“The complex history of humanity and of our individual lives is most essentially the history of our hungers, and our endeavours to satisfy them. Our accidental and accident-prone lives begin not with a cry of joy, or surprise at our existence, but of need. From our first breath to our last we are enclosed in a fundamental existential truth: that there is a gap between the state that we are in and the state we would like to be in. Hunger is the experience of that gap, from which arises our misery and our joy, our hope and our despair, our wretchedness and our glory.”

Raymond Tallis, Hunger, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008, 1.