For much of my professional life, I have enjoyed the privilege of writing about hunger. What it means to say hungry kids can’t learn… how efficient Grandmothers stretch a single chicken into a week’s worth of nutritious meals… why it is that almost half of those relying on food pantries are working people.
But, until this week of my I-won’t-say-how-long life, I had never really experienced hunger.
Okay, sometimes my meals might be later than my stomach expects or appreciates. But I had never really missed one.
So when a medical test required me to avoid solid food and milk for 42 interminable hours, I found myself in a surreal world — slogging to round-about destinations, off balance, out-of-focus and obsessed about ingesting and digesting. People noticed that my blonde moments seemed more like hours. My propensity for clumsiness left telltales on my hallways. My olfactory and sight nerves doggedly pursued every smell and image of great, or even not-so-great, cuisine.
My admitting that I did not enjoy temporary famine would be akin to Ryan Braun or A-Rod suggesting they might not have been entirely truthful about taking performance-enhancing drugs. No amount of banana popsicles or lemon-lime Jell-O could dull the sharp-edged sword in my stomach – and yet I had both along with chicken broth and Gatorade galore.
And I woke up the morning after my test to indulge in my daily dose of two over-easy eggs, English muffin, blueberries and milk. I’ve since snacked on awesome chocolate chip cookies and nibbled a handful of those tasty veggie strips. Sometime this week, my niece and I will celebrate her birthday/new job at the much beloved Cap City Diner where I will order off menu and devour the best tilapia salad ever.
My pain was temporary. But about a third of the kids living in my very same County likely endure what professionals call “food insecurity” more often, in fact frequently. Talk to some of our school principals. They tell us about fifth graders who quietly admit they don’t have enough to eat and kids who beg for lunch even when they arrive too late for cafeteria hours. Listen to parents who lower their eyes when they quietly share that they just can’t swing rent, gas, utilities and groceries every month.
I will gladly continue to help tell their stories, should I be given more chances to do so. But never without remembering – through a tiny first-hand lens – what it means to truly be hungry.
