History Main / EatDirtCheap

* ''WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow'': In "[[Recap/RenAndStimpy2x12RoyalCanadianKiltedYaksmen The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen]]", the eponymous duo are stranded in the wilderness and slowly starving to death when Ren hits upon an idea. What, he asks his compatriot, is "[[CanadaEh Canadia]]'s most abundant natural resource? "Dirt?" asks Stimpy hesitantly. "Yes!" replies Ren triumphantly. "We'll eat dirt!" It goes better than you'd expect.

* Obviously, it can be happened with poorly cleaned food. There's a good chance at least a ''little'' dirt can go by undetected.
* Mountain ibexes have been photographed licking the side of a cliff--while standing on said cliffside--to get salt. As the now-memetic caption says, "They crave that mineral."
* In Haiti, cookies made from dirt or clay, salt and butter or shortening by the name of Bonbon Tè are popular as a meal replacement for those in impoverished areas primarily because of how cheap they are to produce in mass quantities. They're also coveted by pregnant women and children as nutritional aids for the reasons stated above.

---->'''Item description:''' A dish gone awry after adding the wrong ingredient. Chewing your way through this won't be fun, but it'll fill you up when you're [[JustForPun between a rock and a hard place]].

* In ''Anime/MonsterRancher'', Golem eats rocks like food, and consumes sand like a beverage.

* Played with and ultimately averted in ''Literature/StoneSoup''. A group of travelers come to a village and [[SacredHospitality are refused food]]. As they have a cooking pot with them, they fill it with water, drop a stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing, to which the answer is that are making stone soup. The travelers further say that stone soup is delicious, but does improve when carrots are added. Curious, the villager hands them a few carrots. Another villager walks by, and the same scenario occurs, only with a different ingredient, and so on and so on until every household's added something. It results in a tasty and filling pot of soup, which [[ThePowerOfFriendship the travelers share with the village they've tricked into generosity]].

* The eponymous space monster in the film ''Film/{{Dogora}}'' is a sort of amoeba or jellyfish-like creature which eats carbon. While this could technically be anything made of carbon, in the movie it is seen feeding on diamonds and coal.
* In ''Film/{{Galaxina}}'', the SpacePolice have an alien prisoner on their cruiser who eats rocks. TheCaptain amuses himself feeding the prisoner by chucking rocks at its head.

* Glory from ''Film/JackOfTheRedHearts'' eats fistfuls of dirt while she and Jack are relaxing outside.

* Alluded to by H.I.'s cellmate in ''Film/RaisingArizona'':

* PlayedForDrama in ''Literature/TheBoyFromAleppoWhoPaintedTheWar''. Adam is so malnourished that he bites his nails for the salty taste of the dirt.

* The titular character from ''Literature/DisgustingMcGrossface'' is said to lick mud off his feet.

** In “I Dare You, Roys Bedoys!”, Roys claims that dirt is delicious, seemingly just to be contrary, so Wen dares him to eat some, which he ends up disliking.
** Discussed in “It’s Your Fault, Roys Bedoys!”, where Flora asks, “If someone told you to eat dirt, would you eat it?”.

* ''Series/DoctorWho''. In "It Takes You Away", the Doctor eats the local dirt and somehow deduces from this that the TARDIS has landed in northern Norway. She also deduces that, 25 miles away from their current location, there's an alpaca farm with a gift shop and bad Tripadvisor reviews. Her companions are used to [[DitzyGenius her bizarre behavior]] by now so take this in stride, but politely turn down the dirt when she offers it.
* Dr. Ridlehuber from the ''Series/GettingTogether'' episode "Memories Are Made of This" believes in eating dirt. As he sees it, normally people eat plants, which eat dirt, so he's just cutting out the middleman.
* In Season 2 of ''Series/TheGreat'', Catherine's pregnancy leads her to develop WackyCravings for dirt. Being Empress, she has servants bring it to her in fancy trays, and chows down on it with silver spoons.
* In ''Series/ItsAlwaysSunnyInPhiladelphia'', Charlie claims while on a thinly-veiled version of ''Series/FamilyFeud'' that "an animal we eat that doesn't eat us" includes "dragons." Why? Because humans can eat dragons, but it's a meal fit for a king more than a man, but dragons don't eat humans, they eat gold, which is why they're always gathering it up. He manages to score a single point for this answer, due to having been one of the people surveyed.
* In ''Series/PrehistoricPark'', much to the annoyance of the park staff, Titanosaurs are able to consume whole trees and thatched huts, but they prefer rocks. {{Justified|Trope}} in that the rocks allow their digestive system to crush the massive quantities of fibre they consume, easing indigestion; they can't dig except by uprooting trees, so finding an appetizing rock is not as easy as one might expect.

