“Politics”, describes how hunger artists became a trending issue for the morality and politics of industrial societies of the late nineteenth century. Their controversial performances challenged hygiene policies, issues of individual and social discipline, and added new factors to be considered by social reformers. Since hunger artists entered the popular culture of their time, their ‘heroic’ stories contributed towards the debate on the possibility of human beings living with less food, so the social conditions of wellbeing and health, especially for the working class, could be revisited. Public fasting became a sort of physical prowess, a metaphor of self-discipline, a commodity to be bought and sold in the logic of the industrial capitalist society, at the same time, opening the door to a more popular, eclectic medicine that challenged academic authority and established power. Equally, despite the global nature of the land of the hunger artists, these popular, controversial performances became a tool of national pride or national humiliation. Hunger artists played a role in standardisation processes of the calories required to properly feed the citizens of the nation. They evoked the health, resilience, and discipline of the average citizen as a key agent in the making of the modern nation, as a future, collective project.

This chapter examines the neurobehavioural impacts in adults of both starvation (food restriction/cessation) and energy restriction for life extension. Section 8.2 covers animals, finding that restriction causes hippocampal damage and stress responses. Section 8.3 covers humans. Short-term fasting (<1 week) has limited cognitive effects, primarily increasing attention to food. Long-term fasting (weeks-to-years) has been studied naturalistically (e.g., famines, hunger strikes) and in the lab (e.g., Minnesota starvation study). Findings are convergent, with dramatic increases in appetite, low mood and egocentricity. The neural basis of these effects can be studied indirectly in people with anorexia nervosa, although this is complicated by pre-existing brain changes that may dispose to this disease. The impacts of cachexia and aging are also examined, alongside the longer-term impacts of food restriction post-recovery. Part three examines the animal and human energy restriction literature. While lifespan extension can occur in small mammals, the evidence in primates and humans for beneficial effects is equivocal.

Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng clashed on how to handle the student protests, with Zhao arguing for a more open press and for democratic and legal solutions. Students declared a hunger strike shortly before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Beijing. Millions of Beijing residents hit the streets to support the hunger strikers. Deng Xiaoping decided to impose martial law. When Zhao Ziyang refused to implement martial law, Deng decided to replace Zhao as general secretary with Shanghai Party secretary Jiang Zemin.

Matters of cultivation, cuisine, and alimentary carnality constitute the very marrow of the material, aesthetic, and ethical cultures of empire and of postcoloniality; No history of modern empire can be thought without passing through the mouth, or through the question of consumption in general. This chapter showcases the alimentary longings, primarily but not solely for spices, sugar, and tea, that drove colonial expansion across the world, and the transformation of metropolitan palates and meals that resulted from this expansion. It examines the dialectic between metropolitan appetite and the production of deprivation in the colony, focusing in particular on slave hunger in plantations and on recurrent famine as one of the features of colonial rule and the market-driven order it institutes. It underlines the significance of hunger as a still resonant form of anti-imperial protest. Above all, it parses the ways in which postcolonial writers mobilize an ecology of alimentation to speak to experiences of colonialism, decolonisation, postcoloniality, and late capitalist globalisation.