Mud Pies All Around

I have to be careful what I read or I stumble across things like you will find below. I'm no "head in the sky" hippie yippie who thinks you can change the world just by holding hands and singing Kunbayah...well at least not anymore, but I do feel that the billion dollars a week or so we are spending in Iraq could find some better uses closer to home. Just a tiny fraction of it could resolve the following problem and I guess it just really makes me mad to see it not doing so.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
(snip)

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.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.

Knowing and stewing over this stuff subtly takes a toll on one. I pick on the money we are spending on Iraq just because it is so obviously money down a sinkhole and the cause of much pain but that is just one source of anquish. How about the fact that a 30 second commercial on the Superbowl broadcast is costing $2.7 million. Maybe one of the 30 second advertisers would skip a commercial and send the equivalent in rice and beans to Haiti...pipe dream.

h/t to Susie