What Hunger Taught Me About Other People’s Choices

“How can they eat that?”

I sometimes hear people ask this when they see someone on television taking food from rubbish. Or they see a child drinking dirty water and ask, “How can they drink that?”

I understand the question when it comes from wanting to know. What stays with me is the disgust that sometimes follows it. “That is disgusting. I would never do that.”

Usually, I say nothing. The person speaking may not know anything about my childhood. I have not told them. Sometimes the way they speak makes me feel that explaining would take more than I want to give in that moment.

But I do notice my own reaction. Sometimes I become irritated. More often, I feel confused. The reason someone might eat or drink something they would normally avoid seems very close to the surface: they need food or water, and we may be overlooking what is missing from their life.

I know something about that from being a small child in Poland. Two memories return to me whenever I hear those questions.

Something I could eat

I was probably four or five. I do not remember my exact age.

I had a mother and father, but they were often unavailable to me. They drank heavily. They could be away all day and evening, then come back at night and continue drinking. Having parents did not mean that someone was making sure I had something to eat or drink.

I find it difficult to call the place where we lived a home. To me, that word carries a feeling of being cared for. When I remember that time, I often think of it simply as the place where we slept.

When I needed food, I had to look for it myself. I remember finding a banana peel in rubbish beside the road. I ate it.

And I remember liking it very much.

That can be difficult to understand if you picture the peel beside a whole banana or a meal you could have instead. I did not have those things beside me. I had found something I could eat, and I was hungry.

I did not know food in the way I know it now. There were tastes and meals I had no experience of. Something I found could be the best thing I ate that day. If I found nothing better on the days around it, the happiness of finding it mattered even more.

I have written about finding a dry slice of bread and discovering what happened when I left it on a warm stove. I can look back now and see the hunger around that memory. I can also remember how good the bread tasted and how happy I was with what I had discovered.

The banana peel belongs to that same difficulty of remembering: I understand more now than I did then, but the child’s pleasure is still part of what happened.

The white thing on the wall

The other memory is about water.

I was thirsty and went into a school building. In a toilet, I saw a man leaving and water running down the inside of a white object hanging on the wall.

Today I know it was a urinal. At that age, I did not know what a urinal was. What I recognised was water.

By the time I went closer, it had stopped running. I looked around, trying to understand how to make it come again.

There was a silver or chrome button with a blue mark in the middle. I remember hitting it quickly. A little water came, then stopped. So I tried pressing it.

The water started running. I remember how happy that made me.

I put both hands against the inside surface and cupped them together like a bowl. I collected the water as it ran down and drank from my hands.

When I think about it now, I know things that the boy standing there did not know. I understand what the fixture was used for. I know it was not a safe place to get drinking water. I would not drink from it today.

But my memory of leaving that room is not a memory of disgust. I remember the water being good to drink. I remember being happy because I had found it.

I want to be able to tell both parts honestly: what I understand as an adult and what I experienced as a child.

The alternatives we bring with us

When I hear “I would never eat that,” I wonder what the speaker is imagining instead.

A refrigerator with food in it? Money to buy something? A parent who will make a meal? A tap they know is safe to drink from?

Those possibilities matter. If I have something else to eat, I will leave the discarded food where it is. If I can get safe drinking water, I will choose that. I would make the same choice as the person watching television.

But I cannot take the options I have now into somebody else’s situation and assume they are available there too. “I would not do that while I had another way to meet the need” is a more precise statement than “I would never do that.”

This is where the circumstances we did not choose become more than an abstract question for me. A choice includes what is within reach, what we know and what may happen if we refuse. Looking only at the final action leaves much of that out.

I cannot now list every possible source of food or water that might have existed near me as a child. I can tell you what I knew and what I found. Knowing today that a safer option should have existed does not mean I knew where it was or how to reach it then.

A small child should have had an adult helping with those questions. I was trying to answer them with the understanding I had.

What hunger and thirst ask of us

There is a physical need inside these memories. Hunger and thirst direct us towards finding food and water. Research on hunger and thirst describes how the body’s needs influence motivation and behaviour. It helps explain the urgency without predicting one identical response from everyone.

I would be careful, then, about saying that there is a single “survival mode” that always takes over and makes the decision for us. People respond differently, and need does not remove every part of judgement. Nor does being thirsty make unsafe water safe.

What I can describe clearly is how narrow the question was for me. I needed something to drink. I saw water. I tried to work out how to make it run again.

I was not choosing from a list of drinks and deciding which I preferred. I was responding to what I had found with what I understood at that age.

The banana peel did not become clean because I was hungry. The water did not become safe because I wanted it. Understanding my decision means taking the need and the lack of care seriously alongside those facts.

When a question becomes a judgement

Concern about the food or water itself makes sense to me. A person watching a child drink unsafe water may feel frightened for them. That concern can come from care.

The part I struggle with is when the disgust begins to describe the person: how could they lower themselves to that, why would anyone behave that way, what is wrong with them?

Then the child can disappear behind the thing they are eating or drinking. We see the rubbish or the dirty water so clearly that we give less attention to the hunger, the thirst and the missing adult.

I do not expect everyone who asks “How can they?” to mean the same thing. I may hear judgement where someone is struggling to express shock. I want to leave room for that too. Trying to understand other people includes checking what they mean before deciding I already know.

Still, the words make a difference. “That water could make the child ill” directs attention towards the danger and the child’s need for help. “That child is disgusting” directs it towards the child’s worth. I would want us to notice where our reaction is taking us.

When I remember the boy in that school toilet, I do not want him to have felt ashamed of finding water. I want someone to have made sure he could drink safely.

You do not have to have lived my life

I do not believe that only someone who has experienced childhood hunger can understand what I am describing. If we could understand only our own experiences, there would be very little room for us to care for one another.

I hope for a pause before certainty. Before saying what we would never do, we can ask what would have to be missing for an action to become possible for us. Before judging someone’s choice, we can ask what help and alternatives they could actually reach.

We may not know the answer. The person may not want to explain their history to us. We can still recognise that our first reaction is incomplete.

I am telling these memories because I want that incompleteness to be easier to see. From outside, the image is a child eating a banana peel or drinking from a urinal. From where I stood, I had found something I needed. Both accounts concern the same moment, but they give us different things to understand.

The circumstances should still trouble us. I do not want the fact that I felt happy to make the neglect seem smaller. I needed food, safe water and someone looking after me. My ability to find something did not remove that need.

What I remember when I look back

As an adult, I can see how much should have been there for that child. I can name the risk in the water and the care that was missing. I would want a child in those circumstances today to receive help.

I also want to leave room for the memory as I lived it. The happiness was real. It was the happiness of finding something when I needed it and of working out how to make the water come again.

That is what I carry into those conversations now. Before I decide what another person’s action tells me about them, I want to understand what choices they knew they had. I want to remember how much a safe place to stand can change what seems obvious.

When I hear someone wonder how a child could drink that water, I remember the white object on the wall, the chrome button and the blue mark in its middle.

I remember putting my hands together. I remember the water beginning to run.

And I remember walking out happy, because I had found something to drink.