My mom grew up in a small town in Yugoslavia during WW2 and often went hungry; subsequently she taught us much as we grew up about how to avoid it. I grew up in a small fishing/logging town in Washington (persistently depressed economy) and do remember one early spring where our winter stocks ran very thin and money was scarce. I thought at that time I was going hungry, but realized many years later that I wasn't - we were just stretching things and out of supplies for a day or so at a time.

That experience did help solidify my work ethic considerably and made me establish some personal standards for "being prepared"...

Very interesting thread.

I have been very fortunate, so no, I have never gone hungry due to financial or political circumstance.

In SERE school, they don't feed you for five days...all the water you can drink. It does odd things to your mindset. In SERE, the purpose was to have you physically and mentally challenged going into the escape scenario and the "camp".

Very enlightening.

In this country it really pisses me off when I see on the TV some people standing outside the social welfare office blaming the goverment and saying their children are starving while they chain smoke cigarettes and wear the "correct" brand of sports shoes and T-shirts. AND going by the size of their stomachs they have had ample funds for beers.

Their certainly are hungry people in this world, but not the ones outside the dole office.

Never hungry to the point of delirium
Self-imposed hunger is all...fasting.
My buddy and I went 5 days w/o eating (only water) back in the early '70s...didn't we all fast back then?
My sinuses opened up such that it felt like I had two conduits running from my nostrils right up to my brain...my mind became pleasantly clear...grand insights.
I wanted to do more but hunger won out.
On the sixth morning, I built an avocado, sprout, & provolone sandwich the size of a condominium.
Bloody marvelous!
My bud went out for a couple of Big Mac's/fries & promptly got sick.

I escaped from Saigon when I was a baby on a refugee boat. Although my father was Vietnamese, he served in the US Navy and trained in Newport, MA. My father tells me stories of how I went hungry as a baby on that boat because my mother's breast milk dried up because of her own hunger and dehydration. My father said he would try and find any water on the boat to try and make bottles of formula... Even if it had rust in it. He said he was surprised I didn't get sick. I don't remember that because I was only 10 months old. But I do remember faint memories when I was four, living in tiny student housing, living off welfare checks as my father worked as a janitor and finished an engineering degree in three years. We thought Ritz crackers were cookies and remembered dancing around our small living room in glee when my mom would ration three crackers. I don't remember starving but we sure didn't have the "luxury" food items. I do remember eating at a shelter one Thanksgiving. And to think, 10 years later, my dad had a four bedroom house, a Porsche, and all four of his daughters went to college, one also serving in the US Navy. I never complain about my life because I always remember what it COULD have been. Blessed.

That's a touching story. God bless you and your family.