True hunger

An article " came out a " couple of " weeks ago about hunger in the Philippines, and about how our country apparently suffers from a lack of resources when it comes to feeding our people. Another part of that article was about President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and how she, too, misses out on meals, sometimes. I guess this is true; she is President after all, and her job entails long hours not allowing her enough time to eat.

I’m moved by this because I’m not the President, but sometimes all I do is eat. Man, I love food. I never miss out on meals, and I have extra ones in between. Right now I’m having a ham and cheese sandwich and a Coke. My philosophy is: "If you’re hungry, don’t hesitate to raid the pantry." I am well aware that many of our impoverished brothers and sisters may not have the means to live by this motto, and this makes me sad. But not sad enough to stop eating and go on a hunger strike or something like that. In many ways, the physical hunger, the hunger that begins in the stomach, is the starting point of a greater kind of hunger. That’s why I can’t, and won’t, not eat.

With nothing in your stomach, you feel sluggish, things move at a snail’s pace, and everything just becomes harder to do. This is a no-brainer because food provides energy and without it, one’s body can’t work at an optimum level. Even more so, the brain cannot function at its best without food; and when the control center of anything isn’t working properly, everything else suffers. Then the cycle just starts all over again.

What begins as a pang in a hungry individual’s stomach hastens and intensifies the hunger/frustration/pain of an empty brain. Some of the greatest thinkers went on fasts and things like that when they were looking for "the answer," or whatever. I’m sure they saw visions, but that was probably because they were just really hungry and were beginning to hallucinate. It frightens me to think that, while in such deep thought, with nothing in one’s stomach, the brain starts to feed on itself for nourishment so that it can survive another day (if it actually happens like that.)

But going back to the Philippines and knowing that many of our people suffer from hunger just concretizes this theory even more. Those who experience a severe lack of food don’t only suffer from hunger pains, but they suffer from hungry minds as well. That’s an even greater hunger, and possibly an even more painful one.

It’s not fair at the most basic levels of humanity because living isn’t just satisfying the physical, but also the mental and the spiritual. Who knows, some really poor, really hungry dude may be on the verge of discovering a groundbreaking cure or has the perfect mathematical solution to addressing the local economic deficit, but he has nothing to fuel his mind with to allow him to actually gather those thoughts into a single coherent idea.

It’s a waste, really, to think that potentially great thoughts go down the drain from an inability to provide food and nourishment, basic human necessities.

I remember a short film that I watched once at an IndieBenilde film fest. The story revolved around an impoverished family experiencing hunger and a lack of food. It all seemed pretty much the same to me: hungry family, "mahirap lang kami," all of that clichéd material used to touch the audience and make us feel sorry, blah, blah, blah. It all seemed pretty routine but towards the climax of the film, things started to get really screwed up. The father in the story buys a really nice dinner for his family, food they have never even dreamed of eating. He even buys juice. Next thing you know, the kids and his wife collapse, are writhing in pain on the ground, and are frothing at the mouth. He poisoned the juice. He just wanted them to have a nice last meal; some sort of last supper.

I didn’t particularly like the film but it affected me on different levels. Film is supposed to be a simulation of life as we know it. It is putting mimetic and kinetic elements together to recreate real-life events. It really bothers me to think that this could have already happened somewhere to some family. A father may have really poisoned his family to put them out of their misery. And at the same time, who can blame him? They were suffering. At least he gave them a taste of good food at the very end. Considering that this situation could be true, it troubles me even more now to think that this "great idea" was born out of hunger as well. Could that man’s brain have been that fried from being just too hungry that he would go to those lengths and actually do something like that? Is this a great idea common in the minds of all poor and hungry fathers? Is it common to think like that with such a hungry train of thought?

I guess this is the complexity of being human. It could be a curse as well. We are a combination of animal and god. The human experience cannot be explained through the carnal or the spiritual alone. On the one hand, we require physical nourishment. We need food, shelter, and other things that keep us going from day to day. On the other hand, we need another totally different kind of sustenance, something that allows us to exercise our reason, our free will; something that allows us to look past just existing now, and more like existing for eternity.

I think food plays an essential role in quenching both kinds of hunger and is a key to making the rift between the physical and spiritual aspects of being human a bit smaller.

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E-mail me at enricomiguelsubido@yahoo.com.