* Hortas from ''Franchise/StarTrek'' are silicon beings that live in the deep rocks of Janus VI, digesting rock for sustenance. Once communication was established between the Human mining colony and the native Horta population, productivity soared.

** Gakuma of ''Series/UltramanTiga'' mainly lives on minerals, but after miners exhaust the resources, it begins to attack living creatures with its [[BreathWeapon petrifying beam]] for sustenance.

** In ''Series/UltramanMax'', the iconic kaiju Red King is given this trait. He swallows chunks of the explosive sediment that composes his island in order to spit them out as a BreathWeapon.
** Gromite from ''Series/UltramanMebius'' feeds on mineral matter in order to harden its stony exoskeleton.

* "When I Was Your Age" by Music/WeirdAlYankovic claims that the singer was so poor they had to literally eat dirt "every night for dinner". Getting dessert was a ''punishment''.

* In ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossingWildWorld'', the player can donate to the poor town of Boondocks, whose residents eat nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches... without bread... or cheese. So they eat grilled dirt.

* In ''VideoGame/DeepRockGalactic'', it is implied that one of the uses for the Morkite that the dwarves mine is as an ingredient in Dark Morkite ale.

* Depending on their genetics, crystal blobs -- and even cows, chickens, and sheep -- in ''VideoGame/VerdantSkies'' may eat flowers... or wood, rocks, or minerals. The absurdity is lampshaded in the game text.

* In a ''Webcomic/PebbleAndWren'' strip, the title characters are pretending to be on another planet and Pebble wonders if the rocks are edible. Wren says no.

* Claire Luvcat from ''WebVideo/CreamHeroes'' decides to grow some cat grass indoors and spends most of the episode filling pots with soil and preparing seeds. Then [[BigEater Dodo]] starts eating the soil, despite showing disgust over it earlier.

* In ''WesternAnimation/Ben10Omniverse'', the Gourmands of Peptos XI have a... unique strategy for avoiding planetary conquest: they ''[[ExtremeOmnivore eat their own planet]]'' and belch their way to a new one. Just like the last ten.
* ''{{WesternAnimation/Dilbert}}'' attempted to engineer a super food to solve world hunger and introduced it to a rural country that seemingly had no crops of its own. It's only afterwards he learns they don't grow crops because the mud that's ubiquitous to the region is their food source and rich with all the nutrients they need, [[NiceJobBreakingItHero and his new crop tastes terrible and has drained all the nutrients out of it to grow]], truly leaving them to starve.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheFlightOfDragons'': Dragons eat limestone and will swallow gemstones to help digest them, much like birds eat grit to grind their food. Said limestone produces the gases necessary for them to fly and breathe fire.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheFruitties'', the Fruitties are [[AnthropomorphicFood anthropomorphic fruits and veggies]] along with [[PlantPerson other plants]], and thus are at the very bottom of the food chain. Instead of doing something like photosynthesis to make food for themselves, however, the Fruitties eat substances like sand and mud.
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'': In "[[Recap/FuturamaS6E11LrrreconcilableNdndifferences Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences]]", after Lrrr[[note]][[LargeHam RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI VIII!]][[/note]] accidentally conquers Earth the next thing we see is the main cast [[WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture sentenced to the mines]] to supply his wife with gemstones to eat.
** In "The Duh-Vinci Code", Fry apparently ate rocks before they met up with Leonardo Da Vinci, which Farnsworth thought was dumb. Farnsworth proceeded to punch Fry in the stomach after he mistook Leonardo Da Vinci for Leonardo DiCaprio, hurting his hand but causing Fry no pain, which Fry felt justified eating them.

* ''WesternAnimation/TotalDrama'': In the episode "[[Recap/TotalDramaTheObstaKillCourse The Obsta-Kill Course]]", dirt is revealed to be Scott's ComfortFood. He later puts it on his ice cream in "[[Recap/TotalDramaSundaeMuddySundae Sundae Muddy Sundae]]".

* ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'': Gorons have been mentioned to eat mostly rocks; one Goron describes his race as the "stone-eating people from the mountain."
** In ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime Ocarina of Time]]'', they don't just eat ''any'' rocks. They will ''only'' eat the rocks from the nearby dungeon, which has of course become overrun with monsters and they need Link to clear it out before they all starve to death. It's not that they ''can't'' eat other rocks, [[PickyEater they simply refuse to]], because the rocks from the dungeon [[PerfectionIsAddictive are of such vastly superior quality that all other rocks now taste disgusting in comparison]].
** Later games add some other mineral-based meals for Gorons, usually as a part of side quests: one game has you delivering a rock sirloin (a hunk of rock that resembles CartoonMeat) to a stranded Goron while another has you delivering a bowl of lava soup to a sick Biggoron. They also like to eat amber, even if it has fossilized bugs inside it.
** Certain traveling Gorons in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild Breath of the Wild]]'' reveal that ore, gems and the like are considered unpleasant fare, in contrast to good old-fashioned rocks. Amusingly enough, throwing one of those in your cooking pot will give you Rock-Hard Food; it restores one-quarter heart (equivalent to an uncooked acorn), and Link's eating animation shows him getting stopped mid-bite from the toughness of it.
--->'''Item description:''' A dish gone awry after adding the wrong ingredient. Chewing your way through this won't be fun, but it'll fill you up when you're [[JustForPun between a rock and a hard place]].
** Daruk's journal says Link once tried rock roast, and liked it.

