On Hunger

1. Hunger is a systematically produced technology of political and economic control

I call hunger a technology because I see a pattern repeating across different times and places in twentieth-century America: hunger is produced, on purpose, to get people (or animals) to do something.

A manufactured instrument. Hunger is not a natural disaster or an inevitable byproduct of market forces, but a deliberately designed technology of power. Throughout American history, state actors and private entities have systematically withheld, altered, or substituted food to enforce compliance, clear lands, and extract labor. This artificial scarcity operates as a default setting that quietly reinforces existing social hierarchies.

Three distinct modalities. The technology of hunger is deployed across three primary dimensions:

• Method: A standard laboratory tool used to motivate and modify specific behaviors.
• Weapon: A carceral and military instrument used to punish, control, or eliminate populations.
• Policy: Federal and institutional rules designed to make survival contingent on work or obedience.

Masking systemic violence. By framing hunger as an individual failure of willpower or bad luck, those in power mask structural coercion as personal autonomy. This ideological sleight of hand allows the state to blame the hungry for their own deprivation. Consequently, hunger remains a highly effective, normalized tool of racial and economic violence.

2. The "starving process" was a foundational tool of settler-colonialism and racial capitalism

It is necessary you should keep the Indian hungry if you wish him to do anything.

Settler-colonial elimination. In the nineteenth century, the US government and private settlers colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing by starvation. By systematically slaughtering millions of bison on the Plains and enclosing traditional hunting grounds, the military destroyed the autonomous subsistence of Indigenous peoples. This "starving process" forced Native nations to cede sacred treaty lands and relocate to reservations.

Coercive treaty signing. Once confined, Native populations faced a brutal choice between starvation and total cultural assimilation:

• The "Sell or Starve Act" of 1876 unconstitutionally seized the Black Hills by withholding rations.
• Rations were withheld from families who refused to send their children to boarding schools.
• Food distribution was made strictly conditional on agricultural labor and patriarchal family structures.

Reconstruction debt peonage. A parallel dynamic occurred in the post-Emancipation South, where white landowners used food advances to control newly freed Black laborers. By locking up crops and restricting access to subsistence gardens, planters forced freedpeople into perpetual debt. This "work or starve" contract system effectively replaced chattel slavery with indebted servitude, proving that the power to starve is the power to enslave.

3. Experimental psychology weaponized hunger to model behavior modification and motivation

The 'reward' was not one. Thorndike designed the cat's reward so as to maintain its hunger.

Founding the discipline. The entire field of experimental comparative psychology was built on the systematic starvation of animals. Edward Thorndike placed "utterly hungry" cats in puzzle boxes, using the smell of fish to drive random, frantic movements until they triggered an escape latch. This setup established the Laws of Effect and Exercise, which became the bedrock of modern American educational testing and behavioral modification.

Perpetual state of lack. To maintain experimental consistency, psychologists engineered a system of deferred gratification:

• Animals were given tiny food morsels (e.g., a quarter-cubic-centimeter of fish) that kept them hungry.
• John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner proved that animals could be tricked into working indefinitely on a promise of satisfaction.
• Robert Yerkes and John Dodson compared hunger to electric shocks, establishing optimal drive curves for learning.

Utilitarian social modeling. These laboratory setups were explicitly designed to model human classrooms and industrial workplaces. By treating the relief of hunger as a "reward," behaviorists naturalized a capitalist scarcity economy where workers must perform repetitive, instrumental labor for survival wages. The experimental animal, kept in a state of organized debility, became the prototype for the modern, compliant citizen.

4. Depression-era hunger marches reclaimed hunger as a collective political identity

The hunger marchers’ slogan 'Fight—Don’t Starve' linked together the biological time of hunger (starvation) and the historical time of class struggle (the fight).

Forging class consciousness. During the Great Depression, millions of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and miners recognized that their hunger was a product of historical exploitation rather than personal misfortune. Waiting in public relief lines and working for starvation wages enabled people to see the collectivity of their lives. Under the banner "Fight—Don’t Starve," a diverse coalition organized mass hunger marches to demand cash relief and unemployment insurance.

