Remember the Mud Cookie Story?

I was hanging out with JK the other night, talking Haiti shop, and he mentions the riots of 2008. Oh, the mud-eating riots? I ask. Turns out JK is the journalist who wrote the mud-cookie story of January 2008 and was held responsible for the world-wide outcry it provoked. Mud-cookie story (look up mud cookies, Haiti and it'll pop up pretty fast) was written in January, riots about food costs break out in April. But since visceral mud cookies image was still lingering in everyone's imagination, in the popular consciousness which I share, people in Haiti were rioting because they were eating mud. Unsurprisingly, the truth is much more complicated than that. People have been consuming mud cookies made from the dirt from the central plateau in small amounts for a long time. The minerals in the soil function like an antacid. It's like Tums. You 'take' it, you don't 'eat' it. But when you are hungry they are helpful because they offer a feeling of fullness while neutralizing the acid that causes hunger pains. But in 2008, food prices in Haiti had risen to the point where people couldn't afford rice and were eating the cookies instead. Like several handfuls of Tums for dinner because you can't afford a fast food. Ironically so many people were relying on the cookies that even the price of mud had gone up. But the article spiraled a bit out of control: it was translated into many languages and papers all across the globe published it, many on the front page. Apparently the image of the Haitian mother eating mud poetically resonated with world-wide anxieties about rising food prices at the time. Of course, many Haitians were upset about what they viewed to be the insulting publicity about their country, and JK received quite a bit of flak. The only thing that anyone remembered from the story was "uncivilized Haitians so hungry they eat mud," not any of the information about its traditional usage or the paraphrase from an American immunologist commenting on the health benefits of eating certain soil. Of course, the story was not a piece of anthropology. It was spun in order to provoke concern about a serious economic crisis. And it did. A few months later, when Port-au-Prince (and other impoverished cities around the world) broke out in food riots, everyone already sensed that the problem was grave. And now, two years later, people can ask silly questions like "oh the mud eating riots?" because that is the image that lingers.