![Haitian mud cookies snopes](https://kumkoniak.com/95.jpg)
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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. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy. Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared with food staples. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say. Beans, condensed milk, and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit last month to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large, regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.Īt the market in the La Saline slum, a two-cup portion of rice now sells for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. The global price increases, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky, too," she said.įood prices around the world have spiked because of higher prices for oil, which is needed for fertilizer, irrigation, and transportation. Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds, 3 ounces, he weighed at birth. "When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. 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.
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The mud has long been used by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. 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.Ĭharlene, 16 with 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.
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud.
![Haitian mud cookies snopes](https://kumkoniak.com/95.jpg)