DloPwop:

Yes, here in the southeast U.S., there is a long, long history of people (mostly poor, but not always) eating "dirt (and other "non-food" material, like laundry starch)," but not just because they can't get anything else. Sometimes it's pica (vitamin/mineral deficiency), but sometimes the material is considered, well, a local delicacy. I had a teacher in high school who grew up on a pig farm (his dad was the town pig castrator -- awesome! -- they had a chest freezer, my teacher said, chock full of "mountain oysters"), and he told stories of when he and his brothers and sisters were kids, they used to run out to the woods and look for "sugar dirt." Evidently this was some kind of very fine, dry, white clay you could find in little patches under trees -- they used to lick their fingers and tap the stuff, then lick it off their fingertips. My teacher said it wasn't the taste they liked so much as the special way it evidently crunched between the teeth. :)

In some parts of the rural south you can even find "dirt" packaged in plastic, like steaks, in the fruit/vegetable areas of grocery stores. Of course the packages are labeled "not for consumption," but everybody knows that's just for John Law.

I'm not saying they're not starving in Haiti (and hundreds of other places), but I thought I ought to back up the postulation that one man's dirt can be another man's...yummy dirt.

I'll close with an aphorism of my great-grandmother's, used often in circumstances where some dumb grandchild had dropped a cookie on the ground -- it's a variation of the three-second rule, I guess: "Wall, you gotta eat a pecka dirt before you die, anyways. God made dirt and dirt don't hurt!" Maybe Haitians and Rebs are just trying to get it all down ahead of time.