It is what philosophers call a ‘raw feel’, an immediate sensation such as seeing the colour red, hearing a loud sound, feeling the softness of a blanket, smelling a rose, tasting sweetness. We immediately ‘get’ these sensations. We don’t have to learn them as we have to learn how to write, spell, play the sitar or eat with a fork or knife.

Further, my argument is that hunger differs from other embodied qualia sensations in that we cannot normatively confirm it. Two or more people can agree or disagree that the smell of a rose ‘out there’ is pleasing, or that they are seeing the colour red, or that they are hearing a scraping sound — but in the case of hunger, the sensation occurs within an individual’s body. It is internalised. Hence, the experience cannot so easily be shared. Yet, as a species, we all ‘know’ what hunger is.

My conjecture here is that this is because we don’t need to describe them. They are not like the complex cultural experiences of falling in love, or being moved to tears by a film. Qualia simply exist within us, with us, part of the deep inheritance of human evolution. One can write a novel about a person who has never fallen in love or has never seen a film — but it is much harder to conceive of a human who can neither see, touch, hear, smell, taste, nor ever felt hunger.

It follows, I suggest, that when we do seek to describe qualia — especially an internalised sensation like hunger — the best human ‘experts’ turn out to be writers and artists, skilled at ‘empathy creation’.

Like sleep, the need for light, a modicum of movement, and other basic needs, we share this characteristic with many living creatures, and certainly with mammals.

In this research, I introduce the specific idea of an embodied ‘hunger clock’ that can be regulated and/or dysregulated by cultural practices. In extreme cases, such practices include the human cultural creation of war, founded on evolutionary territorial and competitive instincts, which can result in children and ‘the weak’ becoming terrifying instances of collateral damage. In more ‘regular’ societies, the socioeconomically deprived — divided from ‘us’ by cultural categories such as race, caste, religion, gender and disability — are systemically turned into a ‘they’. One way their hunger-clocks are tampered with over the long term is through a systematic denial of health-sustaining food and water resources.

The elimination of hunger is pretty high up in the UN list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), standing at Number 2 among 17 goals. Yet, although there is more than enough food to go around the world, the problem of hunger is far from being solved.

My hypothesis is that this is because (a) the internalised ‘hunger clocks’ inbuilt by evolution into our bodies cannot, indeed should not, be turned off, as the phrase ‘Zero Hunger’ seems to imply; and (b) no crisp set of ethical norms and practices related to hunger resistance and resilience — formulated by the citizens of the Global South, who most suffer from hunger-clock dysregulation — currently modulate the bald statement of UN Goal SDG 2. Our research offers actionable pathways forward.

Humans today are the only mammals who cannot digest meat or the flesh of other animals without it first being cooked. This practice of cooking what we ingest extends to vegetables, to legumes and some fruits.

My hypothesis here is that the tastes, smells and sights of cooked and uncooked food affect not only our hunger-clocks, but our attitudes towards other people, our sense of territorial belonging, our intergenerational and community bonds, our taboos, as well as our aesthetic perceptions. Our research highlights some of the impossibly hard-to-erase cognitive links between food and hunger in the species homo sapiens.

Our intuitive hypothesis is that hunger and thirst are perhaps the most powerful cognitive metaphor for desire in many cultures. We are, that is, hungry not only for food in a literal sense but also for ‘thought food’ or ‘food for thought’, for love, for a better life, for adventure, for spiritual sustenance.

Through a detailed perusal and analysis of several linguistic and literary texts, we demonstrate the cognitive valence, relevance and capaciousness of hunger narratives and metaphors across cultures.

In our Research section, for example, we report on experimental work asking a young student cohort, both male and female, to describe hunger under two conditions: one without metaphor, two with metaphor. This preliminary research has found that it is significantly more difficult to describe hunger without metaphor. We have also, in our Research section, created an archive of ‘hunger’ texts and begun to list words for a ‘Hunger Lexicon’ across India.