I am no stranger to hunger. I have struggled alot during my life to control the impulses to eat, separating the actual hunger from the other emotional impulses. This contemplative practice may serve to connect people to the feeling of hunger, as alot of people have forgotten what it truly feels like. But even then, that is up to personal interpretation. Although, I don’t think we can get a true sense of what real hunger feels like without extreme forms of fasting. I do believe that that feeling could be good as well.
I practice intermittent fasting, I only eat between 12pm and 8pm. The other 16 hours is a fast. At first this was a huge change for me, as I bought into the eating smaller meals more frequently during the day, and eating as soon as you wake up, breakfast is the most important meal of the day diets. The first few days, I was absolutely ravenous in the mornings, feeling extreme pangs of hunger. By the end of the week, it was almost nothing. I also wake up between 0530 and 0600 every day during the week. I have plenty of time to contemplate my hunger. On of the things I have learned is that it is easy to ignore hunger for a time, but by the time 12 oclock rolls around, I am intensely relieved to eat food.
Also, because of my career in the Army, I have had periods in my life, where work had to come before food, and I wasn’t able to eat for long hours on end, sometimes even a full day or more. Thinking about hunger in these concepts, makes me more empathetic toward the people who suffer from food shortages, and also make things like the video we watched this week on food waste much more devious. I have repeatedly said this during the course, but It all goes down to education, many people don’t know or understand the struggles within the world food system, so they don’t care, or else they know and need the money from their job so they just deal with it. I think with a more educated population, we could perhaps start to solve some of these issues.
