The many hungers that afflict us

Hunger is the great equalizer. A growling stomach makes no distinction between race, class, or social status. Both the wealthy man dining in a five-star restaurant and the beggar pleading for scraps on the street share the same fundamental need: food. Yet in today's media-saturated world, the ever-present cooking shows, culinary blogs, vlogs, and round-the-clock delivery apps have turned food into a distraction, concealing the deeper hungers that truly afflict us.

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Take, for instance, those living in poverty. Their hunger goes beyond food. They yearn for dignity, justice, and recognition of their humanity. However, some of them have come to use hunger as a means to perpetuate a cycle of dependency. Flaunting their victimhood, they join mass protests against economic inequality while neglecting, or even worsening, problems within their own families and communities that they have the power to address.

The wealthy and powerful also suffer from a more insidious hunger, born of an unceasing pursuit of satisfaction. Their unspoken motto is "Never enough." Many suffer from anxiety, depression, chronic insecurity, and a suffocating sense of emptiness. As the saying goes, "Nature abhors a vacuum." When that inner void grows, their baser instincts rush to fill it. As St. Thomas Aquinas wisely observed, "No man can live without pleasure. So if a person deprives himself of higher pleasures, he will go scavenging for the less wholesome kind."