Hunger is Information, Not Urgency

I've been sitting with something.

It shows up at work when someone says let's grab lunch and what they actually mean is I need to think out loud and I need a witness. It shows up in family, where Sunday dinner was never really about the food and everyone knew it but nobody said it. It shows up in friendships that only seem to exist inside restaurants, and in romance where cooking for someone is one of the earliest ways we say something we're not ready to say out loud yet.

Food is everywhere in my relationships. And I've been wondering why.

Not in the way people usually wonder about it, like a food blogger realizing they have a "thing." More like noticing a thread running through every sector of my life and finally deciding to pull it.

Here's what I think… we use hunger as cover.

I'm starving. We should eat. You hungry?

We say these things and we mean them, technically, but that's not really why we're saying them. We say them because we don't have a better word for I want to be near you or I need to slow down or something is off and I think togetherness might help.

Real hunger, the kind people actually live with, is a different thing entirely. We're not that. What we're doing when we reach for food in the middle of a hard conversation or plan a dinner to soften a difficult ask or sit across from someone we love in a booth because it feels easier to look at a menu than at each other, that's not hunger. That's communication. We've just agreed not to call it that.

Hunger is Information

The body uses it to say something is needed here. But we've borrowed the word and started applying it to everything else we need and can't name. Closeness. Reassurance. A reason to stay at the table a little longer.

I don't think that's wrong. I think it might actually be one of the smarter things we do, reaching for food when we mean something harder, because at least we show up. At least there's a table. At least someone's passing the bread.

But I've started paying attention to what I'm actually hungry for when I suggest we eat.

And it's almost never just the food.

I Remain