They can starve a nation into rubble, but the perpetrators will never feast on my silence
By Samantha Bacchus McLeod
This morning I read something that ripped my heart right down the middle. Tears poured down my face. I was surprised it was not blood.
A humanitarian aid worker, back from Gaza, spoke of children screaming in pain from burns and broken bones. But even louder than that, they screamed from scorching hunger. She wrote of weighing protein bars to meet a cruel Israeli military rule — no more than seven pounds of food allowed in. She wrote of doctors treating the maimed and the burned while starving themselves. She wrote of leaving her Palestinian colleagues, the most beautiful and compassionate people she had ever met, and feeling ashamed — ashamed to walk away, ashamed of a world that calls itself human yet allows genocide.
She said that as her bus crossed the buffer zone, one side showed Rafah: rubble and dust. The other side, lush green Israel. And there, at the gate, Israeli soldiers sat before a table full of food. She said she had never felt so nauseous at the sight of plenty.
I understood her down to my very bones.
My life’s work is not an accident. My laser focus on food, sustainability, farming oceans and land is forged from the knowledge of what starvation does to the human spirit – and from the fury that it is a deliberate war upon a perceived lesser.
I have spent decades trying to stop history from repeating itself. But as I read her words, I felt the bile of truths I try to deny flow over my tongue, rivers of bitter filled my mouth. The thing I fear most is already here.
We have lived through what I call the Hunger Plan. The world remembers Ethiopia’s famine through charity posters and grainy television footage, but I remember the rum-sodden voices of adult men in my childhood, discussing the bombing of a starving people. I remember my mother’s tears as she told of our own bellies swelling during the lean years of socialism in Guyana — not from a tyrant’s cruelty, but from the punishment imposed by nations that had once claimed friendship.
America withdrew loans. England turned its back. The United States bullied others to join in the strangling, because we had chosen self-government and autonomy. Because we dared to say we, too, deserve freedom to be a self-respecting nation.
That is the oldest war in history, the war waged against those who rise above the station imposed upon them. It is fought not just with bombs and bullets, but with bread withheld, with poisoned rivers, with scorched earth, with borders sealed against grain and milk. It is a war designed to kill you, and to the few that survived all odds, it is a war designed to make you beg.
Today, in Gaza, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti…the methods are the same.
Starvation is a weapon. Hunger is punishment. The metallic flavour of an empty plate resonates just as profoundly as nausea at the sight of a laden table.
I want to believe that truth still has power. That bearing witness matters. That if we tell it well enough, raw enough, it will lodge in someone’s throat and make them choke on their complacency.
But I also know our hearts, though they may break, must harden in resolve. Our hearts must carry the memory of every child who has ever screamed “I’m hungry” so loudly it drowned out the sound of shelling.
We must feed one another in every way we can. With food, with shelter, with solidarity. We must remember, the hunger plan is not a chapter in history. It is here. And the only way to survive it is to refuse to be silent.
My philosophy stems from our history…this is why I do what I do. Why I fight for food security, why I stand for farmers, why I tell the stories of oceans, fields, and kitchens. Because feeding people is resistance. It is rebellion. It is the antidote to every plan that would keep us hungry, dependent, and silent.
We can rise from this, but only if we rise together by supporting farmers, reaching out a helping hand to those in need, offering a full plate of food before hunger screams.
We must do this until no border, no army, no politician can starve us into submission again.