- Russell, Sharman Apt.
Hunger: An Unnatural History.
New York: Basic Books, 2005.
ISBN 978-0-465-07165-4.
-
As the author begins this volume, “Hunger is a country we enter
every day…”. Our bodies (and especially our hypertrophied
brains) require a constant supply of energy, and have only a limited
and relatively inefficient means to store excesses and release it
upon demand, and consequently we have evolved to have a strong and
immediate sense for inadequate nutrition, which in the normal
course of things causes us to find something to eat. When we do
not eat, regardless of the cause, we experience hunger, which is
one of the strongest of somatic sensations. Whether hunger is
caused by famine, fasting from ritual or in search of transcendence,
forgoing food in favour of others, a deliberate hunger strike with
the goal of effecting social or political change, deprivation at the
hands of a coercive regime, or self-induced by a dietary regime
aimed at improving one's health or appearance, it has the same grip
upon the gut and the brain. As I wrote in
The Hacker's Diet:
Hunger is a command, not a request. Hunger is looking at your dog
curled up sleeping on the rug and thinking, “I wonder how much
meat there is beneath all that fur?”
Here, the author explores hunger both at the level of
biochemistry (where you may be amazed how much has been learned
in the past few decades as to how the body regulates appetite
and the fall-back from glucose-based metabolism from food to
ketone body energy produced from stored fat, and how the ratio
of energy from consumption of muscle mass differs between lean
and obese individuals and varies over time) and the historical
and social context of hunger. We encounter mystics and saints
who fast to discover a higher wisdom or their inner essence;
political activists (including Gandhi) willing to starve
themselves to the point of death to shame their oppressors into
capitulation; peoples whose circumstances have created a
perverse (to us, the well-fed) culture built around hunger
as the usual state of affairs; volunteers who participated in
projects to explore the process of starvation and means to
rescue those near death from its consequences; doctors in the
Warsaw ghetto who documented the effects of starvation in
patients they lacked the resources to save; and the millions
of victims of famine in the last two centuries.
In discussing famine, the author appears uncomfortable with the
fact, reluctantly alluded to, that famine in the modern era
is almost never the result of a shortage of food, but rather
the consequence of coercive government either constraining the supply
of food or blocking its delivery to those in need. Even in the
great Irish famine of the 1840s, Ireland continued to export
food even as its population starved. (The author argues that
even had the exports been halted, the food would have been inadequate
to feed the Irish, but even so, they could have saved some,
and this is before considering potential food shipments from the
rest of the “Union” to a starving Ireland. [Pardon
me if this gets me going—ancestors….]) Certainly today
it is beyond dispute that the world produces far more food (at least
as measured by calories and principal nutrients) than is needed to
feed its population. Consequently, whenever there is a famine,
the cause is not a shortage of food but rather an interruption
in its delivery to those who need it. While aid programs can
help to alleviate crises, and “re-feeding” therapy can
rescue those on the brink of death by hunger, the problem will
persist until the dysfunctional governments that starve their
people and loot aid intended for them are eliminated. Given how
those who've starved in recent decades have usually been
disempowered minorities, perhaps it would be more effective
in the long term to arm them than to feed them.
You will not find such gnarly sentiments in this book, which is very
much aligned with the NGO view that famine due to evil coercive
dictatorships is just one of those things that happens, like
hurricanes. That said, I cannot recommend this book too highly.
The biochemical view of hunger and energy storage and release in
times of feast and famine alone is worth the price of admission,
and the exploration of hunger in religion, politics, and even
entertainment puts it over the top. If you're dieting, this may
not be the book to read, but on the other hand, maybe it's just
the thing.
The author is the
daughter of
Milburn G. “Mel” Apt,
the first human to fly faster than Mach 3, who died when his
X-2
research plane crashed after its record-setting flight.
February 2012 