ON HUNGER
Hunger, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary
a craving or urgent need for food or a specific nutrient
an uneasy sensation occasioned by the lack of food
a weakened condition brought about by prolonged lack of food
a strong desire
To help my daughters decide what they want to eat, I run through a few questions with them sometimes. Do you want something hot or cold? Crunchy or smooth? Sweet or savory?
Hirschmann points out that satisfying hunger is a two-step process. First, you need to know what the physical sensation of hunger feels like. Second, you need to match that sensation with the specific food that will satisfy it. If what you want is a warm runny egg on avocado toast, a kale salad or a bowl of ice cream won’t truly satiate you. The second step is far harder than the first.
This experiment has got me thinking. How linked are our desire to know what we want to eat, and our desire to know what we want in life? While the questions may be different: Do I want something quiet and still, like reading, or loud and energetic, like dancing? Is it not the same skill?
A few years ago, I attended a conference given by Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist with decades of experience working with children and parents. Raising healthy girls was her topic, and I was riveted.
I snapped this photo here after she spoke because it was such a poignant summary of the crux of her argument. If you ask an eight-year-old girl for her opinion, she will begin her sentence with “I think”. If you ask an eleven-year-old girl the same question, you will often hear, “I don’t know.” By the time a girl is fifteen, her response is usually, “Like, whatever, you know.”
Ms Steiner-Adair’s clinical observations resonated deeply with me personally. As a teenage girl in a group of teenage girls, decision making was nearly impossible. No one wanted to be responsible for a decision if it was a bad one. Or so I thought. But what if it was actually bigger than that? What had we intuited from the society around us? That we did not deserve to have an opinion? Were not capable of having an opinion? Or were we simply not given enough opportunity to practice making them? I don’t know that answer.
I do believe that if you do not practice choosing what to eat, then you cannot learn what satisfies your hunger. If you do not practice making decisions about what you want to do on a Saturday night, then how equipped can you be to make choices with heftier consequences, like what you want to study or if you want to have children?
Lucky for me, it seems my Middlest has figured it out, as evidenced by the note I woke up to recently.
Listen to your hunger, Mom
Hunger does have two definitions, after all.