Clay Cookies of Mao Tse
Clay (likely kaolin) Water Chaff, flowers, weeds
PREPARATION
Dig up the appropriate type of clay. Mix it with water. Blend in chopped chaff, flowers, or weeds. Shape into small cakes and bake. Ready to eat. Alternatively, dig up the clay and consume without processing.
How did we fill our stomachs? Sometimes, we had to resort to eating earth. This was called immortal earth. Many people dug it out from under walls and turned it into cakes. We ate everything we could find, and some things we ate were really raw and rough. People often suffered from constipation. For example, after eating [earth], my grandparents had constipation. Every time, they had to scoop out the stool with their fingers.*
Luo Guihua
“During the Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962) in China, clay was also consumed—from Sichuan, Gansu, and Anhui to Henan. Lined up like specters, villagers queued by deep pits, waiting their turn to descend and scoop a handful of porcelain-white clay. Children with protruding ribs fainted from exhaustion. Old women in tattered clothes burned paper amulets. Over ten thousand people excavated a quarter million tons of clay. In one village, two hundred and fourteen out of two hundred sixty-two families ate clay, several kilograms per person. Some filled their mouths with clay while digging, but most added water and mixed it with chaff, flowers, weeds, then baked clay cakes that filled but lacked nutrients.”*
Mao Zedong’s policies during the implementation of the Five-Year Plan, known as the Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962), adhered to slogans: more, better, faster, cheaper. Mao wanted to make China the world’s leading industrial power at all costs. Implementing the Great Leap’s goals caused unprecedented devastation in every sector of the economy, most drastically affecting rural areas. The countryside was subjected to forced collectivization, confiscating farmers’ property and consolidating them into gigantic people’s communes where food was distributed in communal canteens based on merit. Various “substitute foods” such as paper paste were introduced. Soon, a famine of unprecedented scale gripped China, unlike anything the world had seen before.
1*https://brill.com/view/journals/asme/7/2/article-p384_6.xml?language=en
2*Frank Dikotter, “Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962”
