Getting a Grip on the Roots of Hunger
admin September 30th, 2007
(Frances) I feel like the T.S. Eliot-kid. “The end of our exploring,” he famously wrote, “will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”
Just as my new book Getting a Grip is hitting bookstores, I’m circling back to where its core ideas first began to take shape in me. Yesterday we fired off the final, final version of a chapter I’ve been working on since last January: World Hunger: Roots & Remedies. It will appear in a sociology text book to be published by Oxford University Press. In it, I journey from my original “ah-ha” moment decades ago: Oh, my God, we humans are actually generating the scarcity we say we fear. With massive feedlots we’ve turned livestock into protein disposals! (Think about it: We produce 13,000 calories a day for every American just in grain; most of it goes to animals.)
My new chapter argues that as long as we think of hunger in terms of missing things—food, seeds, money—ending it is hopeless. Solutions flow once we realize hunger is a symptom, flowing inevitably from extreme imbalances in power in human relationships. Reflecting learning over almost four decades—yet circling back to my first shocking realization—my chapter ends with these 140 words:
“It is tempting to view hunger as a moral crisis, when it is more usefully understood as a crisis of imagination. Humanity is trapped in a failed frame, a way of seeing that underestimates both nature’s potential and the potential of human nature. Exposed daily to news of deprivation alongside apparent indifference, many find it hard to hold out hope. How tragic; for mounting sociological evidence reveals that most humans have, inherently, what it takes to end hunger: deep needs for fairness, efficacy and meaning.
The challenge is therefore to reframe hunger as a crisis of human relationships that is within our proven power to address, to search out and broadcast lessons of success and, most importantly, to fearlessly engage oneself—for, ultimately, can anyone believe that poor people, often facing great obstacles, can gain power to overcome hunger if one feels powerless oneself?”
Frances
