The Hunger Games are a series of books about many things.

They're about violence, they're about propaganda, they're about fascism,

but they're also quite simply about hunger.

Almost every character in the Hunger Games goes through a period of starvation.

And this has always been like a really evocative theme for me

and in children's literature in general.

Like when I was growing up, I learned a lot

about the famine as an Irish person. And it was always so frightening because the famine in Ireland

in the 19th century happened, yes, because we had a potato crop that failed, but also because

you know, all the rest of the food

that was in the country, all the kind of orchards full of fruit and all the vegetables and all the

livestock was completely and 100% owned by the British who had colonized the country and they

were not interested in sharing. So essentially it was a man-made disaster that I believe halved the population of Ireland,

if I remember correctly.

And so it's naturally very evocative reading about famine and fiction.

It's very evocative seeing famine in the real world.

So this week I'd like to turn you on to a charity called the World Central Kitchen.

Now the World Central Kitchen has been providing meals for people who are affected by this man-made famine in Gaza.

And the other day they had to stop providing meals.

Let me read a statement from them.

So World Central Kitchen teams in Gaza have

run out of ingredients to cook warm meals. We served 80,000 meals on July 19th, emptying the last of our

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