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.
Comments
16 responses to “Hunger”
Wow you really have a way of laying it all out. Another impressive post.
Words of Lemuel Sturdevant Leavitt (1827-1916):
Our crops had been very poor. There was never enough water for each man to irrigate his scanty acres. We not only had our own families to feed, but often the Indians came and demanded bread. One winter was particularly hard. Our crops were more meager than usual and the winter was extra-long and severe. Our bins, as well as those of most of our neighbors, were getting pretty low so it was decided that I should make a trip to Parowan to replenish our supply of flour. At that time it was a hazardous undertaking, for in the winter a trip over the snow-covered mountains to the north, with no road to follow, was a real undertaking, however, it was necessary that someone make the trip.
I suffered intensely from the cold, yes; even hunger, but I finally made the trip with 500 pounds of flour. Within twelve hours most of the neighbors had come to borrow just a few mixings. We tried to distribute it and make it go as far as we could until we were left with only fifty pounds. I could see that unless another trip was made soon the entire colony would be faced with starvation so the very next morning I set out again. This time I had to go to Beaver which is forty miles north of Parowan. My brother-in law owned the mill in Beaver. When I told him our dire needs he gave me twice the amount I could pay for, saying he had plenty. He insisted that I take the flour adding, “I can’t let my baby sister’s children go hungry.” I think he would have done the same for anyone.
On the return trip I had the misfortune of getting both of my feet frozen, but the Saints in Santa Clara were kept from starvation.
Is that from your ancestor? Mine also settled in Santa Clara, in 1856. He might have saved the Stahelis from starvation.
John M., precisely.
E., thanks. This one has been percolating for a while.
A saw a video recently that discussed a non-recorded pre-historic war based on genetic diversity decline and bottleneck event from around 6,000 – 4,000 BC. One running hypothesis behind it is that as we transitioned to an agricultural society there was less land available for hunting and gathering, so then when there was a poor harvest people couldn’t make up the difference from hunting, but resorted to pillaging as a last option. To over-summarize the situation, we had invented the sword, but we hadn’t invented the shield yet. It took forming governments and cities to put a stop to the cycle of violence.
I do not look forward to the worst case scenario this post is lying out.
I agree with your sentiments, Jonathan. But just in case you’re worried about what the Whitehouse is doing by pausing foreign aid I’m posting this link:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/
My guess is that you’ve probably already looked at that page. But even so I wanted to post it as a reminder that the pause is meant to be temporary–no more than 90 days.
That said, I have two thoughts on what Trump is trying to do. 1) I don’t think it’s wrong for him to take a look at the bureaucracy involved and clean up any wastefulness and shenanigans that may be happening–especially if unsavory folks–like terrorist organizations–are taking advantage of the system. And 2) Woe unto us if we don’t continue to help the hungry and poor–as it is our Christian duty.
That (and that) said, I’m confident that foreign aid will be rolling out again–and I hope that Trump understands that the aid the U.S. gives to other countries is one of the things that makes America truly great.
Jack, you’re a little behind on the news about the freeze. In court filings, the government has stated that the review is over, at least for the State Department and USAID, because they have made their determinations about award and grant terminations. About half of State and over 80% of USAID awards and grants have been terminated. They will not roll out again. Both terminated and non-terminated awards are still awaiting payment for contracted work performed last year. For example, the World Food Programme just received their payment for work completed in the summer of 2024, but it’s still not clear how much money they can expect going forward and they are closing their Johannesburg office in order to consolidate their administrative functions in Nairobi. That might sound like efficiency to you, but it makes their work less efficient to have few people on the ground in Africa.
Many organizations that assist with severe food insecurity have seen their awards terminated. Famine in South Sudan and Sudan is very real right now. Last week, I was at a local food bank in the African country where I live and learned about the school lunch program they just had to cut because of a terminated USAID award. Not only will children be more malnourished because of that, school attendance rates will also fall.
Most damning of all, withholding medication from mothers with HIV means that thousands of babies have been born with HIV since Trump took office. A “pause” might not sound too bad to you, but it’s everything to those babies. It’s everything to mothers who have carried their children to Chad to escape war in Sudan and now aren’t getting the food and medical assistance they require. It’s everything to the families of people on ventilators that have been turned off. I could go on. Trump has made it clear that international assistance, even for hungry children, is not a US priority anymore.
Amira, thanks very much for the on-the-ground update. It’s devastating.
Jack, my concerns here are not actually foreign aid, however. We also have a variety of programs to avert hunger here in the U.S., but even those domestic programs aren’t my primary concern. Of more relevance is that farmers in my large, agriculture-focused state are starting to notice that trade wars are raising doubts about their main source of fertilizer, and their main international market, threatening their ability to stay in operation. That’s just one recent example of careless disruption of basic economic processes. People who have never thought seriously about where bread comes from, and who ignore the experts who try to tell them, can make terrible decisions with severe downstream consequences.
