June 12, 2025
The Hunger Plan
by Will Hodgkinson
“How are you doing today? How are you feeling?” The Volunteer scrolls on his phone, chewing his bottom lip. “Arjan? Am I saying that right?”
Arjan nods. His head is heavy, and he draws out the nod so he can catch the breeze from the examining room’s fan. The breeze feels like breath on his face, but he is grateful for it all the same. It makes him think of Raja, of her breath in his ear at night.
“Arjan. That’s right. Good to see you again, man.” The Volunteer grins. He has been eating samosas, Arjan notices. There are golden flakes of pastry stuck to his front teeth. Arjan smells, imagines he can smell, potato, saffron, yellow cumin. Saliva floods his mouth, and he forces himself to stop. The smell of piss and Lemon Pledge returns.
“So what happened, man?” The Volunteer glances at his phone, taps and scrolls. “You fainted.”
Arjan nods again. The fan’s hot breath licks his face.
“Jeez.” The Volunteer shakes his head in commiseration. “We’re getting that a lot. Hot day, yeah.”
“Hot.” Arjan repeats.
“How you feeling now? Still dizzy?”
Arjan shrugs, feeling his skin tighten on his collarbones. The effort makes the room swim. It wouldn’t take much, he imagines, for the bone to break through. Then the blood would run and pool in the hollow of his chest, and he would catch the blood and lick its brothy richness from his cupped palms.
“It comes and goes,” he says.
“Good days and bad, right?” The Volunteer says. “Like all of us. The struggle is real, man. The struggle is real.”
“It’s real.”
The Volunteer scrolls on his phone. “It’s tough, I know. How long’s it been for you?”
Arjan says nothing. He knows what the Volunteer means, but he likes making him come out with it.
“Y’know,” The Volunteer tries a sympathetic grimace. Arjan glimpses a hemisphere of pea, impossibly verdant, lodged between two back molars. “Since you’ve last eaten.”
Arjan considers, watching the Volunteer. “I don’t know. I haven't been counting.”
“Longer than a week?”
“Longer.”
“Oh gosh.” The Volunteer clicks his tongue. “I’m sorry man.”
“I’m sorry too.”
The fan whines.
“I’ve got something new for you today,” the Volunteer says. “I think it could really help you. Help all you guys.” His grin widens.
“Have you heard of Neuchew?” The Volunteer takes a pink foil packet from the cardboard box on his desk. On the box, a beaming cartoon child rubs his belly. The rainbow that frames him radiates multicolored lightning bolts.
Arjan shakes his head.
“No? From NexxtGen This’ll change our lives man. All of ours.”
Arjan waits.
“Just came in,” the Volunteer explains. He shakes the packet. “A whole shipment.” He lowers his voice to a stage-whisper, breathy with awe. “It’s a Godsend, man, I’m telling you. Not a minute too soon.”
“I don’t know,” Arjan says. “I don’t know what it is.”
“You don’t need to, man.” The Volunteer opens the packet. The tablets are purple, sealed in plastic blisters.
“Is grape ok?” The Volunteer rummages in the bag. “Also got bubblegum, watermelon, banana, and---oooh----Mango Blast.”
“Grape?” Arjan repeats. His tongue swims in salvia.
“Yeah. That good with you, man.”
“It’s good.”
The Volunteer puts two of the tablets in a paper cup.
“Do you want them in water?” The Volunteer gestures at the soapstone mortar that sits beside the box.
Painted in a design of dancing stick figures, the mortar has always struck him as incongruous. It is supposed to reassure him, he thinks, this reminder of an apothecary he has never visited.
“I can crush them up, mix them up good. Tastes like Kool Aid. You ever had Kool Aid?”
“That’s okay.” Arjan swallows. Already he tastes, imagines he can taste the grape. “I don’t need water.”
He sucks the tablets to keep the grape taste, its chalky sweetness, on his tongue. The Volunteer watches him.
“Good right?”
Arjan can’t answer. If he answers he will have to swallow, and the saliva filling his mouth is too sweet. He nods.
“Yeah, man!” The Volunteer grins. The pea winks.
“It’ll help. That’s a guarantee. See if you can’t feel the difference.”
