Review: On Hunger

Simmons, Dana. 2025. On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520412989 xiii + 234 pp. Acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, index. Free Ebook: https://luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.232

Amanda Green (Eastern Kentucky University)

I began reading Dana Simmons’ On Hunger during the longest U.S. government shutdown, which included the Trump’s administration’s refusal to disperse SNAP funds to 42 million Americans in November 2025. To begin this book under such circumstances was timely– to put it mildly.

I had the opportunity to hear On Hunger’s author and historian Dana Simmons, Ph.D. University of Chicago, speak about her book during the 2025 ASFS-AFSHV annual meeting. As someone who studies student hunger, I was drawn to Simmons acknowledgement of the connection between her historic case studies of hunger with the current state of hunger in U.S. higher education. Simmons dedicates her book to her UC Riverside students and tells students outright: “Hunger is not your fault.” (p. 157). Instead, through Simmons case studies, scholars might understand how student hunger is intentional. Simmons asks across her examples: “Who becomes hungry, and why?” (p. 5), which might be just the question we should ask about hunger in higher education.

Simmons explains that “Hunger is a technology. By that I mean that hunger is not a natural event but a product of human agency” (p. 12). She continues:

“I call hunger a technology because I see a pattern repeating across different times and places in twentieth-century America: hunger is produced, on purpose, to get people (or animals) to do something. In many areas of American life, hunger has become a “default setting” that quietly and powerfully reinforces existing social hierarchies (Benjamin 2019, 2)” (p. 12)

What makes this book unique is its central focus on the term hunger – a term whose definition shifts but one which can connect disparate experiences across time and place. Through the lens of hunger, Simmons can discuss examples of hunger likely known to food scholars such as the Dawes Act and resulting loss of Native American land and sovereignty in Chapter 1 alongside the starvation of cats, rats, and dogs used in experimental psychology in Chapter 2. Simmons draws out the parallels, writing “Hunger serves to advance a logic of elimination, a logic of debt and labor, a logic of behavior control, and a logic of commodification” (p. 158).

This approach moves readers beyond understanding hunger as occurring at specific historic moments, and instead identifies how hunger is implicated across diverse fields, specifically science and politics (p. 5). Simmons’ three examples in science include experimental psychology and animal behavior (Chapter 2), nutrition science and brain functioning (Chapter 5), and weight control (Chapter 8). In Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, and 7, Simmons addresses the hunger (and anti-hunger movements) that result from U.S. government policies. It is the connection between science and policy that requires the most careful analysis. Using her case studies, Simmons builds the relationship between hunger and science: “Scientists made hunger and scarcity into natural objects, fit for political regulation. There is a direct connection between the production of scientific knowledge about hunger and the production and wea­ponization of hunger itself” (p. 5)

The book consists of eight chapters as well as an Introduction and Conclusion. In Chapter 1, the book opens with the 1968 accounts of starvation on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and traces the witnesses’ testimonies to the 1880s U.S. policy of starvation. Simmons writes, “Indian agent P. B. Hunt called it ‘the starving process: It is necessary you should keep the Indian hungry if you wish him to do anything’ (Hunt 1881, 80)” (p.18). In this opening example, Simmons makes clear the use of hunger as a tool of coercion and forced cultural assimilation. Scholars now recognize that this “hunger was made” but throughout history, the US government worked to make Native hunger appear natural, normal, and a result of their inability to adapt to modernity and agriculture. The chapter includes several examples of the U.S. government coercion, including the 1867 “Sell or Starve Act”.

Caption: The cat puzzle box designed by Edward Thorndike to measure the impact of hunger on learning.

In Chapter 2, Simmons offers a seemingly unrelated contrast: how hunger became of the foundation of experimental psychology and underlying ideologies of the U.S. education system. Tracing eugenicist Edward Thorndike’s early experiments using “utter hunger” on cats in a puzzle box (see image above), Simmons demonstrates how hunger became a taken-for-granted assumption of how to motivate human and animal behavior in psychological experiments and the ordinary world. In this example, we witness how hunger becomes an objective measure, a variable to be manipulated, allowing for the advancement of science.  These early behavior psychologists presented the idea that deprivation was crucial to motivating animals and humans. Paired with Chapter 5, these two examples would be of interest to those in Animal Studies.

