"Dear DloPwop:
Have you further to help us out here?"

Takuan: I'm not sure what I should comment on, Haitians eating mud cakes or birth control. I'm surprised nobody has asked me to go buy a mud cake and eat it so I can share with the group what they taste like. I'm game, but if nobody's interested I would prefer to snack on other things.

I really appreciated Sugarbat's comments on eating dirt in the rural south. Imagine, dirt for sale in an American grocery store! It confirms that there is more to this practice than meets the eye.

I don't have anything to say about birth control, but I might have insight as to why Haitians choose to have so many babies. It's definitely not lack of access to birth control.

Virtually all the poor people I know here (the poor are about 99% of Haitians) have lost a child, a brother, sister, cousin, or all of the above. For the poor, family is everything, because they don't have much else. I would guess that women choose to have babies they may not be able to support because they have seen so many children lost, and need to be sure they will have close family throughout their lives.

An article I read in the Economist called humans (paraphrased) "The only species that reproduces LESS when it has a surplus of food available to eat". It seems that when you look at the development of nations, stability comes first, eventually the food supply is stabilized, and then a generation or so goes by until childhood death becomes the exception to the rule and the birthrate comes down to a sustainable level.

Haiti has a long way to go, and they need our help to give them and hand up and out of poverty.

I live in Haiti, and when I find news about Haiti it's often some variation on the story "people in Haiti are so poor they eat dirt". I think it may be more complex than that. I live in an area that is poor, but not especially poor by Haiti standards. The vendors selling candy on the side of the road will often have a stack of mud cakes next to the candy, and I have seen children choosing to buy them instead of candy - very odd. Apparently, only a particular kind of fine-grained clay is used, and it is mixed with butter and salt and flavored. Pregnant women especially seem to crave the mud cakes. I theorize that there are minerals in the mud that Haitians aren't getting from the standard rice and beans diet.

I'm not saying that the statement "Haitians are so poor, they have to eat dirt" is 100% false, but I don't think poverty is the only reason for this. No, I haven't tried eating one yet.

It may be that the stoplight timing is shortened in order to help traffic flow more quickly, and not in fact to raise revenues. I'm in favor of optimizing the system (and opposed to red light runners).