Hunger Awareness Exemptions Stymy Empathy

By TMP 43rd Editorial Board

On Thursday, November 13, Milton upperclassmen attended a performance of this year’s fall upper school musical Hadestown. The production’s first act concluded with the song “Why We Build The Wall,” which we remember for its chilling refrain, “The enemy is poverty, and the wall keeps out the enemy.” The line’s message—that the economically privileged hide behind a “wall” of ignorance to avoid reckoning with the reality of inequality—resonated especially on Thursday, as the performance followed the Community Engagement’s annual Hunger Awareness Event. As expected, this year’s event drew a wave of bad-faith criticism and refusal to engage. As observed by attendees of the Financial Aid at Milton (FAM) affinity space held after the event, many students threw out their food, ordered lunch online, and snuck off to Lower Mills to eat. These reactions change little year after year.

Even more concerning, however, are exemptions to the event given to certain student groups. Last year, due to concerns about playoff performance, the CEPP exempted Boys’ Varsity Soccer players from any “lower-” or “middle-class” meals. This year, math students taking the November American Math Competition test received similar exemptions. By trying to minimize the inconvenience the event poses to students, CEPP itself contradicts its express goal of forcing students to understand the experience of not having a choice in what to eat. We contend that CEPP should more firmly refuse demands for exemptions and instead insist that Milton community members engage in the event in a way that materially impacts our lives. More broadly, all socially-conscious campus groups should steer clear of engineering opportunities to “opt out of empathy,” even in the face of controversy.

At Milton, we learn about inequality every day, discussing it in classes, clubs, and Straus Desserts. In order to prepare us to meaningfully act against this inequality, however, Milton must instill in us a sense of empathy, and empathy requires intimate understanding. The Hunger Awareness Event is one avenue through which Milton finishes the job and imparts this understanding. By forcing us to feel, intimately, the consequences of being food-insecure, in our own comfortable lives, the Hunger Awareness event helps us develop empathy that compels us to action. The 2.3 billion people who faced food insecurity in 2024, per the UN, do not get to choose when they feel the effects of their poverty. Thus, the event’s core element is the unavoidable discomfort it imposes on us; it is precisely the fact that we do not get to choose if we participate in the event that makes it such a powerful driver of solidarity.

Exemptions like those mentioned above create a broader discourse in which those who support the event must concede that the event should not impact our lives in any consequential way. This concession implies that our sports records, math test results, and packed theatrical performances—boons we enjoy because of our privilege—take primacy over the chance to earnestly reflect on the inequalities created by those very privileges. In other words, we recognize that the event makes all of our lives marginally harder, perhaps in ways that have greater consequences for some than others, but we contend that that is the point.

By exempting student groups from Hunger Awareness, we allow ourselves to treat empathy as an optional expression of one’s day-to-day state rather than a constant communal practice, and to prioritize convenience over growth, failing Milton’s mission of imbuing students with societal responsibility. The Milton Paper asks that, in the future, the organizers of all events that seek to discomfort or disquiet our privileged existences, from guest speakers who challenge political orthodoxy to volunteering drives that ask for more than an IA swipe, start to understand that, the more students complain that the event inconveniences them, the better the event is working, and to combat the urge to tout convenience as a selling point. Finally, to those who support the ethos of Hunger Awareness in particular: do not concede that confronting privilege should be easy; discomfort is the point.