Hidden Hunger

A country road west of Kathmandu. Our bus broke down, a replacement should arrive sometime or another. A small group of aid workers, dieticians, and agricultural experts is standing around and looking at the Dhaulagiri basked in the light of the setting s

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Hidden Hunger

A country road west of Kathmandu. Our bus broke down, a replacement should arrive sometime or another. A small group of aid workers, dieticians and agricultural experts is standing around and looking at the Dhaulagiri basked in the light of the setting sun. It will be getting cold soon, very soon and we start to wonder where we can find ‘shelter’ until our replacement vehicle gets here. We find ourselves among small fields with trees, if they can still be called that, lining the outer perimeters. Mostly, they are just a bare trunk without any branches except for a green cap at the very top from what was spared. The branches were all cut off to be used as firewood and now rise in smoke form from the reddish brown huts, which stand like tiny molehills in the smoky fields. At the side of the road, in front of one such hut a wispy man is standing and silently beckons us to come in by opening the door. The smell of soot and animals permeates the semidarkness of the inside of the hut. The man sets glasses down onto a wooden table and invites us to drink some tea. Tucked away in the background, a young woman stands in front of the soot-churning stove along with three children who smile as, full of curiosity, they inch their way toward us. A boy, probably 10-years old, holds the hand of a girl as they approach. She appears slender and small, but in no obvious way undernourished. She looks up and smiles. Her eyes are strikingly expressionless and milky white. Prinuma, that is her name, is blind. On top of that, she is also deaf. Her situation could have been avoided had her mother received enough iodine and vitamin A during pregnancy. Iodine would have prevented the deafness she was born with, just as vitamin A would have protected her against blindness which occurs after birth and in a child’s first few years if it is lacking. Prinuma must stay at home when her brother is at school. She relies on him to be her eyes whenever she leaves the house. And so she has no opportunity to develop and her brother has no possibility to help his father in the fields. Prinuma is one of the countless typical victims of hidden hunger. Prinuma is not hungry in the sense which we know and experience. The bowl of rice and sometimes green leaves steamed in oil which she eats is enough to satisfy

H. K. Biesalski, Hidden Hunger, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-33950-9_2, Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

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Hidden Hunger

her hunger. However, it is a kind of red herring which diverts us from the real problem of undernourishment or malnutrition. Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer prize-winner and columnist for the New York Times, describes hidden hunger in Guinea-Bissau: The most heartbreaking thing about starving children is their equanimity. They don’t cry. They do not smile. They do not move. They do not show a flicker of fear, pain or interest. Tiny, wizened zombies, they shut down all nonessential operations to employ every last calorie to stay alive.

The World Bank, according to Kristof, has calculated that the fin