I’m more referring to when a random person experiences a random craving for something they’ve had before.

Does that generally point to something you’ve had before that unknowingly satisfied a deficiency and which your body tacitly took note of?

I notice it sometimes, like

Beef = i “need” a burger (I’m a skinny dude, beef is not a common staple for me)

Fruit: i need juice or actual berries in yogurt for a smoothie or parfait

    • daddy32@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 months ago

      Thaťs different from child searching for the dirt and eating it by itself - those cravings serve no dietary purpose.

    • quixotic120@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      You’re both wrong for speaking in absolutes. It could be pica but it’s impossible to fully assess such a situation based on a literal sentence description, you would need to know the context, frequency of behavior, occurrence with other items (eg is it solely soil). It could be soil eaten out of desperation to alleviate symptoms related to iron deficiency but again, impossible to know from a single sentence but a child eating soil would be grounds to evaluate for pica unless the child was specifically instructed or something (eg folk medicine)

      brought to you by someone who spent 5 years doing neurodevelopmental evals of autism and intellectual disability in children, where pica came up a decent amount of the time (especially for the kids with ID)