On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America from Starvation to Ozempic (2025; UC Press, Open Access)
Author: Dana Simmons (UC Riverside)
Simmons examines these scientific experiments as foundational to broader applications of hunger as a technology of social control and behavioral modification. The text works through histories of hunger developed as a ‘technology of labor control’ deployed throughout the ‘starvation wage complex’ as yet another problem-box wherein socio-economic experiments sought to calibrate the minimum amount of wages/food rations required for maximum labor production and compliance. This work connects to broader political economies, identifying the complicity of federal agencies and food aid organizations distributing food rations and relief through the logic of ‘conditional charity’ distributed to select recipients, often based on capitulations to employer demands. Hunger is revealed throughout as a shared instrument of statecraft, philanthropy, class violence and labor organizing.
The totalizing relations of hunger as an instrument of disciplinary control are clearly elucidated in Simmons’ examination of ‘carceral hunger’, located in the caged problem-box of the prison as a site wherein hunger is starkly weaponized. Here, prisoners are reliant upon industrial foods that are cheaply processed, unregulated, and bereft of nutritional or gustatory value (nutritus). Industrial prison foods produce hunger, marking the carceral logics informing a food-prison-industrial complex that ‘extends beyond prison walls…carceral hunger is produced, programmatically, every day, across the United States’ (120). Simmons extends the problem-box of the prison to examine the national production of hunger, starvation and food insecurity integral to widespread lack and precarity. Hunger is produced through inequities of race, class, gender and further induced through newly manufactured cravings and unsatiated desire.
Figurations of ‘the hungry’ are central throughout the text, locating generative tensions between differentially produced political identities and subjectivities. While the figure of the hungry in Africa and elsewhere are often marked as lacking agency and therefore deserving of aid and relief (until the recent dismantling of USAID), the hungry in the United States are instead marked by failures of self-control. The hungry American simply lacks the discipline to work more for less, with those scientifically classified as obese lacking discipline to control their cravings. Simmons intervenes by investigating scientific and technological innovations developed to manufacture hunger and incessant cravings for nutritionally-bereft foods with addictive qualities rivaling many illicit drugs. Here, hunger is a technology wielded by the rise of food scientists and industries producing hunger and inducing uncontrolled consumption by manipulating chemical and neural pathways in bodies and body politics (and through federal subsidies and regulatory accommodations). Hunger is a technology designed to override the ‘rational choice’ of informed consumers within market forces operating at physiological levels.
In the current age of Ozempic, individual and collective capacities to quell manufactured hunger and craving increasingly acquiesce to the new domain of ‘pharmacological optimism’. Simmons situates ‘the science of hunger’ as co-produced alongside the new ‘science of suppression’ championed to provide temporary respite from an industrial food-science-marketing complex designed to produce cravings and manipulate desire at metabolic levels. In this context, Ozempic emerges as a form of cultural Marxist pharmacology (Blundell, 2018)—a tool used to defend against industrial and capitalist food regimes. Simmons identifies ‘the consumer’ as continually consumed by the rapacious appetites of this political economy, while simultaneously considering Ozempic as a newly individualized and apoliticized ‘hunger strike’. Yet, the text also explores the ‘gut feelings’ experienced by some Ozempic users suspecting that something isn’t quite right with their relationship to hunger, food, and desire.
Although hunger is deployed to create and control newly racialized, gendered, laboring and imprisoned subjects, Simmons also marks the limitations and unintended consequences of this technology. Hunger is demonstrated throughout the text as a tool equally wielded among those newly collectivized through shared and lived experience. No longer limited to starvation, the book demonstrates hunger as a political force that includes yet vastly exceeds demands for food and nutritus. Hunger is something more in this contemporary context, mobilized throughout strikes, marches, boycotts and political activism as a technology commandeered by the starved, oppressed, exploited and precarious. It is a force that gathers new forms of critical engagement and politicized collectivities ‘across race, gender, and geography…[connected] to historical forms and interconnected sites of power’ (58). Successfully escaping the problem-box of hunger as a technology of discipline and control, Simmons deftly reframes hunger as a desire for justice, equity and liberatory transformation.
Dr. Dana Simmons generously provided their time to discuss On Hunger with Dr. Aaron Gregory (Editor, 4S Backchannels) during a book talk with the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity (SEHE) at UC Riverside, an event co-sponsored with the Center for Ideas & Society. Below is a transcript of their discussion.
AG: Your chapter on ‘Punishment and Reward’ defines hunger as an epistemic tool and “technology to produce behaviors and emotions” (27), mobilized alongside the birth of behavioral, comparative and neural psychology. Early in the text, you examine Thorndike’s experiments with cats and mice placed inside ‘experimental problem boxes’ designed to motivate learning through utter hunger—an experimental approach later revised by Harlow to consider hunger as entangled ‘by curiosity and exploration’ (39). If we might consider a book project as something akin to an experimental problem box, which problems were you curious to solve during the research and writing process?
