Eating Earth

Continuing on the theme of food supply, here is a link to an AP article that came out in February about women and children in Port-au-Prince eating dirt to ward off hunger.

Several people emailed me the article when it first came out and I've been meaning to post it ever since. Just yesterday, I realized that I met the reporter who wrote the story at a party in P-au-P a few weeks ago - he's a relatively recent Northwestern grad and the only AP reporter for all Hispanola. Hopefully I'll run into him again when I return to Haiti so I can talk to him more about the research he did for the story.

Eating non-food substances (e.g. dirt, ice, uncooked starch) - a behavior technically called "pica" - is a well documented practice among children and pregnant women around the world. Here is a link to a 1967 Time Magazine article about African American women eating laundry starch during pregnancy. (Please note that article is less than culturally/politically correct in its terms and tone by today's standards)

My friend Sera conducts research in Pemba, one of the two islands that make up Zanzibar, about the association between pica and anemia in pregnant women. The question remains whether being anemic causes women to crave dirt (e.g. for the minerals) or whether something in the dirt is causing women to be anemic (e.g. through introduction of parasites) .

Last summer I brought Sera some samples of the Haitian mud cookies to send to a soil lab in Scotland - not sure what they found in them but now that it's big news from Haiti, I should ask!