Althouse: "I always have food with me. It comforts me. In restaurants, when people order food — and they have menus

October 8, 2015

"I always have food with me. It comforts me. In restaurants, when people order food — and they have menus — I hate that."

"Just give me something to eat. Quantity matters, not quality. In North Korea I thought a frozen potato was the fanciest food in the world.... I feel guilty... I never dreamed this life. I did not know this life was coming...."

29 comments:

traditionalguy said...: Weight Watcher has met its match. This Nork guy knows the value of all FOOD.; 10/8/15, 11:05 AM
Ann Althouse said...: The quote is from a woman... who has a very sad story to tell.; 10/8/15, 11:09 AM
Wince said...: Socialism. Kind of put the whole "War on Women" thing in perspective.; 10/8/15, 11:14 AM
MadisonMan said...: Ok ok ok -- I've reserved the book at the library.

I think it'll be a compelling read, too. Am looking forward to it.; 10/8/15, 11:22 AM
YoungHegelian said...: I used to work with a Lithuanian woman whose grandmother lived through Stalin's famine in what was then part of the Ukraine. The grandmother & her family survived because they had a pear orchard, and they lived off the pears. After that, she always kept a 100 lb bag of flour in her house.

I have, by the grace of God, never been hungry. But, in all the history I've read on famine, natural & man-made, the survivors all say the same thing: when you're starving, food is the only thing you think about. Finding food consumes your every waking moment. This woman's "food anxiety" is par for the course for those who have survived starvation.; 10/8/15, 11:33 AM
Just asking questions (Jaq) said...: Imagine no possessions... It's easy if you try.; 10/8/15, 11:37 AM
Static Ping said...: In the book The Blind Side: Evolution of the Game, there's a scene where Michael Oher's adoptive family discovers that Michael had been hoarding food in his room. His upbringing in Memphis was horrific and he had a similar food issue. The Tuohys had to explain to him that they owned the Taco Bell franchise he was visiting and he could get all the food he wanted, whenever he wanted it, for free.

It's not just North Korea. The safety net in the United States should have made hunger a non-issue for Michael, but with a drug-addicted mother and an absent father he was not being cared for properly.

Our society has forgotten the potential horrors of life and has become obsessed with stupid things like microaggressions and eliminating tiny amounts of risk. One ignores the bottom of the Maslow Hierarchy at their own peril.; 10/8/15, 11:56 AM
clint said...: That's why they bring you bread and butter while they make your food.

More relevantly: Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick is sitting in my To-Be-Read pile as we speak. It compiles the stories of a number of escapees/defectors, and came highly recommended by a favorite author of mine.; 10/8/15, 12:04 PM
Rick said...: clint said...
More relevantly: Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

I've read it. It's good, but short and thus leaves open the possibility things generally weren't as bad as the specifics. Of course the lack of information is largely because NK is so totalitarian the stories can't get out and often die with the victims.

The book included many sad stories dealing with the 90s famine. But one after-effect was that people congratulated each other when a family member died as it meant the survivor could eat all their scrounged food instead of sharing. Imagine.; 10/8/15, 12:24 PM
trumpintroublenow said...: Looked at images. She has a great sense of fashion

Question -- which candidate has the best N Korea policy and what is it?; 10/8/15, 12:25 PM
traditionalguy said...: When the guys call her up and ask if she wants to go out for dinner and a movie, and she says yes provided that the movie is Babette's Feast and they go eat again after the show.

She is easy.; 10/8/15, 12:59 PM
rehajm said...: Park has rubbed elbows with Hillary Clinton

While expected for the author to believe this is the woman's most significant accomplishment I wonder if Hill's pantsuits make the woman experience flashbacks of N. Korea?; 10/8/15, 1:26 PM
Lyle Sanford, RMT said...: reminds me of Clavell - wrote King Rat and Shogun - was a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII - suffered great hunger and in an interview somewhere talked about always having rice and sardines with him so he'd never go hungry again; 10/8/15, 2:31 PM
Etienne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 10/8/15, 2:37 PM
Hagar said...: An estimated 40 million people died aa a result of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," and it was not even intentional. Just nobody, not even Deng, had the guts to go up to him and tell him, "Hey, Big Guy, you're fucking up again!"; 10/8/15, 3:05 PM
Wilbur said...: When I was in college I worked in the cafeteria dish room of the dorm where I first lived. Min wage but I could eat for free and the food was good.

The man who loaded up the giant Hobart dishwasher was a 50-ish man from Peru named Tino. We became friends and he asked me to save the (uneaten or partially uneaten) hamburger patties that came through the conveyor tray line. I said sure, why? He said he took them home for his dog, Sarge.

