(usat) Before Emira Woods arrived in Haiti last week, she had heard the stories about people there making a meal out of dirt. But as dire as the food crisis is in that impoverished Caribbean nation, she wondered whether such accounts were overblown. "I wanted to see to what extend it was sensationalized, and to what extent it was real," Woods said Sunday, as she recounted to me her visit to Cité Soleil, a notorious slum on the western edge of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. (Photo - Food aid: St. Clare’s church in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, feeds 1,000 people a day / Eric Thayer, Getty Images) "The first thing we heard was that … for many people without access to food this was a way to survive," said Woods, a senior official of the Institute for Policy Studies. "So it was very much real, this notion of eating mud cakes." In fact, it was both real and surreal. Like the thin, square-shaped synthetic food that was the staple of millions of starving people in the 1973 movie Soylent Green, Haiti's mud cookies are the product of a world teetering on the brink of global famine — a world in which basic foodstuffs are in short supply.

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