Asid Batri

A Haitian term for the pain of starvation, from the Creole for battery acid.

An article in The Boston Globe highlighted the horrific effects of soaring food prices in Haiti: “A nation that is so starved as to need a new phrase to describe their hunger pains - it is like drinking bleach, they say.”

Haiti’s poor have adopted terms like asid batri and Klorox (a brand of chlorine-based bleach) to characterize hunger akin to acid burning their stomach walls.

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