The Hunger Games Film Left Me Hungry

I started reading The Hunger Games on Thursday night, finished it on Saturday afternoon, and then saw the movie on Sunday night: such fun!

Can’t remember the last time I read a book with such eagerness. I loved its blend of high-tech futuristic sci-fi with semi-old fashioned wilderness survival, its exploration of violence and resistance and redemption, creativity, culture, exploitation, and consumption.

And? It was just a very entertaining, engaging read.

The movie was not disappointing, either.

(Although I confess that, reading the book, I somehow assumed that everyone in Panem would be multiracial; these racist responses to the film are completely baffling.)

BUT–I do confess that I was a little surprised that food–which was almost a character in the book–was barely little more than a cameo in the film. Hunger (ahem!) is such an important part of what motivates and drives life in most of the districts, while the Capitol is marked by excess.

Yeah, I know that food/eating is kind of a preoccupation of mine, but to my mind, a strength of The Hunger Games is that Collins shows clearly that the highest cannot stand without the lowest: that technology, power, entertainment need raw materials and crops from the earth; that hungry people have energy for little else except finding food; that hunger and thirst lead all but inexorably to violence and murder but, occasionally, miraculously, to communion and love.

And so while I didn’t expect the film to be another great food movie, I’d kind of hoped that food would get more than a cameo.

I can only think it didn’t because it was made by well-fed people from the Capitol… 😉