Hangry

Yes, hangry is the way we Filipinos often pronounce hungry but hangry too is now a word in itself, recognized in the most eminent dictionaries: Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, Collins, Macmillan, among others.

Drop the “h,” as the French and Kapampangans do, and you come closer to this relatively new English word’s meaning. Simply, almost poetically, it’s being hungry and angry. Hangry is the adjective, and hanger now has three meanings, one being what you use to hang clothes on, or a place where planes are parked (not hung), and, finally, the feeling of being hungry and angry.

I did take lunch before starting to write this column, not willing to test findings in a new study just published in the journal PLOS One by Viren Swami and three colleagues. The title explains its ambitious research design: “Hangry in the field: An experience sampling study on the impact of hunger on anger, irritability and affect.”

Experience sampling? The researchers recruited 64 participants who were asked to report hunger, anger, irritability, pleasure, and arousal at five time-points each day. The researchers found that the times of self-reported hunger were associated with higher levels of anger and irritability, and lower pleasure. No associations were found between hunger and arousal. Presumably, they were looking only at hunger for food.

I thought of the Social Weather Stations’ quarterly surveys asking respondents—families were used as the reporting unit—if they had been involuntarily hungry at least once in the last three months. In December 2019, 8.8 percent of households reported this involuntary hunger, and then jumped, during the pandemic, to 16.7 percent in the May 2020 survey, 20.9 percent in July 2020, and an all-time high of 30.7 percent in September 2020. Involuntary hunger has been slowly dropping since, but the latest survey conducted in April 2022, still yielded a 12.2 percent involuntary hunger rate, still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

That 12.2 percent translates into some 3.1 million Filipino families having suffered from involuntary hunger during that first quarter of 2022.

Political scientists and historians have long documented hanger and, going a step further, describe how the hangry masses will rise and revolt.

History, too, is replete with examples of rulers oblivious to the hanger surrounding them. France’s Marie-Antoinette, the queen during the French revolution, was said to have uttered, when told about the hangry masses, “Let them eat cake” but that might have been an early instance of fake news, with some pundits claiming that what she had actually said was brioche, not quite cake but still a rich bread made from butter and eggs.

Historians now say she didn’t make that remark—cake or brioche— at least not publicly, but that didn’t spare her the guillotine as the hangry masses cheered and jeered.

That unproven quote remained in circulation maybe because people wanted to believe that merciless kings and queens and assorted despots would not have cared less about hanger.

To some extent, our modern times have been tragic in how hunger, and the oppression and exploitation that causes that hunger, can be obscured or suppressed, thus staving off people’s discontent and anger.

Anthropologist Sidney Mintz has written about the terrible working conditions of sugar plantation workers in the 19th century, including those in the Philippines. The irony is that sugar was used as well to suppress hunger among the workers.

To some extent, we still see how sugar is used today against hanger, impoverished families feeding a hungry infant with diluted sweetened condensed milk. We see, too, all too often, malnourished children clutching a tiny plastic bag containing a soft drink.

About 10 years ago, Frederick Errington, Tatsuro Fujikura, and Deborah Gewertz co-authored a book that chronicles the success of modern capitalism with a food product that cheaply and quickly satiates hunger, but without providing significant nutrition. The title of the book was “The Noodle Narratives,” about the 20th century’s most amazing food invention: instant noodles, worldwide sales surpassing $40 billion, many of its consumers the poor, hungry but not angry.

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