Arjan leaves with the packet of grape Neuchews tucked in his jeans pocket. In reflex he closes his eyes against the sun, but the dizziness he expects doesn’t come. Across the square, the dog still lies in the drying puddle of its urine, the flies sparking sunlight. But their whine has faded---or he has gotten used to it. He stands a moment with the other men who crowd the clinic steps, watching the flies, smelling what they are tasting. On the faces of the men, disgust fights envy. One of the men licks his lips, spits, and turns back to the clinic doors. Arjan recognizes the rasp of breath in his throat. He has caught himself making the same suppressed groan often enough.
The dog’s flesh has not yet turned, and its ferris richness thickens the heat. Arjan thinks of stew, the pop and bubble of it on the fire. But the image fails to trigger the hunger pangs he has come to both dread and anticipate.
It is only when he is back in the groves that the extent of the change becomes clear. The sensations that have made work here a torment for the past three weeks---the string of dust shaken up by the picking; the bittersweetness of fruit and insecticide; the leaves so green they look black in the sun---have lost their effect. Astride the step ladder, he marvels at his hands, their bird-like dart and flash through the leaves. In his hands peaches appear and vanish into his satchel before their presence---their fuzz and give and scent---have time to register. He climbs, he picks, the satchel gets heavier. But, buoyed by the summery remoteness that has enveloped him, he does not feel its weight. When dusk comes, he almost forgets to steal.
On the way home he passes the crowd gathered outside the canary fence, but, he realizes, he has no desire to join them. The sweetness that weighs down the air does not slow his stride. It takes an effort to stop, to anchor the lightness that has hollowed his body. He breathes open-mouthed, waiting for the cramps, which have doubled over a dozen of the other men to come. But already, he knows they won’t.
In the absence of hunger, other sensations penetrate. He can hear the slicing machines---a sound like oiled cicadas.
Raja is cooking dinner when he gets home. She’s put the lid on the pot, so that the neighbors won’t see the steam.
“What’ll it be tonight?” he asks.
Kneeling by the fire, she smiles at him.
“What? You don’t want the surprise?”
“Can’t stand the suspense.”
Raja raises the lid. The forage has been good today, Arjan sees; among the millet seed are three or four grubs, and a dead cricket fat with larvi.
“I can make it last,” Raja says. “Three days, maybe four.”
“That long?”
“If the water lasts. I’ll have to.”
“Maybe not.”
She looks at him, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“Eat first. Ok?”
Sitting at the table, Arjan considers his bowl, the measure of tea-colored broth it holds. His distaste puzzles him, this ghost of the revulsion he first experienced three weeks ago when their rice ran out and Raja came back with four dead caterpillars wrapped in a piece of burlap.
“What’s wrong?” Raja is watching him.
“Nothing. Long day.”
“You said we should eat.”
“Go on, then.”
“You first.”
Arjan shrugs, savoring the movement, the new lightness in his shoulders.
“You can have mine. I’m not hungry.”
“No,” Raja is shaking her head. “You are. You’ve got to be.”
“It’s okay.” He holds up his hands to preempt the tears that have already risen to her eyes.
“I went to the clinic today.”
“Yeah?” Her laugh comes out as a sob. “You finally got a banquet there. Ten courses?”
“Don’t cry,” he says. “It’ll make the thirst worse.”
“Fuck that. Fuck you. I won’t let you die.”
“I won’t,” he says. He smiles. “I’m better.”
From his pocket he takes the packet of NeuChews and lays it on the table.
“What’s this?”
“They help,” he says. “With the hunger.”
Raja taps the rim of her bowl. “This helps.”
Arjan shakes his head. “Not as much.”
“Yeah. This is actually food. Not some pharma reject shit.” She rattles the packet. “This is what these bastards send us instead of rice. Fucking Flintstones vitamins?”
“Try it,” Arjan urges. “Try it, and then tell me it’s reject shit.”
“Why should I, when I have you to give me the pitch instead?”
“I’ll give you more than that” he says. Smiling, he reaches into his pocket again.
The peach is still cool in his hand, downy with condensation. He sets it on the table. “For you,” he says. “To wash it down.”
“They could have caught you,” she says.
“Fuck that.” He laughs. “I picked my quota. This is for us.”
Raja takes the peach, turning it in her hands, which, he sees, are trembling.
