Ophelia de Vere

  At some point, everything comes back. In light of the retro-mania that currently seems to be everywhere, it is hardly surprising that the Twiggy aesthetic, ’90s heroin chic, the Y2K size-zero mania, and cotton balls soaked in orange juice as a dieting advice are also experiencing a comeback. But is Alice really returning to Hungerland?  Some sentences burn themselves so deeply into your memory that they accompany you for a lifetime. “Be glad you don’t know what real hunger feels like,” is one of them. While the echo of that sentence still rings crystal clear in my mind decades later, the context in which my now 99-year-old grandmother may have said those words has faded. Perhaps she was thinking of the catastrophic hunger winter of 1946/47, when temperatures dropped to minus 20 degrees, harvests failed, and the lingering consequences of war meant that food rations were barely enough to survive. Perhaps she was referring to the famines of the 1990s, for example, in North Kore...