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Eating for Starving Kids

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When I was a kid, it was “Eat your vegetables. Think of all the starving kids in India.” (I never really understood the connection. My response was, “Then send the vegetables I don’t eat to those starving children.” But I digress. . .)

Really?? Wow, some experiences do translate across cultures and oceans. I was also exhorted to eat (not vegetables because there were only potatoes and cucumbers, but to eat, period) in the name of the starving kids. My “starving kids” were never in India, though. They were in Africa and the US.

Did you have this experience? Where were your “starving kids” from?

23 responses to “Eating for Starving Kids”

  1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
    J. Otto Pohl

    For me it was Cambodia which really was suffering a mass famine at the time under the Communist Khmer Rouge. Here I tell people to eat all their food because there are hungry children in America. 😎

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      In the USSR, we pretended that Cambodia didn’t exist.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        And obviously, in Ukraine these imaginary kids from Africa or the USA were a sort of a code for what was really motivating the food anxiety of the older generation: Holodomor.

        But imagine somebody mentioning that aloud.

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      2. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
        J. Otto Pohl

        Really? In the 1980s I remember a lot of Soviet propaganda supporting the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia when they overthrew the Khmer Rouge. It was the crux of the Sino-Soviet conflict during that decade. Maybe it was all for external consumption.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Yes, what was said internally and externally differed a lot very often.

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      3. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
        J. Otto Pohl

        During the 1980s there was a massive famine in Ethiopia that took place for many of the same reasons as the Holodomor. The Communist government forcibly collectivized agriculture, deported “kulaks” to special settlements, and sought to remove food from territories inhabited by ethnic groups hostile to continued rule by the dominant Amhara. While unlike the USSR in 32-33 Addis admitted there was a famine and accepted food aid, the regime made sure none of the aid went to people living where there were guerrillas fighting against them. A lot of the food aid was resold by the Ethiopian government.

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      4. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
        J. Otto Pohl

        When I lived in Kyrgyzstan and taught students whose families had all grown up in the USSR I once taught a politics of genocide course. I was only allowed to teach it once by the administration despite its immense popularity among the students. Here is what I wrote about their reaction to the section on Cambodia.

        http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2009/03/cambodia.html

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  2. ladyleahjane Avatar
    ladyleahjane

    For me, there were no “starving kids in [country]”, I was simply told when I didn’t want to eat whatever was prepared “Well, lucky for you, there’s two choices for dinner tonight: Take it, or leave it.”

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      ““Well, lucky for you, there’s two choices for dinner tonight: Take it, or leave it.”

      – At least, there was a sense of humor present. 🙂 I never heard this before.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    I was mostly a food vacuum so I didn’t get that treatment much. But I remember in the culture in general hearing about European refugees (I think the idea was post WWII), India and the Armenians(!)

    I did have a few food dislikes but it wasn’t an issue that came up much (except for my father’s occasional misguided attempts to cook for us (he knew how to cook really well but often wildly misjudged what 10 year olds could be persuaded to eat).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      In the USSR, the “black” people (meaning people from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc.) were associated with bountiful food because people of these nationalities were the ones who sold beautiful fruit and vegetables in the market-places for ridiculously high prices. I think they were allowed to do that, in part, because this was a way to foment ethnic hatred among different groups of people.

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      1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
        J. Otto Pohl

        It was also because these republics had a lot more local support and tolerance for gray and black markets including growing food on the private kitchen plots allowed to kolkhozniki for sale in the markets zoned for this purpose. All three of these nationalities, but especially Georgians had a reputation for creating a vast parallel underground economy with the approval of republican authorities. One of the absurdities of Soviet economics is that it was actually profitable for Georgians to grow vegetables in Georgia on a small plot of land allowed for private use during time they were supposed to be working on the kolkhoz and fly to Moscow during the weekends to sell this produce. Even including the necessary bribes to not actually work on the kolkhoz and get plane tickets, the demand for fresh vegetables was high enough that they could command high prices for them. Add to this that Soviet air travel was very heavily subsidized in terms of price and the gray market vegetable sellers from the Caucasus could do quite well.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          “One of the absurdities of Soviet economics is that it was actually profitable for Georgians to grow vegetables in Georgia on a small plot of land allowed for private use during time they were supposed to be working on the kolkhoz and fly to Moscow during the weekends to sell this produce.”

          – Exactly! And imagine how Ukrainian country-side people felt, seeing that they couldn’t grow their own stuff and had to buy, say, apples from a dark-skinned person with an accent. All this did was cultivate hatred.

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  4. Stille (@aperfectbalance) Avatar
    Stille (@aperfectbalance)

    My starving kids were Somalian.

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  5. Pika Avatar
    Pika

    Mine were also in Africa.

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    1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
      J. Otto Pohl

      We have plenty of food here in Africa.

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  6. Z Avatar
    Z

    Starving children were in Belgium.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Why Belgium??

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      1. Z Avatar
        Z

        In WWI they had famine and nearly starved to death. They import most of their food and none of it could get in because of the war. This is anachronistic for me, I know, but that did not stop my relatives!

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  7. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    Luckily for you, you’ve never had fried kapenta, or North Korean samp, with the weavils seived out when they float to the surface of the boiling water.

    http://www.zimbokitchen.com/pan-fried-matemba-kapenta-with-onion/

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samp

    That was eating BY starving kids

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    1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
      J. Otto Pohl

      I have heard of starving Armenians in this context referring to the WWI genocide in the Ottoman Empire, but never Belgium. But, it may very well have been karma for the fact the Belgians murdered more people in Congo than the Nazis killed in Poland, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States, France, Holland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway combined. Had Hitler not invaded the USSR all of the people killed by the Nazis including almost the entire the Jewish population of Poland and Hungary would still be less than the number of Africans murdered by tiny Belgium.

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  8. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    My mother never exhorted me and my brother to eat for starving children.She wouldn’t have bothered saying that. It was either “Because I said so” or “It’s good for you.”
    She might have altered food a bit for my brother, but she never forced him or me to because when she did, it backfired.(I fell asleep once with food she shoved in my mouth. My brother was a puker when he was young.) It probably helped that mealtime was mealtime, period.Also when we visited my grandparents, I saw children begging almost every day.

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  9. David Bellamy Avatar
    David Bellamy

    Mine were in Europe after the Second World War.

    It occurs to me that “eating for starving kids” has a lot in common syntactically with “fucking for virginity.”

    The parallel is deeper than it might appear. If a child puts food on her or his plate and does not eat it, it is thrown away; at least it was when I was a child. This requires the parent to buy more food later than would otherwise have been necessary. This in turn reduces the global food supply, thereby exacerbating the shortages facing hungry children elsewhere. This economic effect is very small and very much delayed.

    Similarly, as St. Augustine argued, fucking is justified since it leads to the birth of virgins.

    Both these arguments are hilarious beyond imagination, IMO.

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