Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt
It was lunchtime in one of Haiti‘s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t
afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a month-old son,
has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central
plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places such as Cité Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings, and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt, and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,”
Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds, 3 ounces (2.7 kilograms, 85 grams) he weighed at birth.
Making the Cookies
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then
process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shantytown.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun. The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
Health Effects
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said
Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.
“Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it,” said Gabriel
Thimothee, the executive director of Haiti’s health ministry.
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
“I’m hoping one day I’ll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these,” she said. “I know it’s not good for me.”
Hungry Children in America
Every day, children in every county in the United States wake up hungry. They go to school hungry. They turn out the lights at night hungry. As many as 17 million children nationwide are struggling with what is known as food insecurity. To put it another way, one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life.
Several studies have shown that food insecurity affects cognitive development among young children. And for older children, students like Foronda, school performance is affected. Additional research shows that with hunger comes more frequent sickness.
In high school, Katherine Foronda trained herself not to feel hungry until after the school day had ended. She wasn’t watching her weight or worrying about boys seeing her eat.
She just didn’t have any food to eat or any money to buy it.
“I thought, if I wasn’t hungry during class I’d be able to actually focus on what we were learning,” said Foronda, now 19.
For Katherine Foronda, who spent many of her days in high school subsisting on crackers, it was a drop-out prevention program with a food aid component that helped her put hunger behind her.
Early on in high school, with her hunger distracting her from her studies, she failed an English class. Rather than repeating the class, she was given the option of taking an afterschool life skills course, which offered meals to attendees each day and sent them home with food supplies each weekend.
She also gained new insight into the possibilities for her own future, learning from a mentor that college was within her reach, despite her family’s economic circumstances.
With food to eat and not just a little bit of hope, she started performing better in classes, and founded a program that offered food support to the student body in her high school. She won a scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is now a sophomore.
Findings from Feeding America’s study:
-In 314 counties around the country, one third of the children in the county are living in food-insecure households.
-Nineteen counties are home to more than 100,000 children living in food-insecure households. And three of those counties have more than 300,000 food-insecure
children.
-Starr and Zavala counties in Texas, near the border with Mexico, have the highest rates, with over 50 percent of the children in those counties living in food-insecure households.
