The way I heard it, you're supposed to eat a peck of dirt a year. That'll definitely keep your immune system in practice!

I learned this from an old farmer, being squeezed out of his life's work (and his rented acreage) by the suburban sprawl taking over his formerly-rural part of central New Jersey back in the early '60s. As a young teenager, I went off to work for/with him each day for part of a summer, and I suppose I was too-visibly horrified by the, er, unsanitary conditions under which we broke for lunch. Mr. Schott chided me by quoting his version of this old expression, which allowed for a heck of a lot more dirt-consumption than the one-peck-per-lifetime version.

There a word for dirt-eating, but I'm afraid I forgot it. I rememer reading, sometime back in the 80s, about an African dirt-eating tradition still common in rural Mississippi, where certain ribvertbanks noted for the gustatory quality of the clay attracted dirt-eaters from miles around. The story also noted that dirt-eaters without access to good-enough supplies of the proper kind of earth would make do with some other substance ~ laundry starch, if I'm not mistaken.

A peck is definitely smaller than a bushel. When I was a kid, fruit came in baskets which could be seen at grocery stores, etc. I don't know if kids today ever get a change to see 'em. A bushel basket is wide and stout, more-or-less tub-shaped, and commonly used for apples. The smaller and narrower peck basket was commonly known as a "peach basket"; this is the type and size of basket used by James Naismith at the YMCA Training Center in Sprinfield, MA when he invented basketball; the current-day net hung from a basketball is still roughly the size and shape of such a peach basket, and gives an idea of how much volume is represented by a peck.