“They taste like that too,” he says. “Like fruit.”
“This is fruit.” She holds up the peach.
“Wash it down,” he says. “Trust me.”
She gets the rusty jackknife and cuts the skin of the peach.
He picks up the Neuchew packet and pops a tablet from its plastic blister.
“Just one,” he says. “Grape.”
“What?”
“That’s what it tastes like.”
He watches as she swallows the tablet and squeezes the peach and drinks the juice from her cupped hands.
“Good right?”
Raja looks at him. Juice is running from the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know. You don’t either.”
“I know,” Arjan says. “I know I’m better. And you will be too. Soon.”
Silt, the peach weeps juice.
‘We’re talking about an end to hunger.” The Founder paces the stage, tracked by spotlights that pulsate in time to his words.
Sitting on the overturned bucket in the yard, Arjan holds up his phone to catch the signal, squinting to read the subtitles. The hot wind---this jeering parody of monsoon---is blowing again, and the blowing dust makes gray cloud-shadows against the starless sky. Tarpaulins flap---a fleshy sound, which Arjan realizes now has lost its associations with sides of beef, thick-cut and heavy with blood. In the groves the sprinklers are running, smoothing the sound of the wind.
The video buffers.
“...In crisis.The world’s people are in crisis like never before.” Behind the Founder, images cycle on the screen: drained rice paddies baked to a desert of cracked mud; an emaciated baby; a U.N truck overturned and burning, naked children on hands and knees, fighting for the grain that spills from torn sacks.
“Drought on five continents, systemic crop failures, flooding. 4.8 billion people at critical risk of famine.”
Grit stings Arjan’s face, but he keeps the phone steady, concentrating on the screen.
“4.8 billion people,” the Founder repeats. “Think about that. We are dealing with a magnitude of suffering never before seen in human history.” He pauses, as though listening to the wind scouring the dead land.
“But the greater the problems, the greater are the solutions!” The spotlights brighten to cue the applause, which rasps in the phone’s speakers.
“What do I always say?” The Founder asks. “Crisis breeds innovation. Disaster brings disruption. It’s time to break the paradigm. And that’s what we at Nexxt Generation are all about.”
Applause sizzles in the speakers.
“We are looking at the problem the wrong way around,” the Founder says. “When there’s famine, what’s the go-to response? Send aid, move food around. Easy, right? Simple, right?” He sighs, a hiss of static. “We thought so. And that’s been our strategy for the past 100 years. But it’s time to face facts. We’ve got to be honest with ourselves and with the world. We owe it to those 4.8 billion going hungry every night.
“That old strategy has failed. Food has failed. We have to update our thinking. Allocating aid is no longer scalable when most of those 4.8 billion are the ones growing the food for the rest of us. We’re globalized now, all regions, all continents, all of us, connected, interlinked by supply chains, free trade, free markets. We’re talking global networks that depend on trade and export---export of grain, export of crops, export of livestock---market forces that large scale allocation would destroy and by doing that, only make the problem worse. Let’s face it: We’re a world market and what we need are market solutions. It is time for a new approach.”
Another image appears: the smiling cartoon kid in his halo of lightening bolts.
“NeuChew,” the caption reads. “A Cure For Hunger.”
“What we need now is not more food, but less hunger,” the Founder says. “That’s what NewChew will deliver. A completely metabolic rewiring that will make the the effects of hunger a thing of the past; that will turn starving men, women, and children back into functioning, balanced, and protective stakeholders, who can build and grow in their communities. NextGen working with over 800 affiliated NGOs is already providing 400,000 NeuChew samples free of charge to affected regions.”
The applause seethes.
“We’re on the brink of a new future” the Founder says. “Together, we will make hunger a memory.”
Arjan turns off his phone with the applause still buzzing in the speakers. The wind has died. Among the groves, the sprinklers hiss, a sound like escaping air in the stillness.
Inside Raja is sleeping. She is lying on her side of the cot, her head propped on her joined hands. On her face is a half smile, and running across her cheek is a line of saliva that shines in the darkness. Arnjan bends to wipe her cheek. Raja stirs. Her lips twitch before regaining the shape of the smile. Kneeling beside her, he kisses her forehead. Her skin is dry and tastes of dust.
