> “She [Simone Weil] intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up... A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
Generally, no. Buying whatever one wants to eat may be an incentive, but in most US cities soup kitchens and/or access to the SNAP program are available. Malnutrition can be a real problem. and 10% of the US experiences food insecurity each year, but starvation is extremely rare.
In the US at least, hunger / food insecurity is a cross-cutting issue; people who own homes also run into it.
But food is so abundant and cheap here that even pocket change can get you enough calories to live on. Yeah eventually you might develop deficiencies, but that is likely years down the road, cheap food is fortified to prevent common deficiencies. That discounted day old box of donuts costs almost nothing and that cheap cereal lasts near forever if it is kept dry.
Most homeless folks can find a way to get food, even if it's not great food, via a network of public and private support organizations. So having enough food not to starve isn't necessarily an incentive to work, and that's a good thing because if they were literally starving we'd have even bigger problems.
Not being cynical at all. Getting food to just get by is very easy in a city. There is sooo much perfectly good food being thrown away even with packaging every day everywhere that it would be difficult not find food.
