During the day, while I researched and wrote, I sometimes turned on the news to drown out his sobbing. Seth had often worked with MSNBC on in the background, and perhaps Haniya had goaded my imagination, but when I turned it on, Forrest would look around, as if expecting his father to come around the corner. He bawled to news of Senator Mackowski introducing a bill to phase out all food aid. “So we can encourage able-bodied adults all over the world to, simply put, grow more food and stop having so many children they cannot feed.”
The idea that the world’s governments should “let nature take its course” has become the catchphrase of the Right. Maximum cruelty is often how people attempt to exorcise their fear. We are currently experiencing hunger, heat, and refugee flows that are simply outside humanity’s experience—all in a globalized media environment where terror and panic boost advertising dollars and algorithms turn disinformation into currency. Yes, climate disruption has ransacked agricultural production, but actual starvation is being driven by zero-sum Malthusian politics. A great hoarding has erupted, driving great violence. Landless and unprotected, the famine refugee is uniquely susceptible to, for lack of a better word, extermination. The use of computation—Big Data, to borrow a pithy phrase—makes these cullings much easier propositions. Depictions of genocide in popular culture have tended toward the cartoonishly evil, likely in order to abrogate the viewer from thinking of him- or herself as a participant. This is a great disservice, for at its core the practice of genocide is about eliminating competition for one’s children. The globally wealthy believe that to continue their historic consumptive binge, they must deny others. This philosophy trickles down. It is becoming accepted wisdom that we will not all survive the crisis, and therefore the savvy will now entertain previously unthinkable agendas. Forgive me, Congresswoman, for I know you are a mother of four, but child-rearing, far from accessing a heretofore unrealized spiritual plane, devolves the parent into a selfish, habitual purveyor of violence against those children not his or her own. It is such a small step from believing one’s child is special to demanding the eradication of competitor children who would demand their fair share of noodles and broccoli. The unique sensation of loving a child is merely the selfish gene activating, guiding the parent toward discrimination, exploitation and, if necessary, mass murder. Genocides are committed by parents.
During that initial period of limited calories, Forrest and I were both exhausted all the time. He expressed this by screaming constantly day and night. He barely slept and when he woke, he would be hungrier and more furious than ever. His small eyes vanished into the pudge of his cheeks. His diaper needed changing less even though I continued to give him clean water regularly, a luxury many of the children who I saw in, say, Mali or Mumbai did not have. Nevertheless, he was dehydrated and constipated. His feces arrived in hard, small marbles, and he at least could express that his stomach hurt because when he looked at me he rubbed it like he was trying to scoop pain out of himself. I was also in a great deal of discomfort, especially after I allotted an additional one hundred calories to Forrest from my own daily allowance. I could at least suffer silently. The headaches and dizziness began immediately. I found myself lethargic, unable to work on the report for more than an hour before I had to lie down. If he needed affection, I would take Forrest and lay him on my chest while we watched the news. I wanted it to be clear to him that he was not being punished, that his remaining father would still show him all the necessary attention and affection, but we were simply in the same predicament as so many: hampered by a new and frightening scarcity of calories.
After nine days, he stopped crying. He was, it seemed, too tired. He looked at me instead with a mournful indifference. When I placed mashed bananas before him, he would still paw it hungrily into his mouth, but he seemed to already know this was all that would be forthcoming, and it only made him sad. His hair thinned, and I found the kinky strands in his bath and scattered in the crib. His skin, usually quite puffy and soft, now had a parched, dried consistency. He never smiled and his usual cooing and babbling ceased as well. Other than the occasional grunt or “Dada” he rarely made a sound.
Americans are unused to spending more than 15 percent of their income on food. Unpredictable social consequences will follow. Already, panic buying due to perceived shortages has led to riots in supermarkets, and the hacking and carjacking of trucks delivering food products is now rampant across American highways. Stories of the wealthy stockpiling food in specialized bunkers are not helping matters. According to Peter, many affluent individuals are buying “food redoubts”: huge storage facilities filled with nonperishable goods that can be loaded into armored trucks and delivered to them in case of emergency. Domestically, SNAP has been effectively gutted by congressional Republicans, and the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States now faces the threat of severe hunger, a famine being unfurled from within a wealthy polity by the politicians and provocateurs intent on sorting the worthy from the unworthy.
By the third week of our caloric limitation I’d finally finished my work on the draft white paper, a task that would normally have taken me eight to ten days. Every waking hour my stomach and head ached. Giving Forrest his bath one night, I asked him if he was hungry. He simply shook his head and continued to move a plastic boat in circles around the water. He’d eaten only a handful of Cheerios and a few strawberries that day. I considered giving him a portion of the beans I was to eat that night, but some ancient greed inside me kicked in, and I realized I did not care how hungry he was, I needed to eat those kidney beans. No longer was I just hungry—I was the state of hunger, and I could scarcely imagine being any other way ever again.
To summarize the white paper which I will soon deliver to your committee, if the United States is to avoid social chaos stemming from high food prices and growing famines, we must:
Deliver all 7 million tons of food to the UN World Food Programme, as is our responsibility.
Fully fund SNAP food assistance and expand it to households at 300 percent of the poverty line.
Begin a domestic and global campaign to reduce food waste.
Immediately pass a new law to curb speculation in the commodities markets. Institutional investors are exacerbating the problem by speculating on food staples, thus driving up prices for US consumers and starving the world’s poor.
Immediately end biofuel subsidies and divert that land to food production wherever possible. This is particularly vital in the case of corn ethanol, which has a negligible or net-negative impact on emissions.
Tax meat consumption. Two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is currently used for livestock. To not pay the true environmental cost of the meat and dairy in our diets is simply no longer viable, especially when it comes to dwindling water resources.
Do away with trade barriers and subsidies completely. We have a globalized food system and some nations will, environmentally, be better suited for growing than others. Food production is not like other consumer goods; it can be done more efficiently or less efficiently in certain regions, and we must use the planet’s land and water as wisely as possible. Protecting rural farmers out of nostalgia will always be as politically popular as it is foolhardy. The easiest solution is subsidy substitution: If land is no longer competitive to produce commercial food, governments must alter the subsidy to pay impacted farmers to steward water, soil, and biodiversity.