Journeying Through The History of Hunger

It’s virtually impossible to live in a country like India and not dwell on hunger. For many millions, far more than we would like to acknowledge, the preposition on would hardly capture their experience. They don’t have the luxury of dwelling on hunger, because they dwell in hunger.

As per the U.N’s World Food Programme, at least a quarter “of all undernourished people worldwide” live in India. This is a situation that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, as job losses have mounted across urban and rural areas. For those of us who might be privileged to possess at least the basics – food, shelter, education – or perhaps, much more, hunger remains an unexplored physiological terrain.

The book Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell, I must confess with the strange mixture of guilt and pride that book hoarders harbor, has for a few years, been tucked into my bookshelf, unread. I recall picking up the hardbound edition at a second-hand bookstore at Austin, Texas with perhaps the kind of writerly impulse that drove George Orwell to inhabit the “Down and Out” in Paris and London. Since then, with moves between countries and cities, the title slipped into an unseen backrow, till I recently decided to reshuffle my books as a lockdown project.

This time, when the orange spine tumbled into view, it almost seemed to flash at me like a traffic sign. With the pictures of migrants fleeing from Indian cities to villages still vivid in our memories, knowing hunger, even from an academic or armchair distance, seemed like a necessary thing to do.

I’m grateful for the encounter. This is a book that will stay with me forever. Because Russell, an impassioned storyteller and riveting guide, brings to view little-known facts about the human body, or the manner in which famines distort social relations and the history of an aspect of ourselves that is both familiar and shockingly alien.

Hunger As Performance

To begin with, she draws our attention to the fact that all of us experience hunger, for a few hours at the very least, every day. After all, while sleeping, we do take a break from food. But even for those of us on intermittent fasts, such hunger can hardly mirror the starvation that the really food-deprived face. Such denial or abstinence of more extreme kinds has inevitably drawn the attention of scientists and humanists.

As Russell puts it, humans continue to have a paradoxical and somewhat complicated relationship with food. The planet holds about a billion hungry people, and just as many who are obese. “Food fascinates us. Yet the opposite is also true. Hunger fascinates us.”

The waxing and waning of public enchantment with hunger was captured by Franz Kafka. In his short story, The Hunger Artist, a caged showman seems to crave audience adulation as he fasts for longer and longer durations. But as with any other performance, the shifty crowd soon loses interest. They would rather watch a well-fed, prowling panther that is so satiated with food, it no longer craves freedom.

Like Kafka’s character, new hunger artists emerge into view, in contemporary times, for sheer entertainment or just to garner attention. As recently as 2003, a real-life “hunger artist,” David Blaine, inhabited a confined box that was strung up near the Tower Bridge in London, without food. When Blaine finally exited that box – triumphantly, perhaps – after forty-four days, he said he had imbibed some valuable lessons about himself and about humanity: “He had learned how necessary it is to have a sense of humour, to laugh at everything because nothing makes sense.”

But forty-four days is not even the limit of human endurance. Studies reveal that an average healthy human being can survive for as long as 60 days without food. With a miraculous kind of internal choreography, the body directs its own survival. “You will start consuming yourself, but precisely, carefully, with such orchestration.”

Naturally this invisible cannibalization of your own fat stores and other nutrients will also transform everything else about you, including your moods and your thoughts. Despite the suffering, or maybe because of it, hunger continues to exert a pull on artists and monks. The former, in order to create, the latter, to transcend material reality.

Russell herself fasted for four days, driven not so much by religious or spiritual urges, but by the sheer secular and writerly yearning to understand what hunger feels like. She observes that “[a]rtists need hunger,” as much as bankers need money.

On the second night of her fast, when she walked into her son’s room, she fainted and hurt her forehead. Falling blood pressure is one of the consequences of not eating. Another side effect of such persistent hunger is boredom. Because food is, for those who can afford it, a form of entertainment.

Hunger As Therapy

Not all fasters were entertainers or even politically inclined. Henry S. Tanner, who emigrated to the U.S. in the mid 1800s, was an eccentric of sorts. Always subjecting himself and his wife to strange diets. In a few years, he was single, asthmatic, and arthritic. He decided, at that time, to fast unto death. It was thought then that not eating for ten days would kill a person. But on the tenth day, Tanner found himself not only alive, but also feeling remarkably well. He persisted with his fasting, for as long as 31 days, staying in touch with a doctor all along. Miraculously, his health improved. His asthma and arthritis had vanished.

Later, he was to demonstrate this in a public setting at New York City, where he undertook a rather exhibitionist fast for forty days. He wowed the disbelieving onlookers by not only surviving, but even thriving, gaining back some of the lost weight. He went on to lecture about the benefits of therapeutic fasting, or what he termed “the recuperative power of the self.”

Inspired by demonstrations like Tanner’s, Alan Goldhamer runs the TrueNorth Health Center in California, where he helps patients undertake therapeutic fasting under medical supervision. Those who start exhibiting extreme symptoms are taken off their fasts. People need to stay long enough to also break their fasts with gradual refeeding. Some patients claim to be cured of various conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure.

While fasting might still have to prove its health benefits inside mainstream medical circles, there is more certainty about the effects of caloric restriction. Mice who were fed 30% less than their counterparts lived longer and with fewer health issues. Moreover, their minds were sharper and they were better able to undertake learning tasks. Such studies are also being monitored or replicated by the National Institute of Aging.

