H u n g r y a t Hack l e y
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here’s never a shortage of food on the Hilltop. Students can grab plate after plate of lunch, and can choose from a wide variety of items on Hackley’s changing menu. The Tuck’s colorful candy display is open every day for a cheap dessert (or breakfast), and at every meeting, art opening, coffeehouse, and athletic assembly, there is an impressive spread snacks, free of charge. While the large quantity of delicious food at Hackley is great preparation for students to manage the college cafeteria, it makes it hard to keep in touch with how the rest of the world eats.
Photo: The Dial
A child dies from hunger or preventable disease almost every three seconds, which means, if there are about 1000 students, faculty and staff in the Lower, Middle, and Upper schools, the number of children who die from hunger each day is equivalent to 30 Hackleys. Even in North America, one of the richest continents on the planet, 4% of the population is hungry, and in this modern age, malnourishment has taken a new and more prevalent form: obesity. Although obese people appear well-fed, they tend to eat cheaper, more processed foods that are high in fat and low in nutrients. The United Nations has declared hunger a priority, but obesity as another major concern, for these two seemingly opposite conditions are plaguing nations simultaneously.
class sat only in chairs, drank water, and ate a small serving of macaroni and cheese with a spoon, while the upper class was served a full-course meal with lemonade, pizza, salad, and cake. After a brief presentation about world hunger, the students ate, and so played out an incredibly accurate microcosm of the inequalities and class dynamics in the world, complete with begging, stealing, and, in the case of the 5th and 6th graders, a revolution, when the lower class rose up to storm the upper class table.
Hunger is one of the world’s most dire yet most solvable problems. The world produces enough food for all its inhabitants, even with increased population, but hunger prevails for a number of reasons: both food and oil (needed to produce and manufacture fertilizer) have grown more expensive; global warming has made harvest patterns unpredictable; food aid programs are lacking in most countries; and increased meat consumption has wasted a lot of resources fattening livestock, since seven pounds of grain is needed for every pound of meat produced. All of these causes can be combated by donating to food banks, eating less meat, going green, and visiting websites like www.FreeRice.com, where sponsors will donate rice to U.N. aid programs for correctly answered trivia questions.
When I met with all the middle school students the following day, they seemed to have learned not only the causes of hunger and ways they could help, but they also enlightened me with their thoughts and observations about the “hunger banquet.” Said one student assigned to the upper class, “I knew there would be a revolt. As the wave of kids approached….I recognized them as the IRS, trying to get their fair share. If [your food] was stolen, you were evicted.” “Orange, Green, Blue,” mused sixth grader Phebe du Pont regarding the colors of the paper slips picked from the bowl, “it was all luck.” Other students made comparisons to communism and the French Revolution, but most came to one conclusion, aptly summed up by sixth grader Ryan Walker: “When I was fed [the] small portion of food that the lower class ate, I was really hungry. To know that people feel that way and, in some cases, worse is sad. Everywhere people are dying of starvation and people should do something about it.”
Back in April, the students in Hackley’s middle school learned these facts about hunger in a slide show presentation that I did for my senior project, but nothing could have prepared them for what they experienced a few days later, when middle school students were told to line up in front of Allen Hall for their lunchtime. The students were then instructed to pick a piece of colored paper randomly from a bowl upon entering the room, each color paper representing a social class (upper, middle, or lower), and according to his or her class, each student was fed and seated differently.
Long after the hunger banquet, when I walked through the middle school, students would ask me follow-up questions, or tell me how many grains of rice they donated through FreeRice. com. If other middle school students are anywhere as compassionate or intelligent as those I met at Hackley, then I don’t expect world hunger to remain a problem in the future, when this capable and enthusiastic generation will inherits the world.
The lower class (60% of the kids) sat on the floor and ate only a small portion of macaroni with their hands. The middle
—Avery Trufelman ’09 10