* ''Literature/TheFifthSeason'' has legends of the Stone Eaters, [[SculptedPhysique humanoid creatures of living stone]] that inhabit the continental plate. When they show up in person, it's revealed that the stone they prefer to eat is [[spoiler:human flesh that's been TakenForGranite. Later {{Subverted|Trope}} when their diet turns out to be their means of transforming a human into a Stone Eater]].

* In ''Series/{{Yellowjackets}}'''s 1996 storyline, a teammate notices Taissa eating dirt outdoors at night. Since she was having a dissociative episode, she doesn't remember doing this. When the teammate tells Taissa what she saw, Taissa denies it happened, despite waking up with dirt under her nails.

* ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'': Gorons have been mentioned to eat mostly rocks; one Goron describes his race as the "stone-eating people from the mountain." But they don't just eat ''any'' rocks. One Goron says they've become such gourmets that other rocks may as well turn to ash in their mouths, for all the satisfaction they get from eating them.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' fan works that like to [[PovertyForComedy play up how poor Reimu is]], she will sometimes be seen eating dirt, as seen [[https://safebooru.donmai.us/posts/1095216 here]].

* In ''Series/{{Yellowjackets}}'''s 1996 storyline, a teammate notices Taissa eating dirt outdoors at night. Since she was having a dissociative episode, she doesn't remember doing this dirt. When the teammate tells Taissa what she saw, Taissa denies it happened, despite waking up with dirt under her nails.

* In ''Videogame/DeepRockGalactic'', it is implied that one of the uses for the Morkite that the dwarves mine is as an ingredient in Dark Morkite ale.

* ''Videogame/OxygenNotIncluded:''

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* ''WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow'': In "[[Recap/RenandStimpy2x12RoyalCanadianKiltedYaksmen The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen]]", the eponymous duo are stranded in the wilderness and slowly starving to death when Ren hits upon an idea. What, he asks his compatriot, is "[[CanadaEh Canadia]]'s most abundant natural resource? "Dirt?" asks Stimpy hesitantly. "Yes!" replies Ren triumphantly. "We'll eat dirt!" It goes better than you'd expect.

* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'': Lithoid species require minerals for population upkeep, just as organic species require food. Since minerals are also used for construction and upkeep almost everywhere else, this adds a bit of a wrinkle to resource management.

* Certain species of parrots eat clay. Wiki/TheOtherWiki has a [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Parrots_at_a_clay_lick_-Tambopata_National_Reserve%2C_Peru-8c.jpg picture]] of a small flock of parrots happily munching away at a so-called "clay lick." This is because it's common for tropical plants to produce toxic alkaloids in their leaves and seeds, so animals that eat them then need to eat clay to neutralize the toxins. Native Americans probably learned to cook and eat poisonous wild potatoes with clay after observing this behavior in animals. While they did eventually develop non-poisonous domesticated potatoes, eating clay with potatoes is still a tradition in some parts of South America.

* In Hati, cookies made from dirt or clay, salt and butter or shortening by the name of Bonbon Tè are popular as a meal replacement for those in impoverished areas primarily because of how cheap they are to produce in mass quantities. They're also coveted by pregnant women and children as nutritional aides for the reasons stated above.

** In ''[[Recap/FuturamaS6E5TheDuhVinciCode]]'', Fry apparently ate rocks before they met up with Leonardo Da Vinci, which Farnsworth thought was dumb. Farnsworth proceeded to punch Fry in the stomach after he mistook Leonardo Da Vinci for Leonardo DiCaprio, hurting his hand but causing Fry no pain, which Fry felt justified eating them.

** In "[[Recap/FuturamaS6E5TheDuhVinciCode]]", Fry apparently ate rocks before they met up with Leonardo Da Vinci, which Farnsworth thought was dumb. Farnsworth proceeded to punch Fry in the stomach after he mistook Leonardo Da Vinci for Leonardo DeCaprio, hurting his hand but causing Fry no pain, which Fry felt justified eating them.

* ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'': In ''Animal Crossing: Wild World'', the player can donate to the poor town of Boondocks, whose residents eat nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches... without bread... or cheese. So they eat grilled dirt.