From The Ashes ...

A Little Perspective

Ed Note: I think this tells you what you need to know better than I could.
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May 23, 2004
STAVING OFF STARVATION
When Real Food Isn't an Option
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

ALL the mukhet bushes near the refugee camps in eastern Chad have been picked clean, the World Food Program warns in its latest appeal on behalf of more than 100,000 Sudanese who have fled fighting in their country and now face starvation. Mukhet berries are poisonous, and must be soaked for days to leach toxins out. After drying, they are ground up, but the flour has little nutritive value.

In Haiti's slums, round swirls of dough can be found baking in the sun. They look almost appetizing until you learn the ingredients: butter, salt, water and dirt.

In a world where the rich spend millions on ways to avoid carbohydrates and the United Nations declares obesity a global health threat, the cruel reality is that far more people struggle each day just to get enough calories.

In Malawi, children stand on the roadsides selling skewers of roasted mice.

In Mozambique, when grasshoppers eat the crops, people turn the tables and eat them, calling the fishy-tasting bugs "flying shrimp."

In Liberia during the 1989 civil war, every animal in the national zoo was devoured but a one-eyed lion. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets of the capital.

But all that is, at least, fresh protein. During the siege of Kuito, Angola, in the early 1990's, Carlos Sicato, a World Food Program worker, described a man producing an old chair and promising his family, "If we don't die today, we can survive for four more." He soaked its leather for 15 hours to soften it and remove the tanning chemicals. Then, with boiling water, he made "lamb soup."

Anne-Sophie Fournier, director of the American branch of Action Against Hunger, said she had read that the victims of the Soviet famines of the 1930's ate furniture, too. The scene in "Gold Rush" in which Charlie Chaplin, trapped in a Yukon cabin, ate his shoe (actually made of licorice) was not entirely fanciful.

Starvation brings out what professional famine fighters call "coping mechanisms."

The simplest is such a truism that it seems absurd: When there is little food, people eat less.

Eritrean women strap flat stones to their stomachs to lessen the pangs. Mothers in many countries have been known to boil water with stones and tell the children that the food is almost ready, hoping they will fall asleep waiting.

Not eating is actually effective, famine experts say, at least for a short while. Farmers living on the edge know that if they can ration what's left and hold out a bit longer, the rains may come. Or United Nations trucks full of high-protein biscuits or corn-soya porridge might.

"We know from hunger strikes that in a controlled environment, people can live for 40 days without food," said Patrick Webb, chief of nutrition for the United Nations World Food Program. "But a famine situation is clearly not a controlled environment."

Since 1500, economic historians argue, no famine has been caused solely by a lack of food. Drought may wipe out the crop, but some political force always stops help from arriving: British indifference during the Irish potato famine, the Maoist crushing of peasant farmers in the Great Leap Forward, clan warfare closing Somali ports. No democracy with a free press - even including post-independence India - has ever suffered mass starvation. If North Koreans are occasionally eating each other, as has been rumored for years, it is because the government refuses to admit how desperate its citizens are, and to give aid agencies an unfettered right to find and feed them.

Food shortages often set off strange migrations. In World War II, European urbanites visited farm cousins hoping for food parcels, while in this age of United Nations aid, farmers may rush port cities at the rumor of a ship.

Until help can arrive, people cope as their ancestors did. Rural people may be much better at that than city dwellers, who may be quickly forced to eat rats or chop up the palm trees along urban boulevards seeking their edible hearts.

An informal survey of World Food Program experts produced many examples of resourcefulness.

Africans dig up anthills and termite mounds to sieve out the tiny grains the insects have gathered. Some seeds, however, provoke fatal allergic reactions.

Like Chad's mukhet bush, wild cassava in tropical regions and baucia Senegalensis in West Africa are poisonous, but can be made edible by pounding and soaking for days.

In Bangladesh, a type of lentil known to slowly destroy the nervous system is eaten when people are hungry enough.

Marula fruit is so tasty that elephants knock trees down to get at it, but in battered Zimbabwe, once the fruit is gone people may be reduced to eating the tough seeds by cracking them with rocks and fishing out tiny kernels with a pin.

Plants with very little nutritional value are eaten, like seaweed, tree bark and grass in North Korea or corn stalks in Africa.

Plants that are hard to harvest, like cactus (because of thorns) or water hyacinths (because of crocodiles), become worth the risk.

The skins and bones of dead animals that even vultures are finished with may be boiled for soup.

The danger of all these substitutes is that they can cause diarrhea, which can kill more quickly than starvation, or irritate the gut so much that it has a hard time digesting better food if it does arrive.

Under those circumstances, people can "lose more than they gain from eating," Mr. Webb said.

Even dirt-eating is a coping mechanism that shows its worth when times are tough. The medical name for dirt-eating is pica, and while it is considered a pathology among the well fed, among the poor it can add minerals to a diet that even in good times may only be corn or sorghum mush.

In Zambia, balls of edible clay are sold in street markets. In Angola, a dark dirt called "black salt" is sprinkled on cold food, but cannot be cooked because it loses its tang.

And the dirt biscuits of Haiti - called "argile," meaning clay, or "terre," meaning earth - are not exactly a final cri de coeur against starvation.

Like the mice in Malawi, they are a staple of the very poor, somewhere between a snack and a desperation measure. Making them has been a regular business for years. The clay is trucked in plastic sacks from Hinche, on the central plateau. Blended with margarine or butter, they are flavored with salt, pepper and bouillon cubes and spooned out by the thousands on cotton sheets in sunny courtyards that are kept swept as "bakeries." They cost about a penny apiece.

"They're not food, really," said David Gonzalez, a reporter at The Times who has visited Haiti many times. "People with hunger pangs eat them just to fill up their stomachs."


copyright 2004. The New York Times Company