The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

by Daniel James Brown

Silently and implacably, serious hunger began to work its way into each of the cabins at the lake that week. Hunger is perhaps the strongest and most unyielding of human urges, according to Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History. Because it is so directly tied to our survival, it handily outcompetes most of our other emotions for our attention. It pesters us first, then nags us, and finally screams at us if we are unwilling or unable to satisfy its demands. Deprived of food, our brains conspire with our guts to make their mutual needs our foremost and most immediate concern. Our bodies require approximately two hundred grams of glucose per day to function normally, at least half of that fueling just one particularly vital organ, the brain. When our blood-sugar levels begin to drop, our brains grow displeased—we get uncomfortable, we grow tired and irritable, we develop pounding headaches. Our stomachs also rumble in complaint. If they still find themselves empty after this complaining, they begin to produce the hunger hormone ghrelin and send it via the bloodstream to our lower brains, which promptly begin to shriek their own complaints all the more loudly. At this point we are going to eat, or try darned hard to eat. If for some reason we can’t eat, or can’t eat very much, a number of other physiological and psychological processes then begin to kick in.