ABSTRACT
We have travelled a long way from hunger understood as the conscious surface of biological need or the conscious correlate of a gap between the state of the organism and a state that is more compatible with continuing existence. Unlike animals, we eat not only to feed our bodies but also in response to psychological and social hungers that may be as compelling as the biological archetype. In this chapter, we shall travel much further in this direction and readers may need reassurance that the author has not lost the plot. My defence for what follows is that the history of humanity is that of a gradual loss of a biologically prescribed plot. e latter will reassert itself under conditions of severe privation: primary hunger returns and the secondary accretions, elaborations and perversions and the metaphorical and proxy expressions of hunger take a back seat. But even then, as it returns with sharpened teeth, it does not do so in the guise of pure physiological need, as we noted when we refl ected on Levi’s account of the hungry in Auschwitz. Under the ordinary circumstances of life as it is enjoyed in the West, however, the biological story will remain muffl ed and new stories of new hungers emerge.
