Sunday, September 04, 2011

On being hungry

The first symptom of what turned out to be GERD was a feeling of food being stuck on the back of my throat, which, over the next few days, quickly progressed to difficulty swallowing solid food. Food would simply take too long to pass through my esophagus, until I got to a point where I could only eat about a quarter cup of food and then had to wait a couple of hours for it to move down far enough to make room for more food. What with not being certain if it's a problem and then wanting to wait and see if it would go away by itself and then having a long weekend delay my initial doctor's appointment, I ended up spending over a week physically incapable of intaking anywhere near enough food.

And here's what I learned: being hungry makes me slow, stupid, and clumsy.

It took me about four or five days of not being able to get enough solid food down my throat to come up with the glaringly obvious idea of getting some liquid meal replacements. I read more slowly than usual, made more typos than usual, and often lost my place when proofreading. I spilled things on myself about three times as frequently, so that at any given time I'd have a wet spot or a stain on my shirt. I walked more slowly than usual. I got more easily distracted and frustrated by co-workers in other cubicles having ordinary conversations. I'd sometimes forget myself and scratch or pick my nose while in my cube or walking down the street where other people could see me.

Basically, I turned into one of the dumb kids in school. Not just the ones who got bad marks, but the ones who were slow and loud and messy and didn't follow instructions well and didn't listen to the teacher and did things like fall out of their chairs. The ones that my classmates, in the ignorance and cruelty of childhood and the language of the 80s, would have called "retards".

I've always been an A student, but if you took my hungry self and stuck her in school, she wouldn't have been able to achieve any better than a B if she's lucky. So what happens when you take an average student, someone less academically inclined, and send her to school hungry?

I've been doing my job with the benefit of sufficient caloric intake for 8 years, so I had a reputation for being competent at my job and not a total idiot in life in general, so a week of being slower than usual didn't do much harm. Plus I was having a clearly articulable, if then-undiagnosed, medical problem, so if anyone noticed I wasn't myself I could explain why. But what happens if people only ever see you when you're slower? What if this situation is baseline for you, so it never occurs to you that you could solve it with the input of more food?

Every once in a while, the idea is raised of schools providing breakfast so disadvantaged students don't have to go to class hungry. And one of the objections I always hear is parents talking about how their own kids sometimes just don't eat breakfast even though it's available at home, and complaining that all the food will end up going to non-disadvantaged kids who are just too lazy or spoiled to get up 15 minutes earlier and eat some oatmeal.

But based on this experience with undernourishment, and based on how it correlates with the traits of the kids who got labelled as stupid - and probably ended up thinking of themselves as stupid, because the whole time they were in school they were slower and clumsier and more easily distractable than everyone around them - I am absolutely certain that it's worth it to feed everyone who is interested so that those who are undernourised can be properly nourished. When I couldn't eat enough, my performance in all areas of life dropped a full letter grade. Imagine raising the most disadvantaged students' performance by a full letter grade with nothing more than a daily meal!

I don't have terribly high self-confidence, but I do have a certain sense of what I can do by virtue of the fact that I've always been an A student. Of course I can get into university! Of course I can do the next set of word problems in my math book! Of course I can read that great big long novel! But if this undernourishment had happened over a longer period of time when I was just starting school, my perception of my own capabilities would be a full letter grade lower as well. Instead of "Of course I can get into university!" it would be "Maybe I can get into university if I'm lucky." Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but imagine how it would play out at lower grade levels. "I'll never be able to read that book" could, with the simple application of food, turn into "I've never read a chapter book before, but it looks interesting so maybe I'll try." "I'll never get into university so there's no point in applying" could turn into "Maybe I'll apply and see if I get in anywhere." "I'll never be able to afford university" could turn into "Maybe I'll apply and see if I can get a scholarship."

I'd say those kinds of outcomes are certainly worth giving food to children even if they don't strictly need it.

5 comments:

laura k said...

Sharing everywhere.

Anonymous said...

For a long time I have thought that it would be a good idea to serve both breakfast and lunch to school children. I have seen some of the lunches the 'poorer' students would bring in and it was heart breaking. Most often it was those same children who would have 'problems'.

I don't have any ideas on HOW to make this happen but in a perfect world, it would.

laura k said...

I don't have any ideas on HOW to make this happen but in a perfect world, it would.

I do. But it requires a revolution.

Anonymous said...

When you do in-school meals, you need to make sure that they're done right. It's far, far, too easy for the administration to decide to contract out meal services. It's easy, the company ships in packaged "meals", and the school just needs someone to reheat them. It's not like the admin people are going to be the ones eating the cheap garbage.

A school would need space to prepare meals, staff members championing the project, and hopefully local involvement (fresh farmers market produce in season rather than low-quality stuff shipped in from a warehouse).

Fed Up With (school) Lunch is a blog by a school teacher and parent who was fed up with school lunches and committed to eating one every day and writing about it. There's also lots of information about how school meals can be done better.

Anonymous said...

And one of the objections I always hear is parents talking about how their own kids sometimes just don't eat breakfast even though it's available at home, and complaining that all the food will end up going to non-disadvantaged kids who are just too lazy or spoiled to get up 15 minutes earlier and eat some oatmeal.

Pardon my French, but so f______ what? This food we're talking about costs what? I recall being told once the school lunch program was created in large part as a place to dump surplus food anyway, as a favor to agribusiness. Like you said "feed anyone who's interested." Means tests are mean.