Epilogue
What is Hunger?
Ukraine: A father is shot dead because he chooses to feed himself and his daughter rather than to surrender all of his crop to the government.
Uganda: A mother kneels on the dirt floor, begging God to no longer let her and her son be met with the misery of hunger.
Ireland: A traveler is denied food by an old woman who tells him that all the members of her family are being lost to starvation, one by one.
Philippines: A man in a hunger camp is told that there is no more food left to feed them, they must feed themselves.
Ethiopia: A woman is sprawled across the floor of an intensive care center, wailing, shrieking, howling for her daughter who has died from malnutrition.
India: A mother who can no longer feed her son clings onto the vendor as she begs him to sell milk to her even though she is 10 rupees short.
This is Hunger.
Here, we do not tell the tales of individual men and women, but instead the tales of humanities’ past, present, and future. Hunger seems to be stubbornly intertwined with our fates, intractably entangled within the convoluted yarns of history, time, and age. As history can attest, the causes for Hunger are always a combination of both natural and human behavior. At the same time, the impacts of Hunger are always groundbreaking, extending over society, politics, economy, health, agriculture, and beyond. This age we live in is marked by Hunger, but so has been every other age. So here, you see, we do not tell the tales of individual men and women of our time. We tell a tale as old as time. We tell the tale of humankind.
Hunger is an incurable disease, an incorrigible wrong, an unbeatable foe. But fortunately, the human body is persistent, the human spirit is resilient, and the human race is resistant. It has survived millions of years of Hunger and it can survive millions more. But eventually, with cooperation between the general public and national governments, with adoption of new policies and techniques, humanity will be able to conquer Hunger like how it has conquered any other adversary. For as long as it strives to make the world a better place and itself a better race, it will continue to challenge Hunger with all its courage, battle Hunger with all its might, and fight Hunger with everything it’s got. And eventually, humanity will succeed. We believe it. Do you?