Chapter 3 captures the hunger marchers of the Great Depression era who banded together under the slogan “Fight—Don’t Starve.” Hunger became a shared experience of social suffering across class, race, gender, and region so that those on plantations, in coal mines, factories, and elsewhere were bound together in recognition of their shared manipulation to work or starve. Simmons’ account of voluntary organizations such as the Harlan County and Alabama Red Cross are damning, showing how civil society worked in tandem with mines, plantations, and factories to keep laborers at the bare minimum of life, refusing aid to those who went on strike. Chapter 3 would do well in Appalachian Studies with its strong focus on eastern Kentucky, as well as studies of social organization and mutual aid with its detailed examination of welfare relief.

In Chapter 4, Simmons explores the creation of “the hungry,” a category of people Simmons argues came to be defined with certain qualities, most especially as people who no longer have physical, psychological, and political autonomy (p. 61). Combined with descriptions of the 1944 Minnesota Starvation Experiment, where men underwent 6 months of voluntary starvation, the chapter reveals how the scientific process laid the foundation for the ideological assumption that hungry people may not be capable of self-government or democracy. The experiment – and direct observations of starvation in the post-WWII environment – revealed that recovery from starvation would be difficult and time-consuming, with survivors needing months to years to recover physiologically and psychologically.

Caption: An advertisement from Sugar Association Incorporated that declared a “new way to diet without hunger.” Titled “Your Appestat, Sugar and You.”

Sugar becomes the focus of Chapter 5, opening with the compelling 1950s advertisement from the sugar industry, pictured above. The advertisement urged consumers to eat a little sugar throughout the day in order to avoid becoming hungry and overeating. This chapter stands in strong contrast with Chapter 2, transitioning us from the original scientific use of hunger as a variable in the study of learning to a new understanding hunger as hedonic, an experience of pleasure, where animals eat for the sake of pure pleasure. This time period marks the recognition that humans preferred sweeter and saltier foods and would desire more of these, emerging as the nascent science of taste upon which the food industry now relies. The study of addiction – to food and to drugs – also begins to emerge and the question of responsibility for what people ate and what drugs they used took hold in science and policy (p. 90).

Caption: Mrs. L.C. Dorsey, a civil rights and prison reform activist in Mississippi.

Chapter 6 addresses hunger as a tool of violence and oppression in the 1960s American South. The overarching evidence in this chapter demonstrates that, “White supremacists reorganized land, labor, and welfare to block Black residents’ access to sources of food” (p. 97). The chapter first follows Mrs. L.C. Dorsey, pictured above, from her childhood years surviving in sharecropping to her later years organizing for voting rights and food rights. Dorsey’s life history illustrates Simmons’ argument that “The fight over the value of labor, the fight to vote, and the fight against hunger were one and the same” (p. 103). Food and hunger were tools of violence used to force African Americans to either leave the South, starve, or avoid risking participation in politics or demanding their rights. In this era, Americans are also made aware of hunger in their own country, especially through the 1968 CBS documentary “Hungry in America.”  These hungry Americans are depicted as deficient, damaged, and lacking. As in previous chapters, Simmons also describes the people and organizations who resist. The Poor People’s Campaign emerged, and the Black Panther Party began its breakfast program in 1969. These organizations demonstrated that “Hunger was—and is—a programmatic policy, not a fact of nature” (p. 117).

Caption: Photo of Currins Prison Farm. Photo credit: Bruce Jackson – Cummins. Prison Farm Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Frank T. Stone Fund, 2009. AccessionIDP2009:6.

Incarceration and starvation are taken up in Chapter 7 where Simmons explores both present-day experiences of hunger (“well-designed hunger”) in the U.S. prison system as well as historic forms of hunger used to control incarcerated people. Three court cases stand out from this chapter that illustrate how U.S. prisons used hunger and starvation to force prisoners to comply and how U.S. court systems determined what was adequate nutrition.  In Landman v. Royster 1971, bread and water rations, and in Holt v. Sarver 1969, grue, a paste composed of meat, potatoes, oleo, syrup, vegetables, eggs, and seasoning often served as punishment and often referred to today as nutraloaf, were declared not adequate nutrition to meet the basic human dignity of prisoners and were forms of cruel and unusual punishment. In Hutto v. Finney 1978, the Supreme Court ruled definitively that prisons must meet the nutritional needs of inmates, so that weight loss does not occur, and their diet must include 2700 calories, determined as necessary for active men by the National Academy of Sciences (p. 123). The food, however, did not (and does not) need to be delicious. Simmons refers to this food as nutritis, or edible detritus. In 2020, a case was brought which charged that the sugar and starch diet of the prison system was so devoid of nutrition that it did violate the 1978 Supreme Court ruling. The case was dismissed because the prisoner’s diet was certified by a dietician, likely employed by the prison.

