Cormac Ó Gráda - Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future

Eating People Is Wrong

Eating
People
Is Wrong,

and Other Essays on Famine,
Its Past, and Its Future

Cormac Grda

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grda, Cormac.

Eating people is wrong, and other essays on famine, its past, and its future / Cormac Grda.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-16535-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. FaminesHistory. I. Title.

HC79.F3O567 2015

363.809dc23

2014037905

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon Next Pro with Adobe Garamond display

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Do Dhiarmuid,
do Mhire,
agus dFhionn

Contents

Eating People Is Wrong

Introduction

No two famines are the same, yet, superficially at least, most have a lot in common. The usual symptoms might include high food prices beyond the reach of the poor; increases in evictions, and in crime and antisocial behavior; vagrancy and migration in search of employment and charity; rising unemployment; hunger-induced reductions in the birth and marriage rates; protests and resistance that give way to apathy and hopelessness as the crisis worsens; early philanthropic efforts that, in the more protracted crises, give way to donor fatigue; fear of, and lack of compassion towards, the victims; and, above all, increases in mortality from disease and starvation. There has probably never been a famine where a more caring ruling elite could not have saved more lives. But there are differences too. The context may be economic backwardness and crop failure, but the shortages of food or purchasing power that can lead to famine need not require a big harvest shortfall: war (Sancerre in central France in 157273, Leningrad in 194144, the western Netherlands in 194445) or human agency (the Soviet Union in 193133, North Korea in the mid-1990s) may be enough. Moreover, some famines last only a few months (Somalia in 201112, the Dutch Hongerwinter of 194445), while others straddle several years (Ireland in the late 1840s, China in 195961).

All famines bring out the best and the worst in people, and generate attitudes and actions that are difficult to pass judgment on. As the Russian literary scholar Dmitri Likhachov, who survived the blockade-famine of Leningrad during World War II, put it so eloquently: In the time of famine people revealed themselves, stripped themselves, freed themselves of all trumpery. Some turned out to be marvelous, incomparable heroes, othersscoundrels, villains, murderers, cannibals. The heavens were unfurled and in them God

In societies the world over, famines have laid bare the dark, ordinarily hidden side of human nature. In a Ukrainian village in 1933, children trying to survive on cookies made of frozen potatoes and on wild birds and their eggs dismissed their incapacitated and dying fathers pleas for food: Go and find potatoes for yourself. That evening the poor man was already in the cemetery. The chaotic scene at a soup kitchen in County Donegal during the Great Irish Famine was recalled in folklore a century later:

It was in the second year of the famine that a soup cauldron arrived in this place. Bones were boiled in it to make the broth. Two local women looked after the big pot and distributed the soup. It is said that they gave the first and thinnest part of the gruel to the people, while they kept the thicker part at the bottom of the pot for themselves.

That soup pot saw many rough days. The people were so famished that their compassion and consideration had left them. Healthy men used their strength to muscle past women, children, and the weak. They trampled on top of one another, everybody trying to get close to the soup pot.

One day a poor man, a stranger, approached the pot. When he reached the front he stood aside from those next to him for a while; the pushing and shoving was so violent that a woman fainted. Room was made for two men to carry her away from the pot, and they threw her on the ground, leaving her for dead. When they returned they found the poor man next to the pot where the woman was. One of the men caught him by the back of the neck and flung him back on the stony ground. It wouldnt take much, he said to the poor man, for me to dump you in the cauldron. And you daring to come here to drink some of our broth when it is so scarce and not enough for our own needs. The poor man got up and left without saying anything. A man named Eoghan Thuathail was standing next to the pot and what had happened to the stranger upset him. He called him back and gave him half of his own broth.

The folk memory of famine recalls many such incidents, in Ireland, in China, in Greece, in Malawi, and elsewhere.

Gloomy predictions from demographers and scientists about the imminent threats of overpopulation and famine were commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s. The alarm bells go back further; in 1948 William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn had led the way with Road to Survival Paul Ehrlichs best-selling Population Bomb (1968), which was inspired by that earlier literature, began with the statement that the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Drought-induced famine in the Sahelthat vast semi-arid area south of the Sahara, stretching from Somalia to Sudanin the early 1970s, followed by more severe famines in Ethiopia in 197374 and 198385, in Bangladesh in 1974, in western Sudan in 1985, and in Somalia in 1992 may have seemed to confirm these predictions. Today, however, earthquakes and tsunamis are more likely to make the front pages than famines. And while the famines of the last decade or two share many of the characteristics mentioned above with earlier famines, they do pale in terms of severity or intensity.

The territory of the famine historian cuts across those of demographers and economists, historians and political scientists, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists. They cover case studies ranging from ancien rgime France to India during World War II and from Ireland in the 1840s to Somalia in the 2010s, but their main focus is on some of the twentieth centurys most notorious famines. Learning from those famines and placing them in broader historical context guides our assessment, in the concluding essay, of the prospects for a future free of famine.

The horrors of famine include child abandonment, voluntary enslavement, increasing resort to prostitution, and the rupture of communal and neighborly loyalties. But perhaps the greatest horror of all is being the victim (or even worse, perpetrator) of cannibalism. Essay 1, Eating People Is Wrong, is about this disturbing feature of famine. Homophagy is so universally frowned on that in the past reports of it during famines have often been dismissed as a dramatic motif or trope not intended to be taken literally. But cannibalistic acts have been highlightedand some perpetrators and victims identifiedin several recent accounts of the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine. Both Frank Diktters Maos Famine