He crosses to the table. Raja has forgotten to wrap the peach in burlap, and the ants have found it. He brushes the ants off the peach and picks it up, weighing it in his hands. He is shaking, he realizes. Fighting his revulsion, he bites the peach and chews its flesh to a pulpy slime that coats his tongue. The muscles in his throat clench when he swallows. He wretches, bent over the table, but nothing comes up. The saliva that fills his mouth tastes faintly of grapes.
“Metabolic rewiring,” he says. His laughter shakes him like his nausea .
“How are you doing, man? How long’s it been?”
The Volunteer has been eating jerky; Arjan can smell it on his breath, the fat and brine. A care package, he supposes. A palate-cleanser of the exotic. He can picture the Volunteer eating the jerky. He concentrates on the sensations this image evokes---salt, fat, grease---trying to summon the hunger pangs. His stomach tightens, and he feels a flutter of hope. But it’s only the sickness.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve lost count.”
“That’s good!” The Volunteer claps his hands together. “Praise be to the Neuchews! Which reminds me---” There is another cardboard box on the examining room’s desk. The Volunteer produces another packet of NeuChews.
“Watermelon, Ok?” He is holding out the packet.
Arjan says nothing.
“No grape this time,” the Volunteer says. “Sorry about that, man. But that just because it’s flying off the shelves.” He gestures at the boxes stacked against the wall: a chorus of cartoon children smiling in unison. “New shipment just came in. We’ll have more grape soon. Hang in there, ok, man?”
“I can’t,” Arjan says.
“What’s that, man?”
“When I try to eat---” He shakes his head, hoping the room will swim, but it stays clear.
“Oh man, I gotcha.” Wrinkles appear on the Volunteer's forehead. “Nothing to worry about. No sweat right.”
“We can’t eat,” Arjan says. “Not me, not my wife.”
“Right.” The Volunteer grimaces. “Well, man. That’s the point, yeah. You shouldn’t try, you know. That’s the point, y’know. That’s the cure. A metabolic rewiring. What it’s all about. Transforming your body to eliminate hunger.” The grimace becomes a grin. Arjan watches the laugh-lines collect around the Volunteer’s eyes. “You saw the Ted Talk by now?”
Arjan nods.
“Awesome stuff, right? Really inspiring. Lays it out pretty well, don’t you think?”
Arjan says nothing.
“Your body’s adjusting,” the Volunteer says. “Getting used to the Chews, and kicking the food habit. You’ve got your energy, you’ve got all the necessary chemicals, all the good juices pumping, so that meals don’t fit in with the new program. And that’s what we want right? When there just isn't enough to go around.”
“But the chews…” Arjan says.
“The Chews!” The Volunteer brightens. “Plenty of those, my man. Don’t worry about that. Enough to last the duration.”
“Duration?”
“Y’know.” The Volunteer grins, apologetic. “Your body’s only got so much energy to give. They still havn’t figured out a workaround for that. Not yet. But they will, sure they will, soon enough. Till then, my friend, we all gotta take it one day at a time.”
Smiling hurts his gums. He can feel his teeth loosening, the squirm and yield of their roots. In another moment the blood will come and he will taste the salt he no longer craves.
“Yes,” he says. “One day at a time.”
Around him the other pickers move, their tempo sped up to match his. Their t-shirts, bleached translucent, mould their vertebrae and ribs, which, shadowed by the sun, ripple as though oiled by their motion. They have a rhythm, Arjan thinks, we have a rhythm: An articulated machinery of bones of which he is one armature, no less oiled. He picks; he climbs. The satchel gets heavy, but he no longer feels its weight.
On his way back he stops at the cannery. The crowd, dispersed this past week by promises of free NeuChews at the Clinic, has reassembled. One of the men is kneeling in the weeds, breathing in harsh, deliberate gasps, in tandem with the wind. He is sucking a tablet, Arjan notices, and his open mouth leaks pinkish saliva.
When he gets home, he finds Raja wiping down the table, on which a bowl of broth lies upended. The rag in her hand is stained pink. He can smell stomach acid, its yellow ferment. He can smell blood too, the iron shrillness of it.
“One taste,” Raja says. “Just a spoonful, and I couldn’t get it down.”
