Chew This Over: Munchable Ice Sells Like Hot Cakes – WSJ.com

When Kyle Burkhalter gets up in the morning, he goes into the kitchen and fixes himself a nice cup of ice.The 24-year-old director of research for a Web site chews the ice in the car on his way to work in Atlanta. He downs two or three more cups before lunch. He orders ice from drive-thru windows and dips into the office ice machine. Sometimes, his tongue gets so numb he can barely talk to clients.

Still, he munches on. “It’s something that you want to do and you think about doing on a constant basis,” he says.

Ice isn’t just for chilling drinks anymore, or for packing fish and treating sprains. It’s a hot snack. Some Sonic Drive-In franchises sell it in cups and in bags to go. Ice-machine makers are competing to make the best chewable ice, with names like Chewblet, Nugget Ice and Pearl Ice. One manufacturer calls the ice-loving South the “Chew Belt.”

In Hungry Haiti, Dirt Is Food

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud.

With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.