Amira,
Those things sound bad to me too–and I wish they’d thought through things a little more for pausing the whole program. But honestly I hardly trust anything I hear these days about how moneys are allocated and spent. The two things I do believe is that there are people in need and that the USAID has more pork than a pig farm. And so something’s gotta be done (IMO) to clean things up a bit. That said, maybe a pause is unnecessary. But even so, I’m confident that humanitarian foreign aid will continue at some point–hopefully sooner than later.
Jonathan,
I think those are legitimate concerns. However — and without wanting to trivialize them — I’d also say that they’re “normal” concerns–for lack of a better way of putting it. I’m confident that a quick study of the Whitehouse changing hands democrat to republican and vice versa over the last fifty years could produce an endless litany of quarrels and concerns over economic changes.
Jack, it’s reasonable to identify normal Republican-ish things that the government is doing. Those Republican-ish things are fairly popular and a lot of people voted for them. But I’m begging with you to understand that repeatedly threatening the independence of our closest ally is not a normal Republican thing to do. Previous Republican administrations hated tariffs and economic uncertainty. Pardoning violent insurrectionists and drug market operators and securing the release of human traffickers is not what people elect Republicans for. The aid that was keeping African children from being born with AIDS was an important priority for George W. Bush. Identifying wasteful programs and then cutting them is the normal Republican thing people were expecting, not a slash and burn approach to American soft power. After people die and babies are born with AIDS, it can’t be undone.
Jonathan,
I agree with most of what you say–I don’t love Trump. I do however believe that a lot of what he says is pure–albeit sometimes strategic–bluster. I could be wrong–but I’d be surprised if the tariffs on Canada and Mexico stay in place or that the Palestinians are relocated or that he even comes close to deporting as many people as he says he will.
Viewing from a distance in Australia, it seems that Trump is far more worried about people killing each other in Ukraine, than he is about people dying from starvation and disease in poverty-ridden countries.
It’s a tragedy unfolding before our eyes. Perhaps after his visit to SLC he thinks that the Church is going to pick up the slack? Hopefully, we can, before more people die.
Jack, I see that you’re interested in cleaning up wasteful bureaucratic shenanigans. That’s great. I found this recent podcast https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-government-size-rego to be very informative on the topic. In it I learned how a previous Presidential Administration cut the Federal workforce from 3 million, to 2.1 million. So it can be done.
Are you familiar with any medium or large organization that halts payments to perform an audit? I’m not. That’s not how good organizations operate. Especially when they are mandated by law to make the payments.
Given that the Federal Government isn’t a private organization, but a public one, anyone can audit the government. You can do it. A Presidential candidate can do it. A Presidential nominee can do it. A President-elect can do it. It was bit more difficult to do it before 2006, but in 2006 the US Treasury Department started publishing daily accounts of where all of the money was going. I would think that a Presidential candidate who is sincere about their desire to cut waste would have looked at these public records and put a plan in place on how to reduce waste before being sworn into office.
A “pause” in payments is neither an effective nor sincere desire to make government work better for the people.
jader3rd,
Yeah–I wish Trump had at least kept the money flowing for humanitarian aid. That said, he may have had other reasons for stopping the flow of aid than doing an audit. And one of those reasons might be that he wants folks to know–on both ends of the flow–that he means business. Even so, I’d like to see him turn the spigot back on sooner than later–at least for humanitarian aid.
I can’t help myself–I don’t mean to be combative–but I don’t remember the mainstream media being nearly as vocal about downsizing the government during the days of Clinton as they are today.
I simply do not understand being unable to say that it’s wrong to cause people to starve.
Trump made it very clear what he thought of foreign aid before the election (and, frankly, compassion in general). I know you didn’t vote for him, Jack, but anyone who did and expected foreign aid to continue…”You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
Clinton downsized the government in cooperation with Congress–he worked with them to pass relevant laws. Trump is downsizing the government in defiance of the law and the Constitution, which gives Congress the power of the purse.
Clinton had a plan for what government should stop doing and what it should continue doing, and then let go of people who were doing the former and retained people who were doing the latter. Trump (or rather Musk) is getting rid of people without considering what they do (“all probationary employees” or “everyone we can scare off with a ‘fork in the road’ message”).
There’s a contradiction here. Trump broke from GOP orthodoxy by telling his supporters the government *should* take care of them–no cuts to Social Security, Medicare, etc.–and it made him very popular. Now his administration has been overrun by techno-libertarians who are rich enough, or young and stupid enough, to think they don’t need anything from the federal government. But Trump’s supporters do. I don’t know how this plays out. Will Trump’s supporters turn on him when services they count on stop functioning? Will Trump turn on Musk when his supporters start complaining? Will the courts prevent things from actually going that far?
But to get back to Jonathan’s point, the modern economy is complicated, and the federal government plays a big role in it. It’s one thing to thoughtfully change that role. It’s quite another to burn it all down with no plan for what comes next. That really could cause hunger in America, not just Africa.