PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — 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 take desperate measures to fill their bellies.
Charlene, 16 and who has a 1-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 like Cite 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.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is increasingly concerned about food prices. At the market in one slum, two cups of rice sell for 60 cents, up 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
About 80 percent of Haitians live on less than $2 a day.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. “When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky, too,” she said.
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