In college, my roommate Diego and I saved up a quarter of a dollar each week to indulge in “Pan de Abuela,” a slice of bread with sugar, three types of cheese, and milk. I lived with Diego at a Pension, a family house where you pay for a room and three meals. I had no muscle and weighed 56 kg at 1.77 meters (5′8) for most college. Diego was around 110 kg at 1.86 meters (6′1). For breakfast, we both received one saltine and a sliver of jam.
I don’t know about him, but knowing I would eat Pan de Abuela at the end of the week felt like a reward for pulling through another week of saltines.
I sometimes had more money to buy food because I charged my classmates to do their microeconomics and finance homework. With this income, I purchased non-organic eggs from (un)happy hens but rarely got vegetables, fruits, or supplements. While I wished to eat more, I wished to eat more of the better food everyone else ate.
Indian-American Economist Abhijit Banerjee has studied the investments in food that poor people make on different budgets. In India, he observed that despite having higher incomes in the 2000s, poor people ate less food than those in the 1980s. Food prices declined between these decades relative to other goods in rural and urban areas. Why didn’t they eat more calories if they had more money? Didn’t they want a taste of satiety? Had they grown accustomed to the rumble?
Growing up, I asked questions similar to the ones above, following the logic of my (middle-class family’s) social status. I didn’t understand why poor people got on a two-year payment plan for a sound woofer instead of saving or why they ate steak at the mall while I ate at McDonald’s. I didn’t understand poor people are also people. They want and deserve to enjoy life. In college, I knew the benefits of a well-balanced diet. I trusted nutritionists’ advice, and sometimes I wished I were bigger. However, I got a Pan de Abuela to feel, even for a few bites, that I, too, deserved what the upper classes saw as frivolous.
Knut Hamsun’s Hunger explores the dehumanizing effects of extreme poverty. The novel’s protagonist doesn’t simply struggle to survive but battles to maintain his sense of self-worth:
“Whatever was the reason that things would not brighten up for me? Was I not just as much entitled to live as anyone else? Had I not two shoulders like a giant and two strong hands to work with? And had I not, in sooth, even applied for a place as a wood chopper in Möllergaden to earn my daily bread? Was I lazy? Had I not applied for situations, attended lectures, written articles, and worked day and night like a man possessed? I could not understand the whole thing; not a bit of it.”
The longer the protagonist experiences deprivation, the more he wonders why the Lord’s hand seems to be turned against him. Why was he the subject of the Creator’s experiment? Whoever was above seemed to pass over every other human on Earth and draft him for this challenge. The thought of all the beauty in the world hidden in a slice of bread seems idiotic, but it lent a sense of self-worth that I lost with every barely jammy saltine.
The abstract, distant, and theoretical understanding of people different than us often makes us forget they are people, too. Poverty is not always about hunger but finding anything to brighten the next day. Banerjee says that for 21 cents PPP a day, someone from the Philippines could afford a 2,400-calorie diet, accessible to poor people making 99 cents PPP a day. The catch is that you could only eat eggs and bananas. The cost on one’s self-worth of such a diet is too high, and, like many, I was unwilling to pay for it when I could afford tastier food.
Banerjee never advocates for this diet. I only bring up his calculations to remind myself how I’ve read mathematical solutions to multifaceted human problems and thought, “That should do it.”
Imagine living as one of the billions of people with $3.20 PPP or less per day, and a middle or upper-class person tells you that if you save 25 cents each week, you will have $13 by the end of the year. And how, if you invest the earnings in the S&P 500 over 20 years, you will have $50.31 because of compound interest.
The most polite answer is to remain silent and get a Pan de Abuela.
I upvoted because I liked the story, but this feels like a pretty glaring strawman of “mathematical solutions to multifaceted human problems”. I can’t imagine any reasonable solution/intervention to which this critique would apply.
Executive summary: The author reflects on their experience with poverty and the dehumanizing effects it has on people’s sense of self-worth, highlighting that the poor also deserve to enjoy life and that purely mathematical solutions often fail to address the multifaceted nature of human problems.
Key points:
The author shares personal experiences of living in poverty during college, saving money to indulge in small pleasures like “Pan de Abuela.”
Poor people’s food choices are not solely based on caloric intake but also on the desire to enjoy life and maintain self-worth.
The novel “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun explores the dehumanizing effects of extreme poverty and the struggle to maintain self-worth.
Abstract and theoretical understanding of people in poverty often leads to forgetting that they are human beings with complex needs and desires.
Mathematical solutions to poverty, such as suggesting a diet of only eggs and bananas or investing small savings, fail to address the multifaceted nature of the problem and can be perceived as insensitive.
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