This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

• How much you need to eat depends on a variety of factors including how active you are, how tall you are, your body build, and whether or not you are male or female.

• Intuitive eating offers a framework and strategies for getting in touch with your body’s sense of hunger and fullness and really enjoying what you eat.

• It’s essentially that you respect and care for your body and your mind by attending to what and how much you eat without viewing food as a source of stress.

“As food increasingly disappeared from shops, market stalls, and restaurants, wartime shortages badly affected city life. By 1917, most Prague residents struggled to obtain basic food items; the city and its inhabitants were cold, due to coal shortages, and dirty, through lack of soap. The state’s rationing system proved insufficient to cover the needs of the population, leading to the blossoming of a black market. Discrepancies in access to food shaped new divisions. Prague was ‘ruralized’ as people grew vegetables in allotments and on balconies. Hungry city-dwellers went on trips to the countryside to purchase food. This new reliance on farmers subverted social hierarchies. An antagonism grew between Prague and the countryside, undermining the unity of the Czech nation. The association ‘The Czech Heart’ attempted to heal the rift by sending hungry Prague children to better-fed villages. Food provision shifted legitimacy away from the Austrian state to national organizations.”

Our step-by-step clinician guide continues with Session 2 – the Eats! a fun exploration of the sensations that constitute hunger, fullness, thirst, and utter deliciousness! Every session from this one forward begins with a Henry Heartbeat investigation, which helps children (a) expend their energy so that they can focus on the remainder of the session, and (b) become comfortable and proficient with raising and lowering arousal, a foundation of self-awareness and emotion regulation. The ritual of homework review is introduced: new things learned about the body between sessions are added to the Body Map. Children meet new characters including Georgia the Gut Growler, Solomon Satisfied, and Umm-ma Una. Children and parents conduct investigations such as learning to sense their changing energy from food as they eat, whether food tastes more delicious if you eat it slowly – and more. A body wisdom might be: “your body tells you how much energy you need if you learn to listen.” Following Body Brainstorms, families begin the first two steps of the Body Clues Worksheet to practice monitoring what they are feeling and what their bodies might be communicating. With worksheets, workbooks, and coloring pages, the investigators are off to explore the week ahead!

Tens of thousands of European ‘intellectuals’ faced starvation by 1920 and Vienna was the epicentre for international humanitarian aid. This chapter focuses on how the feeding of intellectuals was organized by a range of humanitarian organizations in this period. The most striking example of this was the phenomenon of the ‘intellectual kitchen’, a site where intellectuals were fed away from the wider populations of their towns and cities. The chapter explores the mechanics of food and clothes aid, and argues that issues of class, gender, and race shaped the status of the ‘intellectual’ for humanitarian organizations as well as aid workers.

This chapter begins in Paris in 1919, a year in which prognostications of the collapse of civilization became widespread. By the end of that year, the largely imagined crisis of civilization had become a tangible one; the ongoing conflicts in central and eastern Europe presented a material threat to the lives of intellectuals and institutions, reports of soaring prices and starvation in central and eastern Europe became widespread, and the spectre of Bolshevism threatened the new democratic order. The chapter explores how intellectual reconstruction was framed – but mostly not acted upon – at the Paris Peace Conference and that it was not until early 1920 that intellectual humanitarianism began to take shape.

Easily overlooked desires and pleasures are also central to the project of Chapter 2, which argues that literary obscenity can be constituted by suggestion and desire, rather than explicit sex. Beginning with the Ulysses trials, obscenity law has conflated obscenity with pornography and opposed it to literary value. By this logic, the category of obscenity contains only those works that employ direct and explicit depiction of certain body parts and actions to incite a prurient response, excluding work that mingles the erotic with the aesthetic, or operates via indirect means. Going against this scholarly and popular convention, this chapter recuperates the category of the obscene by centering appetite, rather than explicitness. Turning to the twin appetites, “Hunger and Lust,” that give the chapter its title, it locates obscenity in writing that allows transgressive or excessive desire to dictate its form, inviting readerly complicity and arousing readers’ own appetites. Juxtaposing texts by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, this account of obscenity reminds us of literature’s power to unsettle our understanding of desire itself.

