this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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It's not a famine and fortunately no one is calling it that here. What it is, is "food insecurity".
Eating healthy is already something that most humans don't manage to do. Even those with money. After all humans are wired to love sugar and avoid work and cooking is work. If I had a penny for every time thought to myself "fuck being healthy" and then ate something, I could solve food insecurity. And I'm not even overweight, so probably mere average in that sort of irrationality.
Adding monetary constraints makes good food choices even less likely. And to make maters there's also a bunch of other issues that arise people who have to worry about getting enough food. That type of stress is very much not healthy.
With your attitude, you could just go into a drug den and tell everyone there that all they have to do is "say no". Sure, technically it's correct, but reality doesn't work that way.
Reality is that feeding people is fairly cheap option to curb social programs.
Yes, your point is that "hunger" should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.
I think that's a sophisticated re-rendering, and that most ordinary folks do associate the word "hunger" with famine, with starving, with terrible deprivation. Which is a real situation in a handful of desperate places in the world. I don't think we should be conflating these two problems. One of them is far more urgent than the other.
I see this as just another instance of disingenuously sensationalist language and I would prefer people used the correct terms for what they are in fact talking about.
For the underlying substance, I agree with you and all the other censorious downvoters. I am just concerned about vocabulary and manipulation.
I'm saying that it simply isn't well defined. There's a reason we have terms like "malnurished" or "undernourished". Your definition is only as narrow in certain contexts, e.g. "world hunger". I personally wouldn't use the word in the context of first-world issues either, but that's because it's ambiguous, not because it's wrong.
So if "malnourished" is better, as you imply, let's use that instead. The issue is not hunger by any non-academic definition of the word.
You've made your case. Mine is that this is a clear example of sensationalist lexical inflation. Like calling everyone right of center a Nazi, it is intended to provoke engagement and emotion rather than to describe a fact.
I agree with you on the fact that this inflation is a problem. I just think that we need to avoid inflation in terms of complaining about it as well. As it stands now anything that's at least not contradicting the dictionary is tolerable in my opinion. Well, at least on social media. In academia your approach is obviously best.