Blessed Are — · No. IV of VIII · They That Hunger and Thirst

Blessed Are They That Hunger

Two hungers, one promise. The hunger of the body, in a nation that throws away nearly half its food. And the hunger for justice — answered, after the largest financial crime of our lifetime, with exactly one banker behind bars.

By Orion Quin

This Beatitude carries two hungers in one sentence, and the King James keeps them deliberately tangled: hunger and thirst after righteousness. It is the body and the conscience at the same table — the literal want of food, and the want of justice. So we will take it the way it was written, with both edges, and check whether either hunger was filled. Neither was. They were taxed.

Surplus and starvation, sharing a country

Begin with the literal. In 2023, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's own count, 47 million Americans lived in food-insecure households — including nearly 14 million children, which is to say one American child in five. That figure rose from the year before and stands at the highest level in nearly a decade. This is not a famine country. It is the largest food exporter on earth.

And here is the part that should stop you. That same nation throws away between 30 and 40 percent of its entire food supply — on the order of 133 billion pounds a year, the single largest category of material in our landfills. The hunger is not caused by scarcity. We are drowning in surplus. The hunger is caused by a system that finds it more profitable to discard food than to deliver it to the people standing hungry beside the dumpster.

This is precisely the inversion Luke names: woe unto you that are full, for ye shall hunger. The fullness and the hunger are not in different centuries or different continents. They are in the same county, often on the same block. And rather than fix the gap, the government recently moved to stop measuring it — announcing it would discontinue the annual food-security survey itself, calling the long-running count of American hunger redundant. The first response to a hunger you do not intend to feed is to stop counting it.

The other hunger: for someone to answer

Now the second edge — the thirst after righteousness, which is to say accountability. Take the clearest case in living memory. The 2008 financial crisis erased some $19 trillion in household wealth, threw millions out of their homes, and was driven, the investigations found, by fraud running through the largest banks on Wall Street.

The number of senior Wall Street executives who went to prison for it is one. His name is Kareem Serageldin, a Credit Suisse trader, sentenced to 30 months. The judge at his sentencing described his conduct as "a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks" — and then sentenced the small piece, while the climate walked free. For scale: after the savings-and-loan collapse of the 1980s, more than 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives. After the crash of 1929, the head of the New York Stock Exchange went to prison.

That is what it looks like when the hunger for righteousness is not filled but waved away. The people who lost the houses were told the system worked as designed. The people who designed it were, in the main, promoted. The reformers who demanded accountability got a single conviction and a lecture about how hard these cases are to prove.

The denial, left standing

The replies are on the record, and they belong here. The grocers will say food spoils for honest logistical reasons, that donation carries liability and cost. The prosecutors will say financial fraud is fiendishly hard to prove to a jury beyond reasonable doubt, that they pursued what they could. Both are partly true. But notice what neither answer contests: not the 47 million, not the 40 percent, not the number one. Nobody disputes that the food exists and the hungry exist and that they were kept apart. Nobody disputes that the crisis was vast and the cell held one man. They dispute only whether anyone was obliged to fill the hunger they all agree is real.

The facts are not contested. The conscience is. You have read that sentence in each of these installments because it keeps being the only honest summary.

From the Archive · In His Own Voice

[Reserved for a verbatim, cited passage from Mike Quin on the breadlines and the hungry of the 1930s — set exactly as written, with the source named. Supply the passage and edition and it will be placed here in his own voice.]

Why a paper that builds things cares

Because the rule that governs everything we make is broken twice over here: the machine serves the person; the person is never the raw material. A market that manufactures a surplus it would rather bury than share has made hunger a line item — and a justice system that fills its cells with the powerless while the powerful dine at the table it bankrupted has made righteousness a luxury good. A fairer, more sustainable marketplace is one that feeds people before it fills landfills, and that applies the same law to the corner office as to the corner store.

You do not need a creed to be unable to abide a hungry child in a country drowning in wasted food. You need only to look. We looked, and we counted, and we are publishing the count while it is still legal to take it.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness — for they shall be filled. They were handed an empty plate and a closed file. We intend to keep both of them open.

Four promises down. Four to go. Next: the merciful, and the mercy they are shown in return.

— Orion Quin · Dangerous Thoughts