Hunger Studies in World War II

Therapy was hardly on the agenda when the Nazis seized Warsaw in 1939 and deliberately put the Jewish population on a starvation diet. The captives were allowed only the measliest of rations – a thin soup, a piece of bread, maybe some potatoes – the kind of food that would slowly weaken and kill them. As expected, they started dying in large numbers, even as they were reduced to begging or wandering incoherently on streets.

They continued to receive medical treatments inside two hospitals. Of course, even the staff, doctors and nurses inside the hospitals were put on similar starvation diets – so hunger and its revolting stench abounded all around. A team of doctors decided to start a research project on hunger – after all, in normal circumstances, the medical community could have hardly recruited so many adult volunteers to participate in a hunger study.

Even if the researchers themselves were hungry, as the person who kickstarted this project was to later write in the introduction, the work would live beyond their own inevitable ends: “Non omis moriar. I shall not wholly die.” Eventually most of the doctors who had contributed to this study were carted off to the horrors of Treblinka (one of the Nazi camps) or committed suicide or were killed in other ways by the war. But their manuscript lived on, carefully documenting the various stages of starvation – the swelling or edema, the fatigue, the listlessness, the lowering of blood pressure, the clouding of one’s vision – and the eventual slide into a coma or death.

Hunger Research in Minnesota

Besides the circumstance-led World War study, there were few studies commissioned on the effects of starvation or semi-starvation on bodies. In 1944, a group of private citizens embarked on starvation research at the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. Volunteers were drawn from sections of society that believed in a larger purpose behind hunger, like Mennonites, Quakers, or conscientious objectors to the war. The outcome of this experiment was published in a fat two-volume tome: The Biology of Human Starvation.

In that experiment, some results were surprising. People who seemed stronger to begin with, broke down during the semi-starvation periods, cheating on their restricted diets or even stealing from grocery stores. One individual, who had seemed particularly charismatic and fit at the beginning had a near psychotic breakdown, requiring him to be released from the group. Edema or fluid collection was noticed in most subjects. Postures changed, with spines losing their capacities to remain straight.

While hearts shrunk in size and lung capacities diminished, brains did not seem to undergo similar physical changes. However, the ability to attend to academic problems suffered, and increasingly their attention was drawn to food – to obsessing with cookbooks or dreaming of restaurants. Gradually, other abilities withered. Even dressing up or taking a shower became a strain on one’s body. They turned anemic, developed intense dark circles and pockmarked skins, lost hair, to name only a few other consequences.

Beyond the physical effects, the “Minnesota volunteers felt it was their mind and souls that changed more than anything else.” They became neurotic, rude, depressed and suffered severe mood swings. The camaraderie that had existed in the group earlier vanished altogether. Moreover, some volunteers experienced violent or criminal impulses – a proclivity to lie, steal, or hit other people. Since the experiment also entailed a period of refeeding, the researchers noticed that during refeeding, instead of showing gratitude, there was “a growing aggressiveness.” Eventually this experiment helped direct some of the refeeding strategies used with starving populations in Europe, after World War II.

Hunger As A Weapon of The Weak

Hunger has not always been imposed, but also self-inflicted. Fasting for religious reasons is commonplace across all major religions. Besides religious drivers, even in ancient times, hunger has been used as an instrument of the powerless, in medieval Ireland and in India. In the early 20th Century, it was famously used by women during the suffragette protests to win women’s voting rights in England. The members of Parliament feared the fasting women so much, they often released them from prison sentences even if their terms had not been completed. Perhaps, they rightfully feared the militancy that would awaken if women started dying for the cause.

Later, the Government also used brutal means to break the protestors’ fasts, inserting feeding tubes into their mouths and nostrils, leaving many of the women physically bruised and also degraded. One of the leaders, Sylvia Pankhurst was subjected to such forceful treatment inside her prison cell, that “[sometimes] she fainted during the procedure.”

Gandhi’s fasts are well-known. Many of his fasts were not directed against the British, but were often targeted at people who he considered his own. For instance, in the strike against mill owners in Ahmedabad, Gandhi was representing the workers’ interests. When the latter grew impatient and threatened to resort to violence, Gandhi started fasting at once to urge them into a more tolerant wait. As Gandhi himself explained the use of fasts to Louis Fisher, “I fasted to reform those who loved me.” Later, he would fast against the notion of separate electorates for Hindus, Muslims and Untouchables. In total, the Mahatma fasted on seventeen different occasions, and had even notched up a list of rules for all fasters. One of the difficult rules was to stop thinking of food during the entire time of a fast.

Since then, hunger strikes have been used frequently across the world. “One historian documented over two hundred in fifty-two countries between 1972 and 1982.” It is a power or choice that the “weak” continue to exercise on the powerful: “[their] show of weakness is their strength.”

Calling For an End to Hunger

In 1999, the United Nations framed the human right for each man, woman and child to be free of hunger. Often, famines, as Amartya Sen, astutely observes, are not caused by a lack of food, but by a lack of democratic rights and of voices not being heeded by governments. The co-author of World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Frances Moore Lappe agrees. As Tom Arnold, who is the executive director of Concern Worldwide and a member of the U.N. Hunger Task Force, puts it: “The world is so rich now. There is so much wealth. We can create positive spirals of development. It’s a matter of political will. There is just no excuse left.”

References:

Russell, Sharman Apt, Hunger: An Unnatural History, Basic Books (Perseus), New York, 2005