Chapter 4 begins with an incident of infanticide: in 1965, a young mother murders here infant child and 1-year-old; when questioned, she replies that she wanted to stop them crying for milk. The mother is called an "unnatural creature," a description with which the author takes issue. Indeed, the claim the author wishes to make is that hunger is a force that actively suppresses and destroys what is "good" and "natural" in any other light. Building from anthropological and literary sources, the author seeks to investigate whether or not chronic hunger is a force that tears apart society or brings it together.

Next, the author describes what she believes is a "taboo" in scholarly literature, in regard to the study of hunger as a form of "lived experience"―that is, through the eyes and in the immediate context of those who experience it. Effectively, chronic hunger is normalized, causing severe collective trauma in a community.

In the next section, the author recounts the chronic malnutrition in economic terms, describing the dramatic drop in buying power of the average rural family of Northeastern Brazil; the effect of this decline in buying power can be seen in a contest of beans versus corn.