Reflection
The churning belly
Not every belly is lucky to be fed
Hello everyone, This is kallol on the other side. I hope you know today is my birthday. I thought today shall be a great time to write something interesting, its a special occassion. Throughout my life, I have been deeply affected by the theme of hunger. Being from India and surrounding with too many eyes looking and yearning for food, I could see what food meant for people.
Its not a recent phenomenon, throughout ages in history food was always a determining factor to win wars, to create a utopia of privilege, it was also a differentiating agent in one’s range of emotions and their ability or rather inability to feel them in extremities.
It was happiness yet a pall of sadness for a lot of people. But the truth however today is despite all the deeper layers you want to unfurl of the embedded food politics, despite all the tomtomming about equity, development and emphasis on nutritional availability, more than a billion people sleep hungry today. And when we move deeper into this story it is marred with conspiracy theories, entrenching commercial capitalism and an incessent levels of inhumanity among people that forces a 10th of humanity to sleep with their bellies empty today.
What its like to remain hungry?
Hunger is not just a state of depravity and emptiness, its the feeling that stimulates a sentiment germinating from your inability to indulge in an emotional release. Throughout the progression of human society and psychology, food has been an indulgent to us in not just in our required states, but also an expression of our choices, a momentary sense of peace comes around when you can swirl your tongue around something that you like to eat.
Throughout human history and its experience with countless conflicts we have this unwritten yet followed contract that the state needs to treat everyone equally, at least try, pretend to meet needs of everyone and be accountable to everyone especially in their actions to guarantee personal freedom, rights and provide the masses with a life of dignity and pivotale repute. The question is, has the world institutions managed to achieve that goal?
Building a nutritionless world
Hunger is not just a living breathing status quoist existence inside a dynamic world, but also a peril created by mechanization of agriculture oriented mindsets that have made the art of growing food a commercialized affair. The mechanistic reduction as renowned seed activist Vandana Shiva puts it is a narrative of ‘oneness vs 1%’ entrenched deeper into minds of people by normalizing behaviors of supplementing quantity over quality. Its 1%’s fascinations and utopia against a large clustered units of entities that is incorporating tomorrow’s oneness.
The coming of GMOs, the ownership of large acres of lands and the violence and poison that agricultural lands have been subjected to through scientific exploitation is challenging the biological mutational strength of the soil ecosystem. The HYV seeds creation often gets challenged by herbs and pests that sees the unabashed mutiliation of destruction of not only soil fertility but also shrinking nutritional space in surface area of a crop grown for food. When you challenge the ability of pests and organisms to mutate no matter how many poison you create they will evolve out of it.
The very structure of how we assumed what food is, has to do with such flawed idea of growing crops that are bleeding our soil and running our rivers dry.
Deception of manifestation of nutrition
Food as much as it provides a temporal relief to our emotional upheveals, it also decieves in telling us about its exact nutrition. The kind of cheap processed garbage, redundant crap that is available often ends up as saturated fats inside your body. High and heavy doses of sugar processed material is conveniently now comfort food. This is rather a sad state of affairs how food is being transformed into a psychotropic drug induced substance that people consume it like there is no tomorrow.
The very once noble idea of Mukbangs that came around in South Korea that assisted in connecting with a long distance companion to interact with while having food after a hard day at work has become a projection of satiation through food. The unnecessary rush in eating, creating drama of being satisfied through food has many problems in its nascent projection.
The first issue relates to health as vast amounts of such food is processed, and the second issue is the complete aloofness of reality some of these mukbangers have in regards to the availability of food in general to the entire world at large. Because the way they eat is not a reflection of something bad on themselves but rather an indication of how cultloose they are with the real world.
Skeletons of the past
Coming from a post colonial world I know hunger has had many influences on my world, our communities; there were literally recurring famines planned and done by British to save grains for the world war while Indians lay with their stomachs bloated and open, gutted due to malnutrition and hunger in Calcutta streets. And this is not the Indian experience only, this has happened in many parts of the world, even in Europe like the Irish famine that was engineered again by the British. Hunger shows you the worst of humanity, it’s an experience of constant humiliation and losing grip on your sanity every passing day.
Despite all of this, its another saddening fact that developing world take it so lightly, with many even going so far as to question the real meaning of ‘hunger’.
Many nations under alliance of corrupt GMOs feed substandard crap as food in school meal programmes and they believe that will cure hunger. Only good food and its accessiblity can tackle the issue of hunger, nothing else can.
I have seen the hungry.
Their eyes glisten,
mouth smelling off plaques.
For its never the belly that requires food.
Its the mind and the transmitters that fire
hard and fast, creating an illusion of a high
Of a gone deadmen
who is waiting to die soon.
His sense of peace
and every breath that he takes
makes his stomach churn
and intestines crawl
drying in due process and burning
waiting again and again for something
to enter, or provide
some much needed nourishment,
or just have something before they enter into
the vortex of darkness seeping inside their bodies.
Hello everyone! I hope you are all doing alright. Finally, I was able to enrol in the Medium Partner Programme and thanks to you all for your constant support in this endeavour of mine, without your support reaching this stage wouldn’t be possible.
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