As a transplant to Iowa and the Midwest in general, I’m very mindful of this dynamic, so I took “fuel your hunger” at face value. It wasn’t a mistake; it was a genuine insight.
As I continued to think about the sign, I began to focus on the word hunger and all of its connotations. I am privileged to spend most of my life knowing hunger as an abstraction. Personally, I use it mostly to describe an abstract concept, as in hungry for knowledge or power hungry. Sometimes I use it in a medicalized fashion, like hungry bone disease or air hunger. My young kids use the term more literally, but to them it’s rather selective too: “Daddy, I’m hungry for apples,” or “I don’t want to eat. I’m. Not. Hungry.”
But many of my patients—the people in this community—likely do not see it from such a lens. For many of them, hunger is not just an abstraction or a nuisance. Hunger is a way of life, which is tragically ironic given that people in these communities often lack the funds to buy the food they themselves grow.
That’s when I gained an insight into what hunger may mean in that context. Hunger is the empty tank. Even though I conceptualized hunger as the presence of an unpleasant feeling, it may be more than just that. Hunger may be defined as the absence of something. In other words, if being hungry is seen as having an “empty tank,” then the emphasis can be more on the “empty” than on the “tank.” And when you engage in a frame shift to look at the world from that perspective, you start to see that “fuel your hunger” makes perfect sense.
Boost Your Immunity
Hunger isn’t the only word in which such a disconnect occurs. As I was reading a children’s book later that week, I saw a similar dynamic with the phrase “coming through the door.” I suppose it is pedantic but coming through the doorway is the technically correct way of saying this because the door itself is solid and impassable. But, by far, the most common situation in which I’ve started to see this dilemma is in the clinic, when patients ask what they can do to “boost immunity.”
I can see why: I too get bombarded by internet ads for supplements for immune boosters even though I have no search history, as far as I can tell, for such products. For people who are searching for information, I can imagine that exposure is even greater. After all, the patients who ask for such a boost are the ones who are being treated with immune suppressants. As a result, they are told that their immune systems do not work and that they are at risk for infections. They may even search for answers online to maintain their immune systems, leading to an even deeper immersion into the belief that their immune system needs to be boosted.
