The habitual practice or condition of eating earth, soil, or clay regularly as part of diet or compulsion.
From geophagia plus the suffix '-ism' (a practice, condition, or tendency). This medicalized version of the term emerged in 19th-century medical literature distinguishing occasional from habitual behavior.
Zoologists discovered that African elephants visit specific clay-lick sites for kaolin, which detoxifies poisonous plants—meaning geophagism isn't just human, it's an evolutionary survival strategy some animals perfected millennia ago.
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