Hunger Pangs

I arrived in Washington, D.C. hungry for excitement. But soon enough, my hunger materialized quite differently.

Equipped with a government internship, a new grey suit, and $30 a week for groceries, my enthusiasm faltered as I did the math for the first time. Subtracting the cost of the occasional, obligatory lunch with colleagues or friends, the grocery budget was closer to $21, a mere dollar per meal.

My trifecta: bread, peanut butter and rice.

The way I looked at food changed radically. Rather than accounting for taste, I analyzed everything in terms of potential cost versus potential fullness. That jar of jelly? Like eating money—better stick to plain peanut butter. Go to the gym? Might make me hungrier afterwards. I even opted out of the house meal budget so as not to waste my small savings on luxuries like spices and meat. Frozen meals were for the well-heeled and well-fed. Finding a granola bar in my suitcase was an occasion for outright celebration.

Meanwhile, friends in other places sent long e-mails about their culinary adventures in Manhattan and abroad: the French bakeries, the exotic cheeses, the alcohol.

My own version of fine cuisine consisted in a second dinner. By “second dinner” I mean that one of the housemates had bought a loaf of French bread and left half of it out on the counter until it had hardened to a level where any reasonable person would throw it away. Naturally, I swooped in to keep good food from being wasted, warmed it in the oven, and proceeded to devour it with poverty’s best companion, peanut butter. This tasteless, crumbly bonus meal gave me such a sense of satisfaction that the bread’s original owner became concerned.

It wasn’t always this way. Before I came to Washington, D.C., the last time I made rice was part of a last-ditch effort to practice with chopsticks before a second date in Chinatown. Now I found myself scraping every last grain out of my Tupperware and thinking longingly of all the food I have sent half-eaten down the tunnel to Lowell.

At Harvard, where free food is the social lubricant of choice and cracklin’ oat bran is more plentiful than North Face jackets, it’s virtually impossible to keep from being full. The meal plan ensures—or, more accurately, mandates—that we always have food on our plates. Like twelve-year-olds at summer camp, we may not relish what the dining hall is serving up, but we never have to ponder when—or how—we’ll get our next meal.

Food, like so much else at Harvard, simply isn’t something we have to worry about. The system in place to keep us well-fed and happy easily masks the situation that most people in the world—and many in this country—face. Hunger is thus an abstract concept, not a daily reality. We think nothing of wine and brie, and, somewhere along the way without realizing it, we begin to assume that we will enjoy these things for the rest of our lives; that to refrain would be strange and maybe even shameful.

If nothing else, my foray into less-than-fine dining revealed that the insulation Harvard provides between us and the rest of the world is as thin as the peanut butter I’ve been spreading, and for that I am grateful.

A taste of hunger, after all, is always only one meal away.

Allison A. Frost ’08, a Crimson news editor, is an English and American literature and language and comparative study of religion concentrator in Winthrop House. Thanks to the Center for Public Interest Careers, she can now pay for jelly.