My daughter Zoe is a graceful and quickly growing girl of almost ten. Although not afraid to get good and dirty on occasion, she increasingly prefers to feel clean and to look good – often by carefully accessorizing with as many feathers and sparkles as possible.But it was not always so.
When she was a very little girl (as opposed to the burgeoning ‘tween’ I see sprouting up before my eyes), Zoe liked to eat dirt. Not just boring old everyday backyard dirt all by itself, mind you – but rather dirt as a condiment – a soft dusting like brown powdered sugar coating the smooth round pebbles she couldn’t get enough of. Zoe would hunt for these perfect stones or mummified pieces of wood with all the care of a truffle hunter.
They had to be just so.
Once she found a good one – into her mouth it would go like a forbidden treasure. And forbidden they were, as (without any particularly convincing rationale) her mother and I would make her spit them out whenever we caught her and then shoo her into the house to rinse out her mouth.
Zoe got pretty good at hiding the dirty pebbles in her mouth, and could even hold full conversations without giving herself away. But there was always one sure giveaway - a faint dirt-ring around her otherwise secretive mouth. That, combined with a somewhat furtive cast to her eyes would almost always result in an exchange like this:
“Zoe, do you have a rock in your mouth?”
“No.”
“Really? You are sure there’s nothing in there?”
“Nope.”
“Open your mouth.”
“Noooo!”
“Come on, Zoe – open up.”
And so on.
I’m sure this kind of exchange is all-too familiar to some of you out there.
The reason I am writing about this today is because I have always cherished these memories. To this day, there is something in me that associates dirt-eating with something innocent and mysterious – something incomprehensible to adults yet packed with hidden secrets and inscrutable meanings. It reminds me of my daughter, and fills me with love.
(And honey, if you are reading this I hope it isn’t too embarrassing!)
But this week, dirt-eating came back to me in a much darker way, reminding me of all the blessings in my life that make dirt-eating something I think about with warmth and a vague sense of nostalgic yearning.
Jonathan Katz, of the Associated Press, recently filed a story with the unbearably grim headline, “Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt.” His story unearths (forgive my gallows humor there) some of the human costs of skyrocketing global food prices on the poor – who now, as always, make up the majority of the human race. You can read his article in full here: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-01-29-haiti-dirt_N.htm
Katz points out that because of a lethal combination of factors – from rising fuel costs to the surge in converting land and crops formerly used for food production to feed the sizzling bio-fuel market – food prices have risen almost 37% globally in the past year and over 40% in Haiti, which is already one of the poorest nations in the world.
So poor Haitians have begun eating dirt.
It’s not just a matter of scattered and especially poverty-stricken people squatting desperately in the dirt, eating compulsively just to feed their endlessly empty stomachs – no – this is a much deeper and more enduring phenomena – so deep and so enduring that a whole industry (such as it is) is growing up around it!
Call it the Dirt-Cookie Industry.
The cookies are made of a more-or-less digestible dirt from the center of the island, which is hauled to markets in many of Haiti’s slums and shanty-towns, where it is mixed with vegetable shortening and salt before being left out to bake in the sun. The cookies are a relative bargain, at about 5 cents each, which is still a significant sum in a country where over 80% of the population lives on less than $2USD per day.
Women bake the cookies on rooftops and then head out into the crowded streets with baskets full of the only kind of meal many of their customers may eat in a week.
And so it goes…
In a world full of appalling news, this one has hit me harder than most. I just can’t get past the contrast between memories of my little girl with an innocent dirt-ring around her mouth – and the brutal, devastating and oh-so guilty dirt-rings that our collective addiction to consumption has consigned so many other little girls to – little girls who may never live to grow up, go to school, fall in love or any of the other things that we can so easily take for granted.
I do believe that we are responsible here. Call it what you will: rising oil prices, fluctuating global markets – whatever. Call it what you will. It still boils down to our endless “First World” appetites. The price of oil rises as we suck it from the Earth to power our empty-bellied cars. But rather than cut our consumption we try to instead increase fuel production, converting food resources into fuel resources. This, combined with our oil-addiction, predictably drives up food prices all over the world – and voila! – the Haitian Dirt-Cookie Industry is born!
Now I know that many of us try hard to live responsibly, even when it is hard. That’s a good thing, and not to be sniffed at. I know we will do more and more and more as we move into the future – but I hope we will begin to do so with an ever-greater sense of urgency because this story, like all stories, reminds me that we are not trying to engage in a struggle to solve abstract problems or “issues” – but to save lives – real living breathing loving lives that hang in the balance right now.
In this regard we are indeed fortunate to live in the time and place that we do. The problems facing our world are complex and multi-faceted, with countless variables to contend with. But how fortunate we are to be born into the one society in the history of the world that has such unprecedented power to affect all those variables and to influence so many outcomes in so many ways!!!
This fills me with hope.
I want to live in a world where if people eat dirt, it is for the same kinds of innocently inscrutable reasons my daughter did so long ago, and not because they will die without it.
I feel grateful and blessed to be right where I am in our society, and not only because of all the privilege I was born with, but because I know I – We – have the power and freedom (and responsibility) to leverage that privilege to transform our lives and our world into one where the idea of a Dirt-Cookie Industry is simply laughable.
