– Gregory Ball
It’s happening in a neighborhood near you.
I grew up eating franks and beans, and wings and legs three different ways when chicken was on sale that week. I did not know my parents were stretching the food. They balanced the mashed potatoes with the meatloaf, the vegetables with whatever they could make last. I only knew that dinner felt full. It always felt like enough because they made it feel like enough. Love has a way of arranging a table so a child never sees what is missing.
When I look back on those meals, I can see them again with older eyes. What felt simple now carries a new weight. I can trace the quiet decisions my parents made, the soft resilience behind every serving, the way they tried to protect us from the arithmetic of scarcity.
And the truth is, families today are facing pressures far more punishing than the ones my parents faced. The cost of living has outpaced wages by a wide margin. Support systems that once buffered the hardest months have thinned. Even in our Commonwealth, and the Northeast in general, we have parents skipping meals so their children can eat. Elders counting quarters. Workers holding down two jobs and still coming up short. Housing prices swallowing entire paychecks before food even enters the picture. Public programs stretched thin from years of underinvestment. Food lines that snake around the block. And a culture that treats hunger as an individual failure instead of a shared responsibility.
But as Dr. Stacey Patton makes evident, chronic hunger in America is a tool, rooted in neuroscience and designed to keep people so depleted that they cannot resist. Mix that with an understanding of Adam Serwer’s observation that cruelty in American politics is often the feature, not the flaw, and things get a bit clearer. Starvation is part of the game plan.
History tells us how we got here. Dr. Patton traces a lineage of state-sanctioned hunger, from the Nazi “Hunger Plan” to colonial rationing schemes to Reconstruction-era labor laws that restricted food access to force Black workers back into exploitative labor. The tactic was simple: when people are hungry, they are easier to manage. They question less. They comply more. Serwer’s framing clarifies the logic. Cruelty is both a punishment and a way of communicating who has the right to move freely and who must live on their knees.
When the body is pushed into scarcity, the HPA axis fires nonstop, flooding the system with cortisol and narrowing a person’s thought process to immediate survival. Neuroscientists tell us that chronic stress impairs memory, decision-making, and emotional regulation. People aren’t just exhausted; they’re forced into a mode where strategic thinking becomes out of reach.
Research shows the impact does not stop with one generation. Stress and hunger leave biochemical signatures that alter how children grow, how families navigate the world, and how entire communities carry inherited trauma. Dr. Patton and Resmaa Menakem remind us that this is no mere metaphor. Trauma has echoes. It sits on the shelf deep in the library of your life, shaping how your body braces, how your mind interprets threat and how your spirit prepares for the world long before you have language for any of it.
That’s where the power of hunger becomes not just physiological, but political. A population stuck in survival mode cannot organize, cannot protest, and cannot imagine an alternative. When hunger becomes normalized, it becomes far more insidious. It teaches children to shrink their needs. It trains families to expect less. It conditions whole neighborhoods to move through life with a tightened jaw and a guarded heart. This is what generational hunger steals: not only meals, but imagination, stability and the basic belief that you are worthy of care.
We’ve seen these dynamics play out in Boston. Embrace’s Harm Report maps how centuries of policy design have disadvantaged Black Bostonians. Zoning laws and land-use patterns have quietly blocked major grocery chains from entering low-income areas. Business tax incentives lure supermarkets to wealthier zip codes while starving Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan of investment. Public transit decisions create “transportation deserts,” where getting to healthy food requires multiple buses or costly rideshares. Housing policies push families into neighborhoods with higher food prices and fewer options. Treating hunger as an individual failure does not just punish; it costs the city millions in avoidable healthcare expenses and the downstream effects of poverty-driven illness, as seen in statewide analyses of food access and health.
When so many people lack consistent access to nutritious food, the overall health of our economy and society declines; rates of preventable illness rise, and healthcare costs soar, driving up insurance premiums and increasing public spending for everyone. Schools and workplaces feel these effects too: children who come to class hungry fall behind, and parents have to miss work to care for sick kids, reducing productivity across industries.
Even businesses and those never at risk of hunger spend more. Higher prices, lost consumer spending, and less innovation are inevitable in an economy weighed down by inequality and poor health. Ultimately, widespread food insecurity weakens communities and economies, costing every citizen hundreds of dollars each year and limiting our collective potential.
And once the physical burden of hunger takes hold, communities become more vulnerable to psychological and cultural forms of control. The policing of Blackness in public spaces. The surge of “Karens” who weaponize fear. The trolling aimed at young Black leaders and HBCU students on campus. These are not random eruptions; they are performances meant to exhaust spirits already strained by deprivation. Serwer gave us the jewel on this already: cruelty is a signal. It tells people where they stand in America’s racial hierarchy and undermines their sense of belonging. It drains the energy that might otherwise go toward collective action or imagining something better.
That is why the shift happening among Black organizers, particularly Black women, in the wake of the presidential election matters so deeply. They are taking a much-needed break, stepping back from roles that demand self-sacrifice and rejecting the machinery of depletion. They remind us that our bodies are not public utilities for political exploitation and that rest is a tool of resistance, a declaration that being alive and whole is a right.
If we want a society that treats nourishment as a right, we need systems built on that premise. Cities like Denver and Los Angeles have piloted Guaranteed Basic Income programs that dramatically improved food security. Massachusetts’ universal school meals program eliminated lunch debt and gave students a stable foundation to learn without shame or hunger, as detailed in the state’s universal free meals reports. Trauma-informed public health models demonstrate what governance looks like when you treat residents as humans rather than problems to manage. These are not fantasies. They are blueprints. They echo the values Embrace lifts up: dignity, abundance, and a commitment to a future that honors seven generations.
Let’s challenge the policies that starve communities into obedience. Fund programs that feed families without conditions. Build a culture where every person has enough nourishment, time and freedom to dream.
And when we do, we will also be renewing our social contract, as a living agreement to care for one another. We will be rebuilding our empathy muscles that have atrophied in a culture of scarcity, choosing connection over suspicion and shared fate over zero-sum thinking. A nation that refuses to let anyone go hungry is a nation that remembers who we are to each other. That is the culture of care we deserve and the future we can choose to build together.