We’ve heard of some weird food cravings in our time but none more so than this woman who loves nothing more than dining on kitchen sponges.
Don’t worry though, she soaks them in some apple-flavoured Fairy liquid first to make them taste better and removes the scouring pad before tucking in. The whole thing would just be mad otherwise.
Emma Thompson, 23, suffers from an OCD-type condition called pica, which makes her crave items with no nutritional value whatsoever. She reportedly started chewing on bath sponges from the age of three, before deciding she preferred the taste of kitchen ones.
According to the Daily Mail, Emma spends £6 a week on sponges, and gorges herself on up to 20 of them every day.
She said:
I enjoy the taste of it, I enjoy it more than food. Some people go out for a steak, I would rather go out for a sponge. It’s a guilty pleasure, some people smoke – I eat sponges. It’s not a dirty habit, it’s a clean [one]. My friends takes the mick out of me and say: ‘Are we going to have sponge and chips for tea?’. I chew it and sometimes I swallow it. I like the smell and taste of the washing up liquid on the sponge. It tastes like apples, it’s quite foamy. My mouth gets full of foam.
Sounds, erm, delicious.
To be fair, other than a brief bout of tonsillitis, Emma hasn’t actually had any medical side effects from her “guilty pleasure” snack and has no plans to stop any time soon.
However, experts have warned her that her love of sponges could come back to haunt her, not least because of the potentially harmful chemicals in the washing up liquid. It could lead to diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain and nausea – and you thought green poop after eating the Halloween Whopper was bad!
She added:
People say what are you going to do if you get pregnant as woman sometimes eat them when they are pregnant. But I eat them all the time. When people find out about it they call me weird. They are shocked by it and ask lots of questions. I think there’s a lot of people who do it but won’t talk about it.
We’ll stick to eating crisps and chocolate for our snacks, thanks Emma!
