What exactly is hunger?

Then hunger is ceaseless discomfort, weakness, and pain. The term as used here means a continuous lack of the nutrients necessary to achieve and maintain optimum health, well-being, and protection from disease.

Everyone knows the feeling of hunger as the urge to eat that signals the time for the next meal. But many know hunger as a constant companion because that meal does not follow. People who live with hunger may simply have too little food to eat, or may not choose enough nutritious foods from those available. One form of hunger is a "choice they are forced to make" and the other is a "choice they freely make". To say this, though, is to fail to describe the depth of the experience of living without food.

The following excerpt from a writer in India describes hunger in more personal terms:

For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, waking and sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is a knawing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment's respite even while you know and fear the sequel. Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible sickness assails you, and because you know this you try to avoid the thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs, and you try to rise and you cannot, or to swallow and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost.


With so many people suffering from this, why can't we do more?

The answer is we can do more, we just don't. There are so many things we can do to help like have food drives. Even if every person in the middle class and the upper classes give just one can that would help. I believe that the article is just giving us the information on the definition of hunger. Also it tells how we can help other.

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