Hunger is a disease; starvation is its extreme form. Hunger can lead to starvation; starvation to death. Obvious, no?
Some symptoms of hunger I’m experiencing: sleeplessness; irritability (also occasional patience and gentleness, obviously not bad things, but see “weakness”); stomach cramping and other gastrointestinal symptoms; general achiness; headache; loss of cognition (that is, I seem stupider than usual, except for when I feel more insightful, insightfulness that may be delusional); hyperosmia (fancy word for “extremely sensitive to smells” — both good and bad); exhaustion (see “sleeplessness”); weakness; distraction (extreme, not like checking your e-mail every minute); distraction (did I say that?); lethargy; weight loss (I know, you’re envious, but obviously this can go too far). and a different kind of distraction: the near-constant thought of food.
I am on my fourth — and last! — day of fasting, and I’m very much aware of all of this. I have those symptoms. I’m tired today; the thing got different. Walking down the street I’m slower than everyone else, and breathless. (Imagine working, or looking for work, in this state.) It’s no longer a game, although as I said in my post yesterday, I know that I’ll eat my fill tomorrow. I’m truly hungry; I’m not starving.True hunger is not just a feeling, but an insufficient intake of energy (calories) and nutrients. all obvious. Hunger is not “I need something to eat,” but a disease, or at least the precursor to the disease starvation. It has a cure and a cause. the cure, as we know, is nutritious food. the cause, as we know, is a lack of same. Obvious.
What causes the lack? Imprisonment, torture, being stranded on a desert island, anorexia, crop failure … and both a lack of aid and bad distribution of nutrients. some (or much) of both of these last two stem from unregulated capitalism and greed. bad distribution is causing roughly 15 percent of the world to be overweight and 15 percent of the world to be hungry. the amount of grain being fed to industrially raised livestock in the United States alone is enough to alleviate much if not all of world hunger.
The cost to the United States of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy for one year – this is only one example, there are dozens of others — is $42 billion; the U.N.’s World Food Program spent $1.25 billion last year. the estimated cost of obesity-related diseases in the United States alone is $150 billion annually; at least some of that money could be saved by reducing the consumption of soda and other junk food and industrially produced meat, all of which cause disease, directly or indirectly. and the grain that’s used to produce all of that could alleviate hunger. (Ethanol is a whole other issue, as are diet and health care costs, both of which I’ll get to; not today.) For more on this, see Stuffed and Starved, the great Raj Patel’s book.
I’m ambivalent about our intervention in Libya, but it’s cost us a billion dollars so far. whatever you think about our “interventions” in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have cost us a trillion dollars. the World Food Program says it can feed a kid a day for a quarter, though undoubtedly just well enough to ward off starvation. if you allowed a $1.50 a day for a hungry person — the cost of a soda, and just above the poverty level, according to the World Bank — you could feed every one of the world’s starving and hungry for more than two years for a trillion dollars. Bombs or butter? (Peanut butter, maybe.)
I’ll stop now, and provide what I hope are some interesting observations and links from my work this week, a week I’ll be grateful to see end; I’m not a “thank God it’s Friday” person, but this week is different.
Here are some more detailed statistics on global hunger from the U.N. World Food Program; their estimate that 98 percent of the world’s hungry means that to a great extent the programs designed to prevent or alleviate hunger in the United States are working. (Why would we not want that to continue?) the first question on the U.N.’s Hunger FAQ page is, “Is there a food shortage in the world?” the answer: “There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.” This I discussed a bit above, but it also brings in the issue of food waste, a topic to be explored at length another time, and that extends from large-scale production to our own refrigerators.
Worldwide, much food is supplied by rural smallholder farmers (who themselves may go hungry). When governments or corporations buy up or lease huge amounts of land in developing countries to ensure their future food security (or, equally likely, simply to make a profit) the small farmers are put even more at risk. Here’s a site that collects news stories about these land grabs and their impact.
The 50 million Americans who don’t have consistent access to food are called “food insecure.” Here are the USDA’s most recent stats on food insecurity, along with an older Washington Post article by Charles Lane that questions the USDA’s methodology; it’s worth reading. Food insecurity certainly exists; something like one in four families runs out of food sometime during the month. and even if the “real” number is lower, it’s still too much, and it’s a good thing that we fight it with some success.
But food insecurity is not the same thing as hunger. bill Abrams, who runs the terrific anti-poverty agency Trickle Up, was telling me about “the hungry season,” the time of year in agricultural communities where food simply runs out; people forage wherever they can, looking, for example, for rice in anthills. (If my fast were involuntary I would probably begin foraging today.) the Times’s Nick Kristof has written about hunger — and charity — brilliantly and extensively, of course.
Finally, some more about voluntary food restriction: David Beckmann, the wonderful man who got me into this mess, told me on the phone yesterday that he was “incredulous” at “how I was doing this without praying.” (I said I did it by working.) and it’s true that the history of fasting is tied closely to religion (and not so much to the currently trendy “cleansing”). Mark Oppenheimer wrote recently in the Times about fasting as a way to get closer to God. (One comment on this: “vegetable broth and smoothies” may be a diet, but it’s not a fast; a billion people would happily live on vegetable broth and smoothies. Smoothies!) Here is more from some of the religious leaders I’ve been talking to over the past week. we agree upon this: HR1, the proposed budget, must be fought.
Note that it’s Lent, and soon to be Passover, which means that many Americans are voluntarily restricting their diets right now. Longer term, my hope is that we’ll see increasing numbers of people recognizing the secular benefits not of fasting — which I can tell you is pretty extreme — but of relaxed food-related self-discipline, represented by flexitarianism, by the Meatless Monday campaign, and by my own (perhaps badly named) crusade for “less-meatarianism”, all of which can have positive effects on the environment, on our personal health and on world hunger.
For the record, I’m no closer to God now than I was on Sunday. (Still, I’m thinking of wearing a What Would Jesus cut? bracelet.) the closest experience to fasting, in my life, is running marathons. There is some spirituality in both but mostly suffering, and you get out of these things what you expect. I expected to learn some things, and I have. the most important ones are affirmations of what I already knew: some of us eat more (and worse) than we need to. others eat less (and worse) than we need to. It will be a struggle to fix this, but there are solutions, and they’re, well, obvious.