching squick of licking away a small amount of dirt from one's box, only to look down and see a nest of baby woodlice beneath where your tongue had so recently resided? (They go crunch and have no perceptible taste, besides perhaps a faint bitterness.)


It is also excellent for the digestion, to the point where one has to flush one's lavatory with a shovel, or, for greater accuracy, a hand wrapped in several layers of tissue.


It should be noted that I don't recommend the practice of eating mud and mention it only for the sake of completeness. While I don't appear to have suffered any serious side-effects from the practice, many parasites, bacteria and other nasty things live in earth. Not the least unpleasant of these is the large amount of excrement one can expect to find there.



In short: Don't eat mud, and be careful out there.