Extractive labor struggles. The fight against starvation was centered in highly exploitative, isolated industries:

• Appalachian coal operators paid miners in company scrip, forcing them into perpetual debt at company stores.
• Southern planters cut off food advances to force sharecroppers into low-wage sawmill labor.
• Red Cross and local charity boards allied with employers, denying food aid to striking workers to starve them into submission.

Depoliticizing through medicine. In response to this mass mobilization, President Herbert Hoover and conservative medical authorities tried to depoliticize hunger. They argued that malnutrition was caused by poor parenting and ignorance rather than poverty, using clinical definitions to invalidate the political claims of the poor. However, hunger marchers successfully weaponized their hungry bodies as physical evidence of capitalist violence.

5. Post-WWII food aid constructed "the hungry" as a passive, depoliticized population

The person who has been starved for long is a special kind of person, different from the ordinary patient or relief client back home as well as from you and me.

The starved personality. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and its allies established a vast global apparatus for hunger management. Drawing on the Minnesota Semistarvation Experiment, social scientists defined "the hungry" as a distinct, psychologically regressed type. Starvation was shown to cause infantile regression, apathy, and a breakdown of social ethics, rendering victims supposedly incapable of democratic self-government.

Food as a geopolitical lever. The United States leveraged international food aid to enforce its Cold War security objectives:

• "Surplus disposal" programs conditioned food aid on recipient nations adopting free-market reforms.
• Aid was used to pull nonaligned nations away from Soviet influence and enforce population control.
• Recipient countries were forced to industrialize their agriculture, buying American chemical inputs and hybrid seeds.

Pathologizing political protest. By framing hunger as a psychological pathology, Allied relief administrators dismissed political protests in refugee camps as childish tantrums. Hungry people who demanded autonomy or went on hunger strikes were treated as emotionally disturbed rather than politically engaged. This biopolitical framework established a global hierarchy, dividing the self-governing First World from the dependent, "underdeveloped" Third World.

6. The food industry engineered cravings, replacing bodily homeostasis with hedonic addiction

Psychologists can abandon the view that dietary need is essential for adequate motivation with food.

The myth of homeostasis. For decades, physiologists believed in the "wisdom of the body"—the idea that hunger is a homeostatic regulator that automatically balances energy needs. However, post-WWII military and corporate research shattered this model. Physiological psychologist Paul Thomas Young demonstrated that rats eat for sensory pleasure (palatability) rather than nutritional need, even when fully satiated and subjected to painful electric shocks.

Engineering the bliss point. Processed food corporations quickly commercialized this science of pleasure:

• Food scientists mapped "bliss points" to find the exact combinations of sugar, salt, and fat that maximize consumption.
• Products were designed to melt quickly in the mouth, bypassing the body's natural satiety signals.
• The sugar industry funded deceptive campaigns claiming sugar could "turn down your appestat" and aid weight loss.

Hunger as addiction. By locating "feeding centers" in the brain's hypothalamus, neurophysiologists redefined hunger as a chemical switch vulnerable to external manipulation. Cravings for hyperpalatable processed foods stimulate the same neural pathways as morphine addiction. Consequently, the modern food environment systematically produces hunger by design, trapping consumers in a cycle of metabolic deregulation and corporate dependency.

7. White supremacy weaponized food access to suppress civil rights and Black liberation

Down in Mississippi they are killing Negroes of all ages, on the installment plan, through starvation.

Economic ethnic cleansing. During the 1960s, white elites in the American South systematically used food as a weapon to crush the civil rights movement. As mechanical cotton pickers displaced Black laborers, landowners no longer needed their work and sought to drive them out of the region. When Black residents attempted to register to vote, county welfare boards and planters retaliated by cutting off access to federal surplus commodities and food stamps.

Black survival experiments. In response to this programmatic starvation, civil rights activists organized alternative, cooperative food networks:

• L. C. Dorsey and others founded the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative to grow food collectively.
• The Tufts-Delta Health Center prescribed food as medicine, bypassing corrupt local welfare boards.
• The Black Panther Party established Free Breakfast for Children programs to break the cycle of poverty and hunger.

The politics of malnutrition. When the Senate and national media "discovered" hunger in Mississippi, a fierce scientific debate erupted over how to define the crisis. Conservative experts tried to blame the symptoms of starvation on the "ignorance" and poor budgeting of Black mothers. However, civil rights workers and allied doctors insisted on diagnosing "starvation" rather than "malnutrition," exposing hunger as a deliberate, ongoing act of white supremacist violence.

