High in the Tien Shan Mountains, about 100 miles from the Chinese border on a midsummer day, two Kyrgyz women scoured a sandpit for choice clay. Plucking a clump of dusty earth as if picking fruit from a tree, the younger of the two popped a sample in her mouth, letting the dirt melt slowly on her tongue like a lozenge. “It’s oilier here, tastier,” the woman, Baishekan Saginova, 40, said to her companion. “It was too salty over there, and not very good.” Tolkonezhe Kasmanbetova, 52, agreed with the appraisal. “This is a bit more fatty,” she said, smacking her lips to savour the flavour. Saginova and Kasmanbetova live in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, a distant corner of the former Soviet Union, and say they eat the clay, known locally as gulpota, for its health benefits. “If somebody is anaemic, or doesn’t have much blood left, they eat it,” Kasmanbetova said. “Pregnant women also use it, probably because they need the extra vitamins.” Most health professionals in this country do not endorse the use of unrefined mineral supplements. “There’s more trash in here than iron,” said Dr. Abdukhalim R. Rianzhanov, director of the Kyrgyz Scientific Center of Hematology, when shown a chalky gray substance sold in the capital, Bishkek. “You’ll go straight to the devil if you eat this clay!” Although people have been eating the clay in Central Asia for thousands of years, the practice is neither highly regarded, nor praised as a tradition. Rianzhanov said the odd behavior was caused by anaemia, or iron shortage in the blood, because the patients quickly stabilise with proper supplements. “These people are sick,” he explained. “When they have low iron, they develop the desire to eat this clay, plaster, chalk, or uncooked meat. They’ll eat eggshells, pull the bark off trees. It’s even written in the medical literature that they will eat building material.” A condition, called pica, is described in the West as the ingestion of non-nutritive substances. Across town at the Osh Bazaar, women who look quite healthy regularly purchase gulpota. Galina Kosheleva, 45, said she first ingested clay in 1997 to prolong her life, believing that the practice cleans out the body, and can help prevent weight gain. A true gulpota connoisseur, she prefers chalky gray clay from the Batken region to redder Naryn clay, which she says is higher in iron. “This one tastes like butter,” she said, while sampling merchandise at Osh Bazaar. “It’s sweet, not too salty, this Batken clay, and very good. It doesn’t scratch your teeth, like sand. This is from nature, and only found in Kyrgyzstan.” Paying 5 som, or 12 cents, for just more than a pound, Kosheleva said she was pleased with her purchase. “The clay sold for dollars in American pharmacies is much more expensive,” she said. In Naryn, people who eat gulpota, generally older or pregnant women and young children, collect it themselves in the mountains, near roadsides, or in sandpits. The gulpota Kasmanbetova collected was not for sale. “A kilogram for me, a kilogram for you,” Saginova said to her. “We won’t need to come back for the rest of the summer!” NYT
