Cookie Party

Let me just say that I think this is total bullshit, but the AP ran the story, so I feel it is my duty to share it with you...

With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice - but they can still chow down on cookies made of dried yellow dirt!

Meet Charlene, 16 and the mother of a one-month old, who shares a two-room house with her 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. 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.

Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. 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. At the market in the slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. 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. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say. At about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80% of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day.

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.

I have an idea - dump some birth control into the earth so these dirt eaters don't have seven siblings and cleverly get knocked up before the age a teen would normally get a license. That'll make the money go further. This sounds a lot like the old recipe for stone soup, where a simple stone is boiled, but all tasty trimmings are added to give the soup it's flavor. Someone forgot to tell them to take the dirt out before adding all the salt and shortening though. Haiti is now the official most ass-backwards place on the planet. Even those in Africa who are staving don't eat dirt - you got pwned by Africa, Haiti!