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Samantha Atkins
DiGirolamo
H English 2
7 September 2022
“‘Where are your lunches?’ Dad asked us. We looked at each other and shrugged.
‘There’s no food in the house,’ Brian said.”(Walls 77). In Jeannette Walls Memoir, The Glass
Castle, she expresses the normality of running on empty stomachs throughout her treacherous
childhood. Although this theme isn’t directly stated it is seen in little moments such as Jeannette
and Brian stealing food from others and when Jeannette would eat out of the trash at school.
These moments showcase how the Walls kids are not having their basic needs met. When the
basic need for food isn’t met people will go at great lengths to satisfy their hunger.
Hunger can make wrong decisions seem right. For example, when Jeanette and Brian
lean towards scavenging for their food the rumbling of their stomachs make things sound like a
good idea. Jeannette starts stealing food from her classmates: “During recess at school, I’d slip
back into the classroom and find something in some other kid’s lunch bag that wouldn’t be
missed”(Walls 68). Jeannette knows this is the wrong thing to do but she cannot help it because
she is extremely hungry. To explain further the inability to think straight, your blood sugar
decreases following excessive hunger. An article on “piedmont'' brings light to the consequences
of not eating. A quote the dietician from the article says is that “the brain uses glucose to run
efficiently and if there is not enough glucose for the brain to use, your body does not function at
100 percent” (Robinson 4). This further proves that Jeannette stealing is a result of hunger as
well as her lack of glucose. When the fundamentals of food are not seen, poor choices are made.
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Utmost hunger drives unsanitary outcomes. To explain, Jeannette would eat leftovers out
of the bathroom trash at school. Jeannette did not see why people were wasting a perfectly good
lunch: “When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in garbage pails, I’d go
retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food” (Walls
173). This is immensely unsanitary as its spreading germs and the food is thrown away in
bathroom trash cans. Furthermore, an article from “worldvision” reveals the harsh, unhygienic
foods that countless around the world, in poverty, have to eat. A nine year old from Turkana
says, “Hyena is bitter. When we eat it, it gives us diarrhea”(worldvision 23). Consuming
contaminated food has bad aftermaths. Hunger drives people to consume items that are not good
for them because they do not have any other choice.
In conclusion, the Walls kids are desperate and compelled to make bad choices because
of their need for nourishment. They couldn’t help the unhealthy circumstances that came with the
result of Rex and Rosemary’s lack of budget control. Although throughout the book hunger is a
taboo subject among the Walls family the parts seen by the readers speak louder to the struggle
the children went through.
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Works Cited
Costanza, Kari. “Facing famine: Battling hunger with hope in East Africa.” World Vision, 12 July
2017,
https://www.worldvision.org/hunger-news-stories/facing-famine-hunger-hope-east-africa.
Accessed 13 September 2022.
Walls, Jeannette. The glass castle : a memoir. Scribner, 2005.
“What Happens to the Body When You Skip Meals?” Piedmont Healthcare,
https://www.piedmont.org/living-better/what-happens-to-the-body-when-you-skip-meals.
Accessed 13 September 2022.