These days, in the Haitian seaside slum known as Cite Soleil, chances are children won’t be playing with mud pies.

They’ll be eating them.

I kid you not.

Just last week, in an Associated Press story that resonated both shocking and sickening, the world learned that food prices have skyrocketed so much that the poorest people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere have resorted to eating mud. They take dirt and mix it with salt and vegetable shortening. Then they bake it in the sun.

Some of the Haitians interviewed said the mud, which pregnant women often eat and which quickly sucks the moisture out of a person’s mouth, is a good source of calcium and other nutrients. But it’s one thing to supplement one’s diet with an earthbound substance. It’s quite another to make it a dietary staple.

 And as much as I would like to praise the Haitians for their resiliency in much the same way that black folks have been praised for their resiliency in surviving hard times – by doing things like cooking sugar into syrup and making syrup sandwiches – it’s a little hard to do that when they have to scrounge up dirt, rather than whatever’s left in their pantry, to stave off hunger.

Theirs is more an act of desperation than anything else. And none of us should simply dismiss it as the never-ending hard luck of that island nation -- because the reasons they’re in that situation offers a glimpse into a foreboding future for us all.

World food prices are high because of several reasons -- the main one being that oil is now at $100 a barrel. It takes fuel to grow and to transport food, and when that goes up, food invariably costs more.

We can blame the Iraq War -- this deplorable, saber-rattling misadventure that has wasted thousands of lives and billions of dollars -- for part of that. Colin Powell, our former Secretary of State, warned George W. Bush that such a war could destabilize world oil prices.

And I’ll be damned if it hasn’t. Yet having pain at the pump doesn’t hurt as much as hunger pains.

Then there’s China and India -- countries that are celebrating their newfound prosperity by using a lot of oil and eating a lot of food. Then, the new demand for fuel is also leading farmer to grow corn -- a food staple -- and other biofuel crops for vehicles and not for food.

So where does that leave a Caribbean country like Haiti -- a place where around 80 percent of the people live on $2 a day and need food imports to survive?

It leaves them making mud pies.

There are ways that we can help some of the Haitians get off the dirt diet, though. We can donate to aid agencies, a list of which can be found at http://www.interaction.org. We can also urge our church congregations to start a fund on their behalf. Me, I visited Haiti in 2002, and I care about what happens there not just because of its current misery, but because of its proud past.

Haiti was the place -- then known as San Domingo -- where black slaves rose up against the French empire and freed themselves. Haitian soldiers fought in the American Revolution, and they even joined Simon Bolivar, known as South America’s liberator, in waging other rebellions against Spanish rule. It also was once the richest country in this hemisphere.

But the Haitians were tripped up by the same prejudices and double standards that trip up many black people and people of color. After their revolution the United States, fearful that their defiance and determination might cause its own slaves to forget their place, slapped a trade embargo on it. Then Haiti had to pay a hobbling indemnity to France to reimburse it for the slaves and other properties that it lost during the revolution.

In other words, for Haiti to be able to establish an independent economy, it first had to compensate its oppressor.

Those problems, as well as the Duvalier dictatorships and various stretches of instability, conspired to reduce Haiti to what it is today.

But we should also care about Haiti’s food struggles because the circumstances that are causing it aren’t linked to internal corruption as much as they’re linked to external imbalances in supply and demand. The world is changing, and there’s no easy solution out there.

But the first step in finding solutions is awareness. And, at least for me, the Haitians’ mud pie diet has sounded the alarm.

Loud and clear.