The fog of hunger

Photo by Constantine Manos/Magnum Photos Here is something we have never quite said out loud: for a significant portion of the world’s women, hunger is not a temporary state. It is a cognitive condition. It flows beneath everything: the meeting, the conversation, the stream of thought that almost ran its course before something more insistent pulled it back.

For many of us, the state of hunger was present since we were old enough to understand that our bodies were under review. I was sitting beside a swimming pool that summer, the one before middle school started, trying to follow a conversation I kept losing. I had decided, with the particular certainty children sometimes develop about the rules of the world they are entering, that I would eat as little as possible before sixth grade.

The plan involved a sleeve of SnackWell’s cookies per day: fat-free, engineered to taste like cardboard, manufactured specifically for women and girls who had been told that fat was the enemy and desire was something to be managed rather than answered. The SnackWell’s cookie was itself a cultural artefact, a product designed to help women comply with an instruction they had already internalised. It did not quiet the hunger, because hunger is not a preference.

It is biology doing what biology does when a body is not fed, sending signals that push everything else aside. During the day, we swam, lay on the concrete, and talked about the coming year. My attention kept sliding away from the conversation.

A thought would begin and dissolve into the same insistent loop: how long until dinner, how little I could manage when it arrived, whether anyone had noticed what my body was doing without my permission. I remember listening to a teammate tell a long story and realising I had not heard most of it. Something louder had taken the space the story needed.

By the end of the week, my swimsuit hung loose at the shoulders. On the first day back at school, a friend’s mother stopped at the sight of me, looked me over the way you assess a renovation that has come out well, and said I had a ‘new figure’. She said it warmly, the way adults hand children gifts.