A Modest Proposal About Hunger

Looking into how hunger in Ireland affected literature, a story was written called A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift. Swift, who was an Irish man mainly wrote about political issues but included dark humor in his stories to “lighten it up.”

In A Modest Proposal, Swift emphasizes on how hungry the people of Ireland were because of hunger that was going on and how broken their government was. Swift proposed to eat that the Irish folk eats their children. He had some justification for his reasoning. Swift wrote, that by the time children are around the age of six, they lose their innocence and start committing crimes like stealing (615). He uses “math” also to help justify as he states that if there were one hundred and twenty thousand children, half would be left to help keep the population up. Then the remaining half only half of those are males. That would be a quarter of the population of children left (615). Swift then compares these children to cattle, hogs, chickens, and sheep. This would give anyone who is reading his proposal the impression that children are more of a commodity rather than human beings. Swift also goes on in his writings that, if a baby is born, the price to feed that bay is fairly cheap because he will be just drinking breast milk. However, once that baby gets off from drinking his mother's breast he will only become a financial burden to the family. So instead of being a burden to the family, this child could be sacrificed and feed the family with itself (616).

The real reason he kept referring to eating their babies was, first the families who worked for other people's farms, they had no steady income and since the famine broke out, no one was making money. But since these families gave their everything to the landowners, the landowners practically owned the entire family. So the children would never have freedom since they were in so much debt (617).

Secondly, because these children were forced to work since they were young, everyone (even adults) were getting paid less (617). If the Irish folk take children, from ages two to twelve, people would be being paid more.

And then another point Swift had was that they would be less of a burden to keep them alive throughout their ages (617). These children would keep dying due to the lack of food and nutrients.

The 1770s shortage of food didn’t just make people hungry for food, it made them hungry to see a difference in government involvement. When the Irish needed help, their higher-ups did not come to the rescue. John Swift was hungry for change and by putting in that they would have to sacrifice their most beloved children by eating them, to keeping the rest of the family alive, stressed how hungry these Irish people were.

Today’s world could have avoided famines and hunger because of genetically modified organisms and known to have wide diverse food groups. The Potato famine and the Food Shortage of the 1770s affected the lives of many. Hunger and disease took the lives of over one million people. Hunger affected how people were treated. Hunger affected how people were making choices. In today’s society, especially in small towns, sometimes people overlook hunger and take the food that is placed on the tables for granted. However, the Irish would sacrifice their lives over it. God bless.