Introduction: Hunger and Waste.

Abstract

Introduction:Hunger and Waste Isabelle Meuret (bio) Hunger is a physiological disposition, a quotidian preoccupation, and a metaphor for desire. On another scale, global hunger—leading to malnutrition and starvation—affects hundreds of millions living in poverty-stricken, famine-devastated, and war-ravaged areas.1 As for waste, the dearth, careless use, or squandering of resources, together with climate change and other environmental challenges, have raised new concerns about food supplies and unequal access. The Covid crisis has aggravated such situations, pushing further away a now unattainable "Zero Hunger" horizon initially planned for 2030 by world agencies.2 Food banks have reappeared during the pandemic in otherwise wealthy countries, with many struggling to provide for their families. Official reports show that the dire combination of the three Cs—Covid, conflict, climate—is resulting in soaring death tolls attributable to hunger.3 Writing from the heart of Europe, where, terrifyingly, another outrageous conflict is raging, with anguished and famished people on the roads, I, like others, inevitably got distracted from academic matters. Compiling this volume, however, is not a vain effort. Hopefully, it is an invitation to ponder the fateful circumstances and consequences of war, imprisonment, oppression, and deprivation—of which hunger and waste derive, not just in the West, but across continents, where populations are forcibly displaced or unjustly targeted. Refugees, exiled, disadvantaged, and marginalized, are particularly vulnerable to hunger. Those in affluent societies deemed destitute or negligible are wasting away in what philosopher Achille Mbembe calls death-worlds.4 Pushed against the wall of their existences, "disposable" people are sacrificed so that others may live and thrive. In No Friend but the Mountains, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani provides a damning account of his imprisonment on Manus Island, a detention center set up by the Australian government where [End Page 29] asylum-seekers are left to rot. "Starvation is such a powerful force. It pervades everything," he observes while at sea, fleeing his homeland, "[b]lacking out from hunger . . . famished . . . dazed with hunger."5 Hunger is torture, not just during his frightening odyssey, but also at the compound, where it is used to control the inmates. Hunger annihilates him physically and mentally. A desperate soul, he feels and sees his "whole body as a skeleton . . . left wandering," nearing madness:6 Trying to understand the conditions of micro-control and macro-control /Trying to understand the perpetual flux of everything /Trying to avoid tipping over the edge /Trying to avoid tipping into insanity.7 Boochani's writing is a testament to the ordeals endured by him and his companions in misfortune. His is the voice of the "living-dead" resisting oblivion, fighting for recognition.8 While not self-imposed hunger, Boochani's predicament is enlightened by Maud Ellmann's demonstration, in The Hunger Artists, that there exists "a complicity between the themes of hunger, writing, and imprisonment."9 Hunger strikers strive to deliver a message and convey meaning to the destructive process of oppressive regimes. Said differently, "the wordless testimony of the famished flesh" acquires signification only once a "statement" vindicates self-starvation.10 Emaciation is mesmerizing; it awaits an explanation, hopefully an action. Starvation calls for a literal and legal sentence; it summons a reckoning. Vanishing bodies produce texts to shake us out of our indifference. By the same token, Boochani, a food-deprived detainee, smuggled his words out of an offshore processing facility using clandestine mobile phones, to disclose hidden secrets and inconvenient truths. "Being so hungry, completely starving, one loses sight," Boochani confesses.11 Conversely, his dazzling prose and poetry documents his incarceration and opens our eyes to crimes against humanity. Likewise, albeit in a different context, harrowing dispatches are now reaching us from Europe's breadbasket, under siege. Through the monitoring of cross-border assistance that brings food and medicines to the besieged, voices erupt: "Are Ukrainians so dispensable to the rest of the world?"12 Waste means refuse, garbage, filth. A whole literature is devoted to waste as a planetary emergency.13 Environmental degradation wrecks bodies in need of urgent biomedical responses. The waste paradigm extends from trash to recycling, from litter to resources. Noxious garbage in overflowing landfills sickens neighboring residents, affecting [End Page...