{"id":6605,"date":"2017-08-29T06:39:13","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T13:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=6605"},"modified":"2017-08-29T06:39:13","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T13:39:13","slug":"gluttony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=6605","title":{"rendered":"Gluttony"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like to cook. I like to eat but am pretty indifferent to what kind of food, and once I find a dish I like I am known to order it in perpetuity. That said, I’m a glutton when it comes to all things sweet. I inhale candy, chocolate, pastries, tortes, you name it and am forever grateful for those who indulge my sucrose addiction.<\/p>\n

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In unpleasant contrast, I find myself borderline, no, seriously puritan when it comes to other people being preoccupied with and fond of high-end cuisine. There is a little voice in the head that complains when I join my family at a restaurant for a meal the price of which could easily feed half of an African village for a week. Their appreciation and knowledge of, their joy and reveling in good food is completely supported by me, but my participation in those meals is somehow triggering a sense of guilt.<\/p>\n

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Memories of hunger’s destruction were never far in a post-war German childhood, some of them direct experiences of people close to me, with lingering consequences to their health. Being forced to eat unpalatable food, both at home and in boarding school, did not make it any easier. My political awakening during the late sixties was also colored by issues of famine: Stalin’s punishment for the inability to deliver his agricultural production goals was starving at least 3 million people in Ukraine. The deliberate starvation of Leningrad was the most notorious example of the Nazis\u2019 policy of killing by hunger during their invasion, which in the early 1940s caused the death of four million Soviet citizens in the western parts of the Soviet Union they occupied. These numbers paled in comparison to Mao’s great leap forward <\/em>which, combined with\u00a0drought and poor weather-caused the deaths by famine of 36 million Chinese during the period from 1958-1961 (and that is not counting the 40 million births that did not happen because of these 3 bitter years<\/em> as they are called colloquially.)<\/p>\n

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Hunger’s Bride (2011) from the Holocaust series: The Defiance in their Faces<\/em><\/p>\n

Stalin & Hitler: Mass Murder by Starvation<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n