A problem that occurs when you don’t eat anything for a very long time. It’s like extreme hunger. What makes it worse is that when you end up eating something you’ll feel nauseous and lose appetite quickly.
Someone 1: “Why didn’t you finish your food? 10 minutes ago you said you’d die from starvation.”
Someone 2: “Nope that’s all I can eat today.”
Someone 1: “You just ate 2 slices of pizza.”
Someone 2: “Exactly.”
The micro-level, moralistic cousin to famine rationalization. It personalizes hunger, suggesting an individual's starvation results from a lack of hustle, poor planning, or divine will, rather than from dispossession, engineered scarcity, or the violence of markets. It turns a social condition into a personal failing.
Example: "They're hungry because they don't budget properly or value education." This starvation rationalization ignores the reality of food deserts, unlivable wages, and the time poverty of working three jobs. It rationalizes a society's failure to feed its people by blaming the empty stomachs themselves.