DS: At one point in this chapter, these mice show up. This is one of the reasons why this story is important, alongside the person who set up this whole construct of experimental psychology and hunger as the technology, tool, and method of experimental psychology. Edward Thorndike was single-handedly responsible for naturalizing and scientizing utilitarian philosophy. In other words, this whole idea that to get people to work and to learn, you had to use punishments and rewards. Thorndike taught at Columbia Teachers College and was incredibly influential in the construction of the American educational system. Repetitive systems of writing, multiplication tables—many, many times—and the whole relationship between punishments and rewards for learning…that's Thorndyke. Hunger is deeply embedded in this. He's also doing these experiments at the same time that Indian agencies are starving Native families to force their children to Indian Residential Schools. So that's the configuration.
But I think your question, in a way, is maybe even more difficult to answer. What's the ‘problem box’ here? I really wanted to begin with hungry subjects, as opposed to centering expert knowledge or political figures. Hungry subjects, as animals or people, are the narrative subjects of the book. So I guess that was a problem-box to solve—maybe not the only one—but one that helps you construct a story…a story of hungry subjects as opposed to what is being done to hungry objects.
AG: You wrote sections of this book during the pandemic, a period of time when many were confined indoors or largely restricted in their movements and engagements. This was also a period of time when many of us developed new cravings for certain foods. My pandemic cravings included copious amounts of graham crackers and peanut butter—a curious craving due to the invention of the graham cracker as a dietary technology invented by Presbyterian Minister Sylvester Graham in 1829 to quell cravings and desire.
So this will be the dreaded two-part question: a) Did you develop any particular cravings during the pandemic while writing the book? b) In your chapter on ‘Craving and Control’, you mark a ‘serious problem’ (91) with foods designed to operate on our neural circuitry to produce addictive results, and the tenuous capacity of the consumer to navigate the ‘free market’ through informed and rational choice. How does your book reconcile hunger as a political force acting within market forces that continually manipulate our rational capacities?
DS: I love that you ask about it, thinking about what the pandemic did to us. I will say I started cooking for real. Prior to the pandemic, I was a ‘reheater’. And since the pandemic, I've definitely become more of a cook. And also fermentation, fermentation. I mean, we all did it, right? But I'm still doing it. I’m still keeping the same sourdough that I started in the pandemic, and I cook a sourdough loaf every three or four days, still on this fifth year of the pandemic. But thinking about how the pandemic distributed structures of desire is a really provocative question. I mentioned the individualization, the political and the biologicization of politics of this moment, and both of these are inevitably tied to the pandemic. A kind of tenuous sense of collective destiny passed through things, like everybody making sourdough, but these actually belied race, gender and class, as well as ideology. So, I was also thinking about the ways that poverty and food insecurity shot up during the initial moments of the pandemic, then plummeted to levels that had never been seen before through collective support, primarily state support, at unprecedented levels. These were then yanked away, and now we see poverty and food security going back up. So I was thinking about the pandemic and respective structures of desire, but also about a sense of collective destiny that I think is really, really critical.
The question of craving is a really hard one. One way to think about the question of ‘what is craving’: What I tried to do with this book is to look at the histories of psychology, physiology, and neuroscience to understand craving and to historicize it. In the chapter on Ozempic, I return to a moment in the 1980-90s when the distinction emerged between ‘liking’ as an experience of pleasure reduced to dopamine hits localized in very specific places in the brain, and ‘wanting’ as a feeling of being compelled to consume something. That distinction is at the center of psycho-physio understandings of how GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic work. They operate at the level of wanting, not of liking. So now there are all these anti-hunger drugs designed to reduce pleasure, to diminish pleasure, to control consumption…and most of them turned people psychotic. So they quickly went off the market. But I think there’s a really fascinating moment in this Ozempic era—to think about what it reveals about the structures of desire, and I unpack that in this book.
And I would like to go back to one thing that opens the book, which is the extent to which products—like the Cheetos that you brought to this book talk—are deliberately designed to manipulate structures of feeling. The industrial food science industry has conducted and read all the research, so they know. And that’s why the Cheeto is on the cover, because it dissolves so quickly that it avoids ‘metering’. That's the term, but in simple terms: the body, the mouth, they don’t register that it is consuming food. The operation of hunger is so complex, physiologically, it's totally fascinating. We're just now understanding it because of GLP-1 (Ozempic), the extent to which the gut tastes, measures, thinks, reacts, and feels. And the framing of food as ‘addiction’ is so widespread right now, and very much tied up with that pleasure orientation, but it focuses on the brain. So I struggle with the framing of food as addiction. On the one hand, it was really helpful for drug policy. If you think of food addiction like drug addiction, what does that say about food addiction? It's not really a matter of self control. Methadone was designed by a scientist who studied hunger and metabolic disease, who developed it as a model of harm reduction. So this can be useful for refuting individual blame. But on the other hand, addiction models of food focus on individual consumers and eliminating pleasure. They don't think about the system, the structure, the collective element, and they also totally missed the gut.