“I know,’ Arjan says. “You shouldn’t have tried.”
“Why not,” she asks. “Why the fuck not? We have to eat.”
“No,” he says. “Not anymore.”
When he hugs her, he feels no warmth, no pressure of flesh on flesh. The knobs of her vertebrae fit his hands. He pictures their skeletons interlocked, and finds peace in the image, its calcified symetry.
‘What’s happening to us,” Raja whispers. “What have we done?” He can feel her heart beating, the thrum of it in his breastbone.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But whatever it is, it’s done.” He laughs. “Metabolic rewiring.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Not anymore.”
Lying beside Raja that night, he tries to savor the bready smell of their starvation. He pictures his distended stomach, rounded by its emptiness, in which, even now, his cells in their millions are devouring themselves. His wasting has accelerated, Arjan knows. With dispassion he considers his transformation. His skin tightens. He can feel his bones shift, his skeleton asserting itself, shedding the pretense of its flesh.
When sleep comes, he dreams he is sitting crossed legged beneath the peach trees. The dead dog lies on the ground before him. The wound in its distended belly weeps maggots, which he catches in his cupped hands. His mouth fills with saliva that tastes of grapes, but his lips will not open. He tries to scream and cannot. The dog pulsates; its belly bursts; the maggots foam in a pink-whiteness that floods his lap. Then his mouth bursts too, and his scream pours out with his blood.
Arjan sits up in the cot, his heart kicking. He can feel his heartbeat in his bones. The sweat that coats his skin has a vinaigrette sweetness. When the nausea passes he reaches for Raja. She is lying beside him. Her skin is cold, gritty with dust. He feels for her pulse, but already he knows he will find none. She has been dead for at least an hour. On her cheek, a fly is crawling, following the track of a dried tear.
The Clinic is dark. The men who crowd the porch do not stir when Arjan approaches. They sit or lie curled in on themselves. Some are asleep; others, he knows, have died in the night.
The door is unlocked, as he knows it will be. Anyday, anytime the Volunteer likes to say. The next shipment of Neuchews has come in; boxes lie piled in the exam room. Emblazoned on their sides, cartoon children smile up at him. He smiles back, as he rips their bellies open.
He is opening his third box when he hears movement. Socked feet slap the linoleum; a light comes on.
“Man, what’s going on?” The Volunteer is standing in the doorway. He is wearing paisley boxers and a T-shirt, on which another of the Neuchew children simpers.
“It’s okay man.” He squints. Among the upended boxes, Arjan stands.
“I got you.” The Volunteer holds up his hands. “Midnight snack, right?” He giggles. “Can’t get enough of the Chews. That’s okay. I get it.” He takes an exaggerated step back. A trick from de-escalation training, Arjan supposes. But the Volunteer has miscalculated. His foot skids on a crumpled Neuchew packet, and he falls against the wall.
“That’s okay, man. No need for anyone to get hurt. Plenty to go around.”
“I know.” Arjan is smiling as he raises the mortar in his hands “More than enough.”
He runs as though weightless, (which, by now he supposes he almost is), carried by the dust his bare feet churn. The mortar wedged beneath his arm increases, rather than checks, his momentum. Steered by its weight, he does not realize where he is going until he sees the cannery.
It takes no effort to vault the fence. The barbed wire flays his back and snags on his vertebrae, but he no longer feels the pain. He runs with his blood pattering on the asphalt behind him. In the main shed, the vats stand, banked in the dimness. The smell of the heavy syrup congeals the air.
His momentum, Arjan discovers, is still carrying him. The weightless ease conferred by the Neuchews has not yet failed. Arjan climbs to the catwalk that runs the length of the shed. Below, in the open vats, peach segments shine like ingots.
He upends the mortar. Ground, the NeuChews leave no trace. Their pastel dust disappears as soon as it has settled, absorbed by the syrup, whose fructose richness will likewise subsume the taste of grapes.
At the end of the catwalk, Arjan feels his legs give out. Falling comes as a relief. Through holes in the zinc roof, he can see the moon, which the blowing dust clouds, but does not hide. Far away, in another shed, in another dimension, slicing machines are humming. Lulled, Arjan closes his eyes, and breathes in the sweetness, until all he can taste is his blood.