Haiti’s Hunger Crisis: When Survival Means Eating Mud Cookies

Hunger in Haiti has reached levels so extreme that many families have turned to eating what they call “mud cookies”, a desperate mixture of dirt, salt, oil, and water left to bake under the scorching sun.

These makeshift “meals” are not a cultural delicacy or choice of tradition; they are born of sheer survival. For thousands of Haitians, the cookies dull the pain of hunger in a country where food insecurity has become a daily battle.

In makeshift markets and crumbling neighbourhoods across Port-au-Prince and beyond, mothers prepare these mud cookies for their children, not out of preference, but out of despair. “It’s not food. It’s a way to silence the stomach,” said one woman in a local community report.

Haiti, already burdened by decades of political instability, economic collapse, and recurring natural disasters, is facing what aid agencies describe as one of the worst hunger crises in the Western Hemisphere. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), nearly half of the country’s 11 million people are struggling to access adequate food, and millions face acute malnutrition.

The symbolism of mud cookies has come to define this tragedy, a haunting image of human endurance and a stark indictment of global inequality. While people in wealthier nations discard tonnes of edible food daily, others in Haiti literally consume the earth beneath their feet just to stay alive.

Humanitarian agencies continue to call for urgent global intervention. However, funding shortages, gang violence, and fragile governance have severely hampered relief efforts. The result is a growing humanitarian catastrophe that receives too little international attention.

For many Haitians, survival has become a test of willpower and resilience. Mothers often go without food so their children can have what little remains, and children learn far too early what it means to survive on nothing.

The story of Haiti’s mud cookies is more than a tale of hunger, it is a symbol of how the imbalance of compassion and opportunity across the world continues to widen. In a time when some nations waste in abundance, others fight to live on dust and hope.