Tag Archives: Hunger

Beyond Meditating

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It’s become kind of a cliche for people to talk about the benefits of meditating. The contemplative practices are a good way to practice meditating on a subject, rather than meditating with the sole purpose of relaxation, which have the potential to leave you wondering the whole time if it’s working. The practices are a different approach to learning about a subject that give you space to ruminate, rather than tackling the subject head on. It’s like the daytime equivalent of “sleeping on it”.

I got the most out of the practice where we contemplated hunger, which I had been putting off for several days because every time I got hungry I just didn’t feel like waiting another 20 minutes to eat. Normally I get a little frustrated by the amount of thoughts that come into my head but with this practice I found that my thoughts were focused almost only on hunger. A physical need dictating where my mind went made it easier for me to focus on the practice.

The most compelling section of this practice was when we stopped breathing for ten seconds. It’s an awful feeling, which is probably the point of the exercise because with my hunger I feel like I can wait to eat and I’ll be fine, whereas by depriving myself of air I can feel that want turn into need very quickly. It was similar to the practice where we watched videos about cocoa farmers, talked about commodity chains, then ate pieces of chocolate. Adding a physical component makes learning about anything a more memorable, more impactful experience.

Below is a link to Miriam Jordan’s article that I referenced in my last post about farmworkers during the pandemic. If you take the time to read it, I recommend eating a piece of fruit afterward and considering who helped it get to you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-undocumented-immigrant-farmworkers-agriculture.html?searchResultPosition=1

Is Your Hunger Natural or Affluent?

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Image courtesy of: https://www.opploans.com/oppu/articles/wants-vs-needs/

Our April 28th contemplative practice invited us to reacquaint ourselves with hunger, an ostensibly basic human experience. Having successfully avoided food for hours leading up to the video, I could be forgiven for assuming I had indeed realized the stated point of the practice; after all, I certainly wanted food, my stomach hurt a bit, and I resolved that fasting wasn’t really for me. On reflection, however, it occurred to me that I didn’t feel any more connected to basic man than I had at the outset. Where had I gone wrong?

About three minutes into the practice, we’re introduced to Einstein’s philosophy that such baser experiences as hunger, love, pain, and fear create the foundation of self-preservation upon which we define our state of nature– basic man. Hunger (along with the other experiences) thus lacks a purely for-itself purpose; it exists primarily as a tool with which to protect the self. Taking this definition of hunger for granted, it is plainly impossible to experience hunger absent the need for self-preservation, for it is the need of preservation that creates hunger to guide us to safety.

Just as hunger may be ubiquitous in the state of nature, it is equally possible for it to be absent entirely in a relatively affluent state in which the parameters of self-preservation have been redefined. Though we all need food, most of us have never been reduced to a primal, naturalistic being in search of food primarily. Our hunger is not the hunger of the state of nature or even of the rest of the world, and so try as I might, I never stood a chance at connecting with a basic human instinct.

While I never felt hunger, this contemplative practice provided fascinating insight into what hunger really is. I believe that considering hunger a component of self-preservation provides greater credence to arguments that access to food is a fundamental human right (a natural extension of the Lockean ideal that a right to self-protection births all other rights), and thus I consider understanding hunger in this way paramount to creating a compelling argument regarding ensuring universal access to food– an optimistic (if naïve) policy aspiration.

Feeling Hunger: an Exercise in Mindfulness (Contemplative Practice 5)

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Why do we eat? Your first instinct might be to say, because we’re hungry! I think I would have responded the same way, had I been asked that question before completing Contemplative Practice 5, Feeling Hunger. But after participating, I’ve come to a realization – I haven’t always been eating because I’m truly hungry, but often because I’m bored, or because it’s dinnertime –  or even because it’s (the food) there. I think that many of us (not all, though), in our mostly food secure society (especially during this pandemic) eat with these mentalities subconsciously buried in our psyche. We are bombarded with advertising telling us what to eat – and not why to eat. And so, we bored-eat, even when we’re not feeling hungry!

Science of Snacks: Thinking Makes You Hungry - Scientific American

Hungry?

Completing Feeling Hunger has made me think about privilege and equitable distribution of food. I think that food-secure people may not (or, at least, I did not) conceptualize hunger in the same way that the underprivileged do. The former asks, what will I eat, while the latter may simply ask, will I eat?

Our relationship with hunger, as people in a predominantly food-secure society is, perhaps, muted in a sense. Hunger is something that rolls around at certain times of the day, and is an annoyance. And, there’s often an easy fix – food is everywhere, really. For others, it is a material challenge; a choice between eating and paying rent; a constant reminder of their place within the system. 

 So, what’s the prescription? Systems thinking. It’s active cognizance of our place within the food system. It’s asking ourselves questions like, why am I eating – and am I hungry? It’s thinking about how our consumption might affect those around the world. Maybe most of all, it’s thinking about how what we consume when hungry might affect the hunger of producers of what we eat.

 

 

Photo via

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican.com%2Farticle%2Fscience-of-snacks-thinking-makes-you-hungry%2F&psig=AOvVaw3v2IG9R1FdkJSuXqwcn7kS&ust=1588554437219000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCND99MzAlukCFQAAAAAdAAAAABBO