AG: So this is a really interesting way to think about what it means to be hungry. There's something interesting about the framing of addiction…it does individualize and responsibilize the consumer, whereas throughout your text, you very much focus on systems that anticipate, produce and leverage hunger, and leverage desire through addictive capacities. You’re upending the individual addiction model by thinking through systems that produce addiction and prey upon neural circuitries, and indeed, imprison us in those ways. This is what Cheetos do. They're like bread lines or relief lines or prison rations, providing just enough for a momentary experience of satiation that diminishes rather rapidly, and that ‘lack’ something substantive.
DS: Yeah, and Natasha Schüll has this great book Addiction by Design about gambling and the design of gambling machines, which I think is a really interesting parallel to consider.
AG: Your chapter on ‘Carceral Hunger’ locates and considers the production of hunger through ‘carceral logics’ within and beyond the confines of prisons. You identify the prison industrial complex as entangled with the food industry, food scientists, markets and marketing forces, regulatory bodies, labor regimes, medical and pharmaceutical domains, relief organizations, and a wide range of actors functioning as carceral administrators aligned to control, discipline and ultimately imprison body politics through hunger. What does the prison tell us about hunger?
DS: I learned a lot about food insecurity from thinking about carceral nutrition, for a couple reasons. One is that the legal regime that currently governs food provision in incarcerated spaces like jails and prisons dates back to the 1970s. Its basic principle is: sufficient calories, sufficient nutrients. There's a long history, particularly in plantation prisons, of starvation, of incarcerated peoples as a form of labor and behavior control subjected to punitive techniques that were later challenged in the courts. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court determined that incarcerated people must be provided with a minimum number of calories and a minimum sufficient amount of nutrients. One of the measures used to monitor this was weight loss. What happens now is that foods used in carceral spaces are forms of torture. The number of calories is sufficient, and in many cases, incarcerated people are provided with powdered nutrients mixed with water. They are what I call nutritus, that is, they're not nourishing in any way. And it's really wild, because when you look at the reports of carceral food, ‘cake’ comes up all the time. That just blew me away. At first, I was like: Why is there so much cake in prison? But that's what it is. It's incredibly dense. It has no nutritive value. It's cheap and it fulfills that 1970s legal standard of providing a sufficient calorie count. This is the definition of food insecurity more broadly: to substitute actual food with less nourishing foods. But that's exactly what's happening in the carceral environment with dieticians deciding what is nutritious and adequate without oversight. One of my current objectives is to find dietitians to partner with me, and to convince the American Dietetic Society to ban dieticians signing off on inadequate rations in carceral spaces, because currently, that signature is being used in the courts to justify standards from the 1970s that are making people extremely sick. This nutritus is also provisioned in ways that reinforce the randomness and insecure access to food in carceral spaces. Meals are timed in unpredictable ways. You can have breakfast at 5am, and then lunch at 4pm, and then dinner at 5pm. Incarcerated people are given very limited amounts of time to actually consume the food. And so there are two elements of food insecurity that are generally experienced, which have to do with time and predictability and anxiety over access to food.
AG: You also locate the collective possibilities of hunger as a political force. In your chapter on 'Carceral Hunger' and others, you're exploring responses to nutritus as a politics of hunger. Dieticians and nutritionists are signing off and saying, ‘Well, these prisoners have their nutritional and caloric needs met.’ Well, if these technologies and dietary sciences were sufficient, they wouldn't result in hunger strikes. So this allows us to radically rethink what hunger truly is, within and beyond the context of nutrition. There is still something wholly unsatisfying about prison rations, bread lines, and relief lines. Regardless of these efforts to quell starvation, hunger simultaneously produces political collectivities desiring more than rations and relief. Your book offers a really lovely intervention between the politics of hunger in this way. So I wonder how you might consider collective hunger as a political force?
DS: There are hunger strikes in prisons. And there were hunger marches of 1930, which have really been lost as a footnote to the history of the American Communist Party. These were national marches that united people around a common identity of having been made hungry. And it's amazing, these movements are multiracial. They're urban, they’re rural. They're often led by women. They gathered people together in caravans to Washington, DC every year in the early 1930s. Women were shutting down slaughterhouses and food distributors in the 1930s, in collaboration with black women and immigrants, and in contact with coal miners and plantation farmers. The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 had a similar, multi-racial and wide collective. They targeted not only employers, but also welfare agencies. They dealt with labor control, welfare policy, access to land, groceries, food distributors, and profits. So I think it's a really powerful model, to think about how new collectives can be built around common experience. These are the sorts of collectivities that the common experience of hunger makes possible.
Published: 06/09/2025