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East Javan Villagers Eat Soil for Health
Heru Asprihanto | March 18, 2010

Fans say ampo has a cool, creamy texture. (Antara Photo) Fans say ampo has a cool, creamy texture. (Antara Photo)
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Elsa117
12:45am Mar 18, 2010

It is clearly a form of Pica (persistent craving and compulsive eating of nonfood substances. And The DSM 4th edition classifies it as a feeding and eating disorder of childhood). And there are three common types of Pica : geophagia (the compulsive eating of earth substances, including sand, soil and clay), amylophagia (the compulsive eating of purified starch, typically cornstarch or laundry starch) and pagophagia (the compulsive eating of ice). Umm, and in this case they are suffering from geophagia pica. And mostly pica caused by iron deficiency.

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Tuban, East Java. Soil is not just a raw material for bricks and ceramics; it’s also a snack that one family has been making for generations.

Tuban is believed to be the only town in the country that produces ampo, a snack made from clean, gravel-free dark earth collected from nearby paddy fields.

Although there is no medical evidence, residents believe the soil snacks are an effective pain-killer and pregnant women are encouraged to eat them to refine the skin of their unborn babies.

There is no real recipe: makers of the snack use a wooden stick to pound the soil into a hard, solid mass.

Rolls of dirt are then scraped off with a bamboo dagger, baked and smoked in a large clay pot for 30 minutes and then they’re ready to serve.

The better the quality of the soil, the better the taste of the snack, says its creator, 53-year-old Rasima, Tuban’s only ampo producer.

She makes ampo every day to sell at the local market, just like her ancestors, and can earn up to $2 a day to supplement her family’s income from farming.

“The ampo-making has become a family tradition in the village and I do not know exactly when it started,” she says.

“All I know is that it was made by my great-grandmother and it was continued by my grandmother and then my mother, and now I continue to make it.”

Rasima says her knack for finding good soil comes from her job as a field worker.

“I work in the paddy fields of others, looking for banana and teak leaves, so my job is always in touch with nature,” she says. Fans say the soil snacks have a cool, creamy texture.

“I think the taste is nice and I usually eat this. It is nothing special, it feels cold in my stomach,” says Siti Qomariyah, who has been eating ampo since she was a child.

Reuters