8. Modern carceral systems use "nutritus" and food insecurity as tools of behavioral compliance

Raw starvation is not a major problem in U.S. prisons, but well-designed hunger is.

From grue to nutraloaf. While courts eventually ruled that starving prisoners on bread and water or "grue" was cruel and unusual, prisons adapted by designing a new form of hunger. Today, corrections departments serve "Nutraloaf"—a tasteless, blended paste of leftovers that meets basic caloric requirements but is completely unappetizing. Because it prevents measurable weight loss, courts routinely rule that Nutraloaf does not violate the Eighth Amendment, legitimizing nutritional torture.

The economy of nutritus. Carceral hunger is systematically produced through cheap, ultraprocessed food and captive markets:

• Private food contractors like Aramark spend less than a dollar per meal, serving soy fillers and mechanically separated meat.
• Menus are packed with cheap, high-calorie starches and cake to induce lethargy and docility.
• Incarcerated people must work for pennies an hour to afford basic, overpriced food supplements from private commissaries.

Extending carceral logic. This carceral food regime extends far beyond prison walls into poor communities of color. Punitive welfare reforms, such as lifetime SNAP bans for drug convictions, criminalize poverty and enforce systemic food insecurity. By replacing real nourishment with "nutritus"—edible detritus stamped with the imprimatur of "less than"—the state maintains a broader population in a state of organized debility and behavioral compliance.

9. Ozempic and GLP-1 drugs represent a pharmaceutical defense against capitalist overproduction

Can biological mechanisms or psychological processes be revealed that are strong enough to resist the political and economic forces of a capitalist system, which is the basis for the world’s business?

Surviving hyperconsumption. The global craze for Ozempic (semaglutide) highlights a profound shift in how we understand hunger, desire, and willpower. By mimicking gut peptides that signal fullness to the brain, Ozempic silences the constant "food noise" and intrusive cravings produced by a hyperpalatable food environment. For many users, the drug provides a freeing escape from the constant, exhausting work of resisting corporate-engineered food temptations.

Marxist pharmacology. Physiological psychologist John Blundell, who tested semaglutide for Novo Nordisk, framed the drug in surprisingly radical terms:

• Late capitalism overproduces hyperpalatable foods to expand markets and maximize corporate profits.
• This environment damages the human structure of desire, creating an unconscious, compulsive "wanting" independent of nutritional need.
• Ozempic acts as a biological shield, altering the structure of desire to help individuals resist capitalist overconsumption.

The cost of chemical compliance. However, this pharmaceutical solution internalizes the violence of the market, often replacing food cravings with severe nausea, vomiting, and self-starvation. Rather than holding food corporations responsible for making the population sick, the burden of regulation is shifted to the individual's wallet and gut. Ozempic ultimately commodifies the suppression of hunger, turning the refusal to consume into a multi-billion-dollar source of corporate profit.

10. Reclaiming gut feelings and mutual aid is essential to resisting the logics of hunger

Today, we are reclaiming the resources that are ours; resources we shouldn’t have to pay to access in the first place. Food insecurity is violence.

Student-led resistance. At the University of California, Riverside, and campuses across the nation, a quiet crisis of student food insecurity has sparked a new wave of hunger activism. Divested state funding and soaring living costs have left roughly half of UCR undergraduates hungry, forcing them to choose between rent, tuition, and eating. Rejecting the shame and stigma of poverty, students have taken up hunger as a collective political identity, staging strikes and liberating dining halls.

Countering carceral logics. To dismantle the systematic production of hunger, communities are organizing collective survival strategies:

• Student-run food pantries and community gardens provide fresh, sustainable alternatives to corporate food service.
• Mutual aid networks in prisons and poor neighborhoods share resources to ensure everyone's basic needs are met.
• Activists advocate for decolonizing diets, rejecting racist food shaming, and reclaiming ancestral foodways.

Listening to the gut. Resisting the logics of elimination, debt, and behavior control requires a radical restructuring of desire. By developing interoception—the skill of listening to how foods actually feel in our bodies—we can distinguish between corporate-engineered "wanting" and true, nourishing "liking." Reclaiming our gut feelings is not just an individual wellness practice, but a collective, revolutionary act of political and bodily liberation.