HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES"

HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2009

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“Values, everyone has values, some are quite honorable, others quite despicable, but we all have values. Values dictate the way we behave or misbehave. Some values are of the brave, others of the bully, and some are of people who simply don’t give a shit.

“Sociologists tell us in South America the chief crimes are against property, especially that of the church and the oligarchy. The majority in many of these countries has little and feels the church is complicit with the ruling class in this state of affairs, and so it wreaks havoc on both.

“The chief crimes in the United States are against people. America is the murder capitol of the world with the largest per capita incarceration of murderers of any country on the globe. The trend in this melting pot of cultures is to intra-ethnic violence, that is, Blacks murdering Blacks, Hispanics murdering Hispanics, Orientals murdering Orientals, and Whites murdering Whites. Whatever we may hate, it is apparent we take it out on our own kind.

“In the land of plenty, wholesale murder has become epidemic as loose federations of young people commonly known as “gangs” are on the attack. Gang Wars are common in our major cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco where killing is an incidental affair. Chicago, alone, has more than 100,000 in gangs with more than 2,000 gang style murders to date in the last decade. Gangs are active in selling and distributing illegal drugs, prostitution, brutalizing neighborhoods, fighting over street corners for drug traffic, and terrorizing the general population.

“Meanwhile, there are millions, who lack the luxury of any kind of crime as their chief value is to find something to eat to stave off hunger and live for one more day. Values are not always a theme of justice.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., from, "Fragments of a Philosophy”

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Sometimes I am saddened, not because readers are critical of some of my missives but because they take umbrage at my lack of optimism. “Were you born pessimistic,” as one person wrote, “or did you take an oath of pessimism?”

The answer of course is “no, I did not,” but what is apparent is that my missive ran into that reader’s value system, as my missive put the reader on the defensive about her values. Life is not a bowl of cherries, especially when people don’t even have cherries to eat to keep them alive.

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Visit one of the worst slums in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti at lunchtime, and you are likely to see the people eating “dirt cookies” to keep them alive. People here control their hunger pangs with these cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau, seasoned with butter or vegetable shortening and salt.

The mud has been long prized by women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium, as the dirt is alleged to be rich in minerals. Children like the buttery, salty taste of the “dirt cookies,” but when they have them three times a day often complain of stomach cramps after living on such a constant diet.

Food prices have soared in Haiti because of high oil prices, while the land is often parched with need of fertilizer and irrigation, which has resulted in this island nation being mainly dependent on imports. To register a sense of this, at the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice sell for 60 cents, beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up a similar rate, even the price of the yellow dirt or clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now cost $5. Still, at 5 cents a piece the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples.

Eighty percent of the people of Haiti live on less than $2 a day as a tiny elite controls the economy, as has in perpetuity. Making and selling these cookies is the only income for the majority of the Haitian women who commonly have five or more mouths to feed at home.

The “dirt cookie” industry is a simple one. Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline marketplace, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies stand next to Haitians bagging mounds of the dirt into cloth bags. Women buy the dirt, and then process it into “dirt 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 the rocks and clumps on a sheet, and then stir the dirt and water into a sludge adding shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave it to dry under the scorching hot midday sun.

The finished cookies are carried in buckets to the market or sold on the streets. What is not sold is brought home to feed the many children of these women.

Haitians are so poor and have so little real food that they make and eat “dirt cookies” without another thought, as it holds off starvation. The “dirt cookies” have a smooth consistency, but suck up all the moisture in the mouth as it touches the tongue and then leaves an unpleasant taste of dirt that lingers.

While the dirt may contain parasites and deadly toxins, it can strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb of women to certain diseases claims a study of “geophagy,” which is the scientific name for dirt eating.

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I can remember when I was a boy of five or six, after a hard summer rain, playing in the soft soil and making mud pies, and even tasting them, and spitting out the slimy mud and shaking my head in disgust. Ugh!

Imagine my reaction when learning seven decades later that “dirt cookies” is a food source and viable industry in this poorest country in our hemisphere. This is not a hoax. This is real, and this is going on today in Haiti. (World Focus, WUSF – PBS Television, May 27, 2009, and go to www.google.com and click on “Dirt Cookies of Haiti” for more detailed information).

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Now, how can such poverty exist is this hemisphere with the United States of America the richest most powerful nation in the world?

Haiti is a country, which has been in constant civil strife and social turmoil for most of my life. It is a forgotten country. Meanwhile, American superpower has not been able to do anything about it. Pervasive starvation exists right under our very noses. This is our Darfur, our Somalia, and our Angola. We sit down to dinner, eat heartily, and throw more food away than we eat, while not so far away the breakfast, lunch and dinner in the slums of Haiti are “dirt cookies.” There go I but for the grace of God.

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Do I have an answer? No.

But there are people in government that do, people with expertise in the area of starvation who could do something. But I know the reason why they don’t. Power deals with power to protect its power and the accretion of its power, entertaining nothing that might threaten the erosion of that power whether it be the power of a great or humble nation. Power is guided by quid pro quo, and power always bows to power but not necessarily to the needs of the people. Power dispenses its power only when the impact and most favorable consequences of that power are germane and consequential.

Read Haitian history on www.google.com, and you will see the United States has supported puppet Haitian dictators, only to be surprised how corrupt they turned out to be. The US has armed the police and army, and learned only to its chagrin how they in turn brutalized the people. The US has supported free elections of an electorate largely illiterate but cunningly escorted to the polls and manipulated to vote their benefactors’ conscience, which was the hunger for power. Former President Jimmy Carter has been duped into legitimizing this charade, as have other well-meaning idealists and humanitarians.

Elections are not free when the electorate is not a constitutional power base. Elections can be free but are reduced to being meaningless if there is no infrastructure to carry out the will of the people for civility, social justice, peace and prosperity.

Haiti is a colonial error of commission and omission, which has maintained a power elite studiously dedicated to a weak infrastructure. Consequently, Haiti is not the fabled Atlantis that allegedly sunk to the bottom of the sea. Haiti is real, palpable and observable. The problem is Haiti has simply disappeared from the radar of the world’s conscience, as if it never existed sharing something of the legacy of Atlantis.

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