Chapter Six focuses on T-Bone Slim (real name Matti Valentinepoika Huhta), a second-generation Finnish-American hobo who became the IWW’s most popular and influential writer. In hisnewspaper columns and songs, Slim represented the hobo not only as a worker, as Anderson had, but also as the revolutionary vanguard of a post-capitalist society. He parodies mainstream and conservative ideas about work, hobos, and the working class more generally. He challenges the common stereotype of hobos and tramps as being unintelligent through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience. He uses puns, neologisms and dynamic wordplay to involve his readers in the process of making meaning. In doing so, he creates a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic, and which in turn allows him to challenge mainstream understandings of literary success. The chapter shows how Slim brings his body and the bodies of his working-class readers into his writing by representing hunger as a defining class experience.

This chapter centres on Macau’s experience from the occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941 until the end of the war in September 1945, when the enclave became the last foreign-ruled territory in China to remain unoccupied by Japan. It argues that collaboration through compliance was a way of avoiding occupation. In this period, the practice of neutrality in Macau reached a peak of ambiguity. It was marked by the interplay of different forces and important new players competing for political legitimacy, economic control and social influence. These included Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Wang Jingwei’s Reorganised National Government, Portuguese colonial authorities, Japanese military forces and local elites.

From Antiquity through contemporary times, depriving populations of access to food, water and other means to sustain life has been a central tool of genocide. The deliberate withholding or destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population can be used to pursue policies that systematically target groups with an impact equal to, and potentially even more widespread than, acts of killing. However, the acts that produce and sustain starvation are treated as lesser crimes than killing. When described as famine, these calamities are often presented as natural or unintentional crises of hunger or low nutrition. Drawing on historical examples that range from ancient Carthage, colonial famines, the Nazi Hungerplan, Communist agricultural and political policies, manipulation of humanitarian aid during the war in Bosnia, and genocides in the 21st century, this chapter considers the complications of assessing intent and formulating responses to mass starvation. It offers a wide-ranging overview of the critical concepts, legal developments, and key issues at stake when deliberate deprivation is imposed on a people as part of genocidal policies.

This chapter lays out key questions and concepts in the book. It discusses the author’s concept, the atrocity of hunger, the intentional starvation of a group through the denial of access to food, and it includes more than just the embodied experience of starvation: the physical and mental suffering that humans undergo due to the physiological effects of starvation, as well as the transformation and breakdown of families, communities, and individuals whose lives and core beliefs are shaped by starvation. It is also the process as experienced by individuals, households, and communities as they move from food insecurity to a state of starvation. It outlines that the coping mechanisms employed by the Jews during this experience provide a window into their everyday life during the Holocaust. This chapter lays out the role of food access as a key factor of survival and frames this question squarely within the framework of genocidal famine. It lays out the differences between the three cities under consideration: Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow.

This chapter discusses the daily experience of hunger in the ghettos. It explores the myriad of coping mechanisms employed by those in the ghetto to combat hunger. This chapter discusses how individuals, families, and communities sought to increase the amount of food available. It discusses the sale of assets to obtain food and the preparation and consumption of hunger foods. This chapter reviews ways in which hunger drove individuals to behave in ways that challenged their core beliefs in terms of how they behaved, what they were willing to eat, and how they interacted with one another.

Hunger is an embodied experience which impacts the physical and mental state. This chapter explores the impact of starvation. The physical effects of starvation on the body are wasting, swelling (edema), susceptibility to disease, and eventually death. The mental effects of starvation include behavioral changes, food obsession, and irritability. All of these were observed by individuals in the ghetto who recorded this as diarists or in some cases physicians studying the impact of the lack of food on their patients. This also chapter explores food fantasy resulting from hunger and humor which arose in response to food deprivation.

The German invasion and early occupation of Poland drained the resources of Jews and their communities even before ghettoization. On the individual and household levels, many Jews were severely impacted by the German seizure of their assets, the inability to work, and the requirement to expend limited resources even before ghettoization in order to provide food for themselves and their families as a result of these financial realities. Violence during the early occupation also could serve to pauperize a family through seizing, killing, or severely injuring a key family member on whom the household relied for support through work. Migration due to the war also sometimes served to sever social networks or access to assets as well as diminish social standing which endangered some individuals and families. The pressures placed on individuals and households left them more vulnerable to hunger and starvation. At the very point at which individuals and households were most in need of support, communities faced multiple challenges. These included an influx of refugees, seizure of community resources, and the flight of communal leadership during the occupation.