During those infrequent occasions when I’ve been able to teach pre-modern history and literature, one of the surprisingly consistent elements of the material we look at is hunger. It’s sometimes mentioned explicitly, but it also appears as an environmental factor that, if overlooked, makes the actions of fictional characters and events in real-world history seem mysterious or incomprehensible. A good example of the direct treatment of hunger is a well-known children’s poem turned folk song from 1824, “Es klappert die Mühle am rauschenden Bach ” (text by Ernst Anschütz, performance by Nena, fairly literal translation by me):

The mill grinds away on the wild rushing brook, clip clop.
By day and by night is the miller at work, clip clop.
He grinds all the grain into hearty dark bread,
And if we’ve still got some, we needn’t feel dread.
Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop!

Swift spin all the wheels to turn the mill stone, clip clop,
And grind flour for us from wheat when it’s grown, clip clop.
The baker then turns it to biscuits and cake,
So nice and delicious for children to take.
Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop!

When fields bear a harvest of plentiful grain, clip clop,
The mill spins its gears for our good and our gain, clip clop.
If heaven just grants us our bread for each day,
We’ll have a warm house and keep famine at bay.
Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop!

The poem makes two things explicit to its young audience: Bread is the product of a value chain that includes farming, milling, and baking, and both human and machine labor; and without it, we will starve.

We think we understand these basic facts, and yet their insistent reality is nearly alien to our existence. We can take for granted that bread and a thousand other kinds of food are readily available, nearby and inexpensively, and we do not need to seriously concern ourselves with their production. Or as the Israeli scholar Azar Gat has written:

It is difficult for people in today’s liberal, affluent, and secure societies to visualize how life was for their forefathers only a few generations ago, and largely still is in poor countries. Life is reputably hard, but it used to be much harder. Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies, yet, without depreciating the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems of modernity, this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. People in pre-modern societies struggled to survive in the most elementary sense. The overwhelming majority of them went through a lifetime of hard physical work to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, child mortality, premature death of spouses, and early death in general was inseparable from their lives. At all ages, they were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule prevailed, violent conflict between neighbours was a regular occurrence and, therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, and honour, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic. In this context, the suffering and death of war were endured as just another nature-like affliction, together with Malthus’s other grim reapers: famine and disease. (Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 599)

While food insecurity remains very real in the United States, the prevalence of hunger and risk of starvation declined dramatically during the 20th century, along with the incidence of many childhood diseases. But you likely don’t have to look very far to see the indirect impact of hunger. When my parents were growing up in rural Idaho in the 1940s and 1950s, they started working for pay around age 10 by pulling rocks from fields, then helping with the potato harvest, before graduating to more complicated tasks. At 14, my mother was spending summers cleaning hotel rooms in a town 40 miles away from home. Both my parents had siblings who died in infancy, and if you look at your own family history, you will certainly find much the same. Go back just one or two generations, and you will find a country that was dramatically poorer, sicker, and less certain where food would come from.

There are some lessons here.

First, the past was not a happier, simpler time. It was awful: difficult and impoverished and ridden with tragedy.

Second, while the specter of hunger doesn’t justify all the awful things that have been done in history, we should have more sympathy for people who faced a choice between possible starvation, and certain starvation, including in Mormon history. Sometimes when people approach pioneer history, they seem not to understand why the handcart companies didn’t just stock up on food and warm clothing at Walmart before undertaking a strenuous hike in Rocky Mountain National Park, or why they bothered making the trek at all instead of telecommuting. Many of the people who wandered from Kirtland to Missouri to Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley and onward throughout the West spent decades at a time dependent for their sustenance on what their physical labor could provide. Which is a long way to say: hungry.

Third, we enjoy a high standard of living today because of a large number of complicated systems that provide food and clean water and manufactured products and medical treatment, remove waste, and keep society running. We should be skeptical – no, let me restate: We should vigorously reject any effort to undo the progress of the 20th century, whether in the form of vaccine denial, trifling with war, destruction of state capacity, economic vandalism, or any other kind of wanton mucking about with the foundations of society. “Burn it all down” is the slogan of children and childish minds, and when it has been tried, people died by the millions.