Simmons pairs her discussion of carceral hunger with the development of the study of household food insecurity, pioneered by nutritionist Kathy Radimer in the 1980s. Simmons quotes Radimer and colleagues, who define household food insecurity as “the inability to acquire or consume an adequate quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so” (Radimer, Olson, and Campbell 1990, 1546). What Radimer’s interviewees described was not hunger hunger, implying starvation, but just knowing that what they were eating was unhealthy and insufficient, eating what Simmons terms nutritis (p. 129). Out of this original work, the U.S. annual survey of household food insecurity began in 1995. In September 2025 the Trump administration ended the 30-year ongoing survey, now making it possible for the administration to hide and ignore food insecurity across the nation.

Caption: With the identification of the hormone leptin in 1995, images like the one above of obese and thin rats appeared across news sources celebrating a way to control appetite. It is one of the earlier medical weight-loss interventions.

The final chapter tackles semaglutide, best known as the weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. Opening with reviews from the medication’s users, Simmons understands that users see the medication as a way to resist consumption (read desire or hunger) in a world where they experience constant pressure to consume. Indeed, for John Blundell and others involved in initial development of Ozempic, they see this biological mechanism (semaglutide) as a way to survive capitalism and over-consumption (p. 147). Hunger is now reframed as a biological disease, one which can be controlled with the correct medication. Yet, semaglutide also arrives after five decades of “obesity epidemic” scare tactics and the politics of thinness that celebrates whiteness and thinness (with their mirror images of fat-shaming and anti-Blackness). Simmons argues that semaglutide users, supporters, and critics often fail to also hold responsible the food system itself. She writes,

“Corporate-funded narratives emphasize uncertainty about the causes of weight gain, even when experts agree that there is a clear correlation between the rise of metabolic disease and industri­ally processed foods. Food companies are systematically and scientifically manip­ulating our taste sensors, hormonal responses, and brain reward circuits. They are treating our sensory systems as “alienable commodities” (Spackman and Lahne 2019, 145). Their foods make us hungry by design. These corporations should be held responsible.” (p. 148).

The chapter ends on one way forward, considering collective forms of intuitive eating, how the structure of desire could be reshaped with living wages and universal healthcare, and what the US food system might look like by redirecting federal agricultural subsidies to sustainable food production.

As an anthropologist, one area I wanted to hear more about was the work of Margaret Mead and other early anthropologists. From my reading, it is not clear what she, and the field of anthropology, understood about hunger. This might be a compelling area of inquiry to extend Simmons set of arguments.

Simmons book, especially its Introduction and Conclusion, are essential readings for any undergraduate or graduate class or future research on the topic of hunger. Reading Simmons’ book, I can’t help but think about how effectively the Trump administration has weaponized hunger as a tool in national and international contexts by withholding SNAP benefits and by eliminating USAID. According to the impact counter, 154,224 children are predicted to have died as a result of severe malnutrition that would have received intervention through USAID’s $168 million annual budget (based on 2024 data).

U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (GA, Democrat) forcefully described the 2025 shutdown in ways that reverberate with the historic arguments Simmons makes. He stated: “They [the Trump administration] are literally pitting sick people against hungry people… I’m going to continue to fight for health care because it’s a matter of life and death, and I’m going to keep fighting for these SNAP recipients, because food is a matter of life and death.”

Violence takes many forms in the U.S. today. Death by a gunshot wound, death through neglect or inaccessible healthcare, and slow death or structural violence through an inability to meet basic needs. Hunger surfaces as a tool of this slow death in four ways: withholding and restricting food benefits to U.S. citizens, removing international food aid, generating so much fear that one does not leave one’s home to meet basic needs, and erasing or making invisible U.S. household’s food insecurity so that need can no longer be seen or met.

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