Bucarophagy
I Procreation
In this portrait of «The Family of Philip IV» by Velázquez, the menina Maria Agustina Sarmiento puts in the hand of Princess Margaret of Austria a búcaro on a silver tray. With this gesture, the painter has immortalized an aristocratic fashion that was very popular with the ladies of Golden Age high society.
A búcaro is a type of pitcher made from clay. As the water inside permeated the clay it became aromatic and was cooled by a thermodynamic process. the ladies of the court used to drink the fresh water and eat the búcaro afterwards.
There were several reasons these women chose to ingest an inedible material with dangerous side effects. Firstly, pale white skin was a much-desired quality. By consuming pieces of a búcaro the ladies became anemic because the clay covered their intestinal walls preventing the absorption of iron. This created the sought-after white complexion fashionable at the time as well as ensuring the ladies stayed slim as other essential nutrients were stopped from entering the body. In addition, the practitioners of bucarophagia used it as a method of contraception. By ingesting the clay, the body was put under huge amounts of stress which in turn, interrupted the menstrual cycle… However, on the flip side, this did not prevent it from enjoying some popularity as a fertility treatment too: It was believed that mud hindered the humoral flow prolonging the contact between the male semen and the female egg, thus increasing the possibility of fertilization.
The customary consumption of búcaros often ended in death because it was impossible to properly digest the clay fragments, so they blocked the intestines and bile ducts, leading to bowel and/or liver failure. [Kurt Kriz]