We once put a man on the moon. Tomorrow, millions can’t plan past lunch.
That thought hit me like an electric current down my spine as I read Dr. Stacey Patton’s essay “Starving You Is the Point.” Her words weren’t theoretical. They reached into my nervous system: into memories I’ve carried since childhood. My father clawed his way back from homelessness and addiction, and later, I watched him give everything he had to serve others at the Los Angeles Mission. I grew up in churches planted in the concrete soil of the low-income neighborhoods around Los Angeles, where food wasn’t just nourishment, it was hope.
In junior and high school, I’d pack an extra sandwich for someone who might need it. It wasn’t charity. It was muscle memory. When you’ve lived near hunger, you learn the quiet math of survival: calories equal calm. Hunger equals chaos.
Hunger doesn’t have to be the TV version of poverty, with a child from some unnamed African country and a fly buzzing around his eyelid. It can be your neighbor who looks just fine but hasn’t eaten a proper meal because they’re barely making the rent.
The Cellular Memory of Scarcity
Dr. Patton writes that “adaptations like hypervigilance, suppressed emotion, diminished trust, and learned helplessness became inherited cellular memory.” I read that sentence and thought of the way I sometimes brace for disaster even in stillness. The body remembers. It remembers the empty refrigerator. The arguments about overdue bills. The way an entire community can live one broken transmission or pink slip away from collapse.
That memory doesn’t just fade when the paycheck clears or when the degree hangs on the wall. It hides under the skin, flaring up like lupus whenever safety feels conditional. I see it in clients who can move millions of dollars but still fear losing control and entrepreneurs who burn themselves out chasing approval from others.
The nervous system, left unhealed, will always act as if the world is on fire.
Capital Without Care
In my work in finance and strategy, I often sit across from people who control capital, including family offices, investors, and developers. These are good people, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. But even they have become disconnected from the systems that feed or fail us.
When I warned years ago about the cruelty embedded in ICE policies, I was laughed off as alarmist. I remember that laughter. It wasn’t malicious; it was insulated.
Comfort dulls compassion.
We live in an age where deprivation is described as discipline. Where $6.20 a day, the average SNAP benefit per person, is framed as a lifestyle choice. We moralize hunger because it absolves us from having to feel it.
But if you’ve never been hungry, not “I missed lunch before a meeting” hungry, but the kind where your stomach aches and you pretend water is food, you don’t know what it does to a person. If you’ve never watched a single mother hope her kids don’t finish dinner so she can eat what’s left, you don’t understand the humiliation of survival. Hunger isn’t some metaphor for grit or character. It’s the nervous system screaming for regulation, the body pleading for mercy.
And yet, our leaders discuss hunger as if it were a mere talking point. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently said, “I guess the silver lining in all of this is that we’re having a national conversation on our SNAP program.”
A conversation?
People will be starving while she’s finding silver linings. That isn’t policy. It’s privilege. The richest one percent are set to receive a $100 billion tax cut. That alone could fund SNAP for a year. We sent $40 billion to Argentina to prop up their economy and import beef, while farms here let produce rot because there are not enough immigrant workers left to pick it. I drive past those fields. I don’t see people in red hats out there doing their patriotic duty, harvesting food for other patriots.
And in this moment of crisis, the system cracked open just enough to reveal we aren’t powerless. On October 31, 2025, two federal judges, one in Massachusetts and the other in Rhode Island, ruled that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) must continue using contingency funds during the shutdown. Source: Associated Press, October 31, 2025
The court decisions aren’t a policy reset. They’re a reminder that rights don’t melt away with budget disputes. You cannot withhold food for negotiation. That judicial check matters.
The moral narrative that poverty is personal failure cracks here. When institutions step in and enforce nourishment, it proves hunger is not valor-in-waiting. It’s urgency. And when even the courts say, “feed the people,” this is our chance to step off the wheel of scarcity and start building something that will last.
The Biology of Resistance
Patton’s line stays with me: “A regulated nervous system is a revolutionary one.”
That’s not poetic exaggeration. It’s neuroscience and theology rolled into one truth: safety is sacred. If the body never learns peace, the soul can’t imagine freedom.
Every liberation movement that endures, like civil rights, labor, and suffrage, was rooted not just in outrage, but in restoration. Communities fed each other before they marched. They created sanctuaries of food, rest, song, and Sabbath. They built regulation before revolution.
The tragedy today is that our social movements have confused adrenaline for endurance. We scroll, rage, repost, and crash. We organize while starving. We mistake exhaustion for evidence of conviction.
If resistance is biological, then nourishment must be strategic. Rest becomes non-negotiable. Food becomes infrastructure. Safety becomes the soil where imagination grows again.
From Moonshots to Meals
It’s impossible to miss the irony. America once mobilized its best minds to touch the stars. Now we debate whether children deserve breakfast.
The problem isn’t just moral; it’s structural. Chronic deprivation keeps the economy humming. Starved people don’t strike. Exhausted workers don’t question impossible schedules. Malnourished students don’t grow into disruptors. The system was never broken. It was built this way.
We treat hunger as an unfortunate symptom rather than a deliberate design. But as Patton points out, “chronic deprivation was designed to prevent” imagination. The mind that’s too busy surviving can’t envision justice or invent the next big thing.
The Economics of Regulation
What if our metrics for prosperity started with regulation, not production?
In permaculture, a thriving ecosystem isn’t the one that grows the fastest, it’s the one that balances energy inputs and outputs. Nothing takes more than it gives. Nothing burns itself out.
Imagine if our cities worked that way. If budgets began with “How do we feed, rest, and regulate the people who live here?” before we asked “How do we grow GDP?”
The irony is that, even in my professional life, advising high-net-worth individuals, I’ve seen what regulation can do. When a founder finally breathes, when their nervous system slows down, their judgment sharpens. They make better deals. They stop confusing chaos with momentum.
If that’s true at the top, how much truer must it be for the rest of us?
Inherited Hunger, Generational Hope
My father used to say that hunger teaches you to listen. You start hearing things other people miss. The hum of a refrigerator, the rustle of a paper bag. After he got sober, he never forgot that frequency. When he worked with the unhoused, he met people who didn’t just need food; they needed to be seen.
He reminded me that the opposite of starvation isn’t fullness: it’s connection.
That’s why what Dr. Patton wrote resonates so deeply: our survival depends on restoring safety together. No one self-regulates in isolation. Healing is communal work.
The Politics of the Body
The rhetoric unfolding before us is not about food stamps or welfare programs. Our government representatives are deciding what kind of nervous system we’re building as a nation.
We’ve wired ourselves for vigilance: constant alerts, financial stress, partisan warfare, spiritual fatigue. We call it productivity, but it’s pathology. The body was never meant to run this hot for this long.
You can’t build a democracy on dysregulation. It eats empathy first, then reason.
Feed the Future
Dr. Patton ends her essay with a truth that a theologian could have written: “A fed, rested, healed people can imagine, organize, and build the kind of world that chronic deprivation was designed to prevent.”
That line doesn’t just describe survival. That is the definition of salvation.
I think of the extra sandwich I used to pack as a kid. It wasn’t much. But in hindsight, maybe it was everything. Maybe the revolution starts there: in a brown paper bag, passed from one hand to another.
We once put a man on the moon. Maybe our next act of greatness is to feed the people still here.
Article Reference: https://drstaceypatton1865.substack.com/p/starving-you-is-the-point-the-neuroscience
Photos by Richard Burlton and Jess Torre on Unsplash