Until he later proudly showed me a picture of his dog I was never sure the meat was for Sarge.; 10/8/15, 3:08 PM
Be said...: Thank you for posting this; I look forward to finding her book. Wonder how it would work, being read back to back with Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."; 10/8/15, 3:12 PM
Fred Drinkwater said...: I've never known a North Korean, but I knew and know many survivors of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Almost all bear obvious psychic scars. Some are seriously neurotic about things like food and hoarding random stuff. A reasonable place to start reading is "Red Scarf Girl", but unlike the NK situation, there are many many published descriptions.; 10/8/15, 5:03 PM
Craig Landon said...: Every widespread famine I've ever read about included cannibalism and mental derangement in addition to the physical effects. I don't know about China, but it certainly occurred as recently as the Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.; 10/8/15, 5:24 PM
Humperdink said...: Over the span of several years, we have had several pairs of female Russian school teachers stay with my spouse and I. I would make them breakfast each morning while they would watch. One morning, I scorched the toast and proceeded to deposit said toast in the trash. The elder teacher proceeded to chastise me for wasting food. I told her I would not serve her burnt food and sheepishly asked what she would do with it. Her response: "we would put it in soup".; 10/8/15, 6:46 PM
BN said...: Starvation is the meaning of life, and the law of the universe. Since the beginning of human time, suffering and hunger has been a constant condition for most. Not all, of course. The rich have always been with us.

A few hundred years ago, something happened to change all that for great swaths of the (mainly western) world. What was it? Now it's been spread to more and more parts. What changed? Probably doesn't matter. At any rate, we are fat and happy now. And we forget what others go through.

Meanwhile, I've been reading about revolution lately. French, Russian, Chinese, Vietnam, Cambodian, and others. Starvation is almost always a tool in war, especially civil war (e.g., the seige of Vicksburg). We best be careful. The way we're going, our rhetoric, our vehemence, our vitriol...

Things take a long time to fall apart, but then it happens "all of a sudden." (I think that's a paraphrase of Fitzgerald IIRC, for anyone who might care).; 10/8/15, 7:29 PM
Drago said...: Craig Landon: " I don't know about China, but it certainly occurred as recently as the Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s"

As Cook or ARM will tell you, Stalin was forced to starve his people due to the long history of western colonialism in "insert geo-location here".; 10/8/15, 8:10 PM
Achilles said...: Utopia exists.; 10/9/15, 1:55 AM
Achilles said...: tim in vermont said...
"Imagine no possessions... It's easy if you try."

Thank you for posting this. There is not a more evil song ever written.; 10/9/15, 1:57 AM
Hagar said...: Cannibalism occurred on a large scale in China during and after the "Great Leap Forward," 1956 - 64. Being China, families would trade children or elderly, so that they would not have to eat their own relatives.; 10/9/15, 6:58 AM
Rusty said...: When people mention Bernie Sanders it reminds me of how Venezuela has to import oil. And I can't help but wonder at the stupidity of the American left.

By all means vote for Bernie, but let me stock up on toilet paper first.; 10/9/15, 7:36 AM
Hagar said...: And like I said above, it was not even intentional. Mao thought that if he just wished it hard enough, it would work, and be a great good for China. And nobody stepped up to tell him, no, it was not working, so it went on until it finally got through to Mao himself that he had made a great mistake.; 10/9/15, 7:39 AM
Robert Cook said...: "There is not a more evil song ever written."

Hahahaha! Only to people too stupid or intent on willfully misunderstanding the song to think so. There aren't too many of those around, as most get the song as a fairly standard ode to the dream of peace and harmony among all people, a peace and harmony only possible once conflict over ideological differences and greed for power and wealth are no longer intrinsic to humanity. (In other words, it will never be, but is the wistful "imagining" of someone sensibly repelled by humanity's baseness and brutality.)

That the writer of the song was himself wealthy and bedeviled with personal failings seems to be the "gotcha!" that those who misrepresent the song fasten onto to paint it as hypocritical or otherwise objectionable, but, of course, every artist is human, which is to say: flawed. There are artists who depict violence and degradation and artists who depict heroism and idealism; it should be obvious few artists are as awful as their worst imaginings, and fewer still as unblemished as their most exalted paeans to peace and love.; 10/9/15, 7:57 AM
Larry J said...: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

- Robert Heinlein

Very applicable with the left's ongoing demonization of the "1%".

I knew a man who was imprisoned in Buchenwald in 1944. He was a Southern Baptist from Arkansas who had the misfortune of being captured by the Gestapo when his bomber was shot down. His weight dropped to 90 pounds. A Luftwaffe officer got him and the other allied airmen (approximately 180 of them) transferred to Stalag Luft III, saving their lives*. His description of the transfer was "it was like going from Hell to Heaven." The other Stalag Luft III POWs didn't exactly see it that way but they didn't have his perspective.

*One of the men, a P-47 pilot named Lt. L.C. Beck from Huntington Beach, CA, was too sick to move. He died in Buchenwald.; 10/9/15, 8:53 AM