The Purposeful Starvation of Children

In the last several years of High School, when I was 16 and 17 years old, I was a competitive swimmer and practiced with my team in the morning before school, during the last period every other day, and after school. The last period of the day was supposed to be for our training, but our coach had become excessively ambitious to win State and National titles and had increased swimming practice from once a day to 2 and 3 times a day. For children.

This intense, collegiate-level of training might have been okay if the coach, administration, and our parents had also understood the requirements for such intense training and supported it through adequate nutrition and medical monitoring, but nobody did, and so with a completely average diet and no medical supervision I was forced to train like a college or olympic athlete while consuming only about 2,000 calories a day. Collegiate and olympic athletes that train multiple times a day and swim miles and miles each practice consume around 4,000-8,000 calories to support the demands of such intense physical training. Michael Phelps, the world famous, multi-medal olympian, consumed 10,000 calories at the peak of his training. So being underfed and overworked my body rapidly gave out, especially because I had an undiagnosed, mild form of cystic fibrosis, which drove my depression through the roof and triggered the beginning of health problems like insomnia, thyroid disease, and weight gain that would plague me for most of my adult life afterward, and resulted in having to quit the team which at the time I thought was just a consequence of not being tough enough rather than being neglected by the adults in my life who instead should have been concerned for my wellbeing.

The point is that calories are not a liability for your waist line—they are literally the energy which is required to keep your body alive, and the fewer calories a person gets, especially in proportion to your physical activity, the less able your body is to simply live. Even after having breakfast and lunch, most days at school I would get so hungry that my head would literally start to spin from being light-headed, and I would have to spend what little money I had on vending machine cookies just to keep from fainting. One time I did faint after afternoon practice when instead of going home where I could get some fast pasta and milk to recover I had to go instead to a Boy Scout activity at the local hospital, and as soon as our leader started demonstrating the insertion of an I.V. into a volunteer my head went blank and I slumped down quickly against a wall to avoid falling, and the scout master made fun of me for being squeamish, since he wasn’t aware that I was literally starving.

It was not until a few years ago when activists started bringing it to the public’s attention that I learned many children cannot afford school meals at all, and so spend most of their day at school starving. I was an excellent student, got the best grades in my family, and nearly placed so high on the ACT I could have gotten into any University on a full-ride scholarship but similarly also took the test while starving after a swimming practice and completely forgot the Pythagorean theorem and failed all the triangle questions even though math was my strongest subject (I scored 32 but would have gotten a 34 or 35 otherwise). As difficult as it was to endure a calorie deficit from overtraining and under-eating, I cannot imagine how difficult school would be WITHOUT ANY FOOD AT ALL, and at a time when it is important for the school to have children succeed, pay attention, and refrain from misbehavior it seems that being fed would be an important tool not only to benefit the starving child but all the other children and teachers.

To that end, the state of Colorado just passed a law that provides free school meals for all children in the state. But over the last several years the Utah state legislature, home to the conservative Mormon religion who proclaim to care about children and families, constantly block legislation to do the same. Only nine states in the Nation do provide free school meals, and Utah did just pass a law that converted low-cost school meals to free meals but only for the poorest kids whose families actually qualify by living under the poverty line, which means that other children from families who do not qualify still can’t pay for their meals if and when their parents are neglectful, irresponsible, or unable to do so and end up racking up THREE-MILLION SIX-HUNDRED-THOUSAND DOLLARS in school lunch debt in Utah alone, so many, many children are still condemned to suffer starvation every school day.

The conservative, right-wing, hateful, stupid position that parents should take care of their children therefore children should go hungry if their parents can’t or won’t do it is why we are even in this situation in the first place. But children DO NOT choose what families they are born into, and have no autonomy to make their own decisions or even earn money to provide for their own wellbeing, and making the children of irresponsible parents go hungry in order to teach the parents and children a lesson on the cruelty of capitalism instead results in children who are not able to succeed in school, who spend their days starving and stressed, to then eventually become adults who are not equipped to care for themselves or succeed in the professional and adult world and then themselves become impoverished and even a further burden on society, to be dependent on welfare or homeless or drug addicted, and then to also have children who in turn they also cannot provide for which repeats and sustains the cycle ad nauseam. The snide, contemptuous position that ANY child should go hungry, especially in a country which wastes 30-40% of its food supply and produces MORE than enough food to feed EVERY SINGLE ONE of its citizens, creates MORE problems than the irresponsible or impoverished families with starving children, and those refusing to feed these children are part of the PROBLEM, not the SOLUTION.

That is to say nothing of the immoral and disgusting position that any child should be allowed to go hungry, regardless of the decisions of their parents or guardians. Of course it is the parents’ responsibility to care for their children but letting a child go hungry is a choice that you also make out of spite, to prove yourself a vile, hateful, spiteful, petty piece of shit who does not even care for the wellbeing of the most helpless and precious of humans. The Christian religion even behooves its members to care for children and make their wellbeing a priority, and does not constrain that charity to a litmus of whether their parents are responsible, yet the Mormon church sits on an excess of 100 billion dollars of stocks and other investments while people wander homeless and starving on the streets around its office buildings, and children in its State starve on a daily basis. The fact that it is the followers of Christianity who are the ones blocking compassionate, productive policy like the feeding of children demonstrates the fundamentally hateful nature of religion and the fearful, hateful, spiteful, petty nature of its adherents whom choose only to follow the tenets of the religion which personally serve their own selfish interests, whom instead should be the ones on the front lines advocating for the relief of such vile and reprehensible treatment of others by the State, institutions, and society.

It is only through free, universal school meals that all children are supported in their need and right to an education, to help liberate them from the confines of their sorry beginnings, that they may reach their individual potential and not be limited by the selfish or obligatory circumstances of the family into which they were born, in the future to become a more productive member of society who helps in turn to alleviate such problems instead of contributing to them. When you instead starve children out of spite and condescension you condemn all of us to the burden and shame of child abuse, and you need to wake the fuck up and start being a better person who thinks beyond just the immediate material conditions of your own personal life.

Call your state senator and congressional representative RIGHT NOW and tell them you demand they introduce and support legislation for Universal Free School Meals. And keep demanding it until it is done.