It would not have occurred to me to test the veracity of “eating dirt” taken literally as a description of putting dirt in your mouth and swallowing it. I always took “eating dirt” as synecdoche for the general practice of “allowing kids to get dirty and suffer exposure to mostly-harmless microbes”, and the references that you gathered above seem almost entirely to support that belief. Perhaps I’m not autistic enough to bother with the difference between “letting kids get dirty” and “letting kids literally put dirt in their mouth and swallow it”; perhaps this failure of hair-splitting caused me to have correct beliefs after all.
Me too! I never read anything specifically about “eating dirt”, and when I started reading this post I assumed it meant “playing in the dirt”. Now I’m confused. Is it really that common to hear someone recomending kids actually should eat dirt?
It would not have occurred to me to test the veracity of “eating dirt” taken literally as a description of putting dirt in your mouth and swallowing it. I always took “eating dirt” as synecdoche for the general practice of “allowing kids to get dirty and suffer exposure to mostly-harmless microbes”, and the references that you gathered above seem almost entirely to support that belief. Perhaps I’m not autistic enough to bother with the difference between “letting kids get dirty” and “letting kids literally put dirt in their mouth and swallow it”; perhaps this failure of hair-splitting caused me to have correct beliefs after all.
Me too! I never read anything specifically about “eating dirt”, and when I started reading this post I assumed it meant “playing in the dirt”. Now I’m confused. Is it really that common to hear someone recomending kids actually should eat dirt?
Edit: Nevermind, OP clarified in a comment.