Dirt-Eating in Haiti

Not only were African-derived food traditions transmitted across the Atlantic, but also the memory and politics of hunger moved from one Caribbean generation to the next. Here, as elsewhere in the colonized world of empire, inequality, and oppression, the poles of plenty and privation were not so far apart.

Far from the places where food, oil, and fertilizer prices are determined or where world leaders meet to discuss economic policy, some Haitians continue the tradition of eating calcium-rich dirt baked into cakes (with salt and shortening) and consumed as supplements to their sparse and monotonous diet. Born in the crucible of cultural encounters at the birthplace of modern slavery and capitalism, Caribbean food, hunger, and satisfaction have remained tethered to the economic forces of globalization.

Just as certain foods (chicken and imported wine) were associated with excess, others were the foods of hungry times, scarcity, and famine. For example, in eighteenth-century Jamaica, Patrick Browne (1756) reported that the indigenous breadnut (not to be confused with the breadfruit) characterized the diet of enslaved Africans and poor whites “and proved a wholesome and not unpleasant food.” Likened to the European chestnut (which was also maligned as poor people’s food), roasted breadnut provided a substantial meal between July and September and in the aftermath of hurricanes. John Lunan (1814) promoted the plant’s use beyond provisioning as “a rich resource in times of scarcity, or famine, as food for the negroes.”

That the majority of Caribbean proverbs relate to food or animals may reflect the hungry person’s preoccupation with finding sufficient nourishment. The abundance of food-related proverbs suggests that women used the kitchen as a venue for promoting folk wisdom and moral advice. It also may explain how Caribbean cooks became early critics of globalization. After all, they bore the primary responsibility for food procurement. If foods were scarce, women were blamed. Their judged culpability was reflected in the widespread Creole proverb recorded in the 1880s in Martinique by Lafcadio Hearn: “Too much jewelry, empty cupboard.”

Caribbean slave owners referred to the widespread practice of dirt-eating as “Cachexia Africana,” which was thought to be a disorder leading to suicidal death. Enslaved Africans were observed eating “charcoal, chalk, dried mortar, mud, clay, sand, shells, rotten wood, shreds of cloth or paper, hair, or occasionally some other unnatural substance.” Some scholars have theorized that the syndrome was a response to diets that left the enslaved malnourished. Another theory is that geophagy served to counter gastrointestinal responses to toxic plants (perhaps some wild plants not regularly consumed) and hunger. One means of dealing with the habit of dirt-eating was to force slaves “to wear cone-shaped mouth locks, tin masks that covered the entire face.” Twenty-first-century observations of the continued practice of dirt-eating in Haiti suggest the addition of dirt to bread dough was an economic strategy in order to “stretch” food supplies in a time of scarcity and extreme hunger.

Both catastrophic and inexorable changes have furthered the globalization of Caribbean cuisines. Resorting to geophagy was a commonplace practice among impoverished families in Haiti before the January 2010 earthquake. Although famine relief efforts were immediately welcomed after the quake, the efforts also threatened to alter the culinary cultures of Haitians by providing North American foods to replace local crops and interfere with local food markets. Indeed, beyond the crisis, food aid may do more harm than good by making self-reliance next to impossible on an ecologically devastated island still swirling in a sea of imperialism.