Man knows true feeling of hunger

Harold Blickenstaff knows the pain of starvation. He never wastes food, and empathizes easily with undernourished people in the world.

Yet Blickenstaff doesn't live in the slum of a poor country.

Nor has be ever been a prisoner of war, or a citizen of a famine-stricken nation. In fact, the 82-year-old resident of Nevada City is an anti-war American. He was a conscientious objector during World War II.

And like 35 fellow conscientious objectors, he volunteered in an experiment on starvation in 1944 that aimed to help America learn how to rehabilitate starving people of the post-war world.

The experiment conducted by the University of Minnesota lasted a year. The volunteers lived in dorms at the university with very little interaction with their families. And a few months into it, Blickenstaff, who was then 20 years old, realized the procedure was way more rigorous that he'd ever expected.

Sixty-two years later, a book called "The Great Starvation Experiment: The heroic men who starved so that millions could live" by Todd Tucker, released this May, recounts the ordeal of the 36 men, all but four of whom stuck through the entire one-year period of the voluntary experiment, while hunger raked their body and mind.

"There were several reasons," Blickenstaff said, on why he participated in the experiment. "One, it seemed like the objective of finding out how to rehabilitate people who've starved, seemed a valid objective. It seemed that, in a way, it contradicts the idea that a conscientious objector is someone who is afraid of what might happen to him. It was a sacrifice I could make.

"Then also the experiment was only supposed to take a half-year's time and we had classes to prepare ourselves to do relief and reconstruction work once the war was over, and many of us did. I personally spent two years in Europe helping rebuild some of the devastated areas. Also, there has never been any other experiment that studied the effects of starvation - not just physical but psychological."

As Tucker recounts in his book, starvation affected the men in various ways. Some became so obsessed with food that they ate crumbs off the floor, and had dreams of cannibalism. A particular volunteer chopped off three of his fingers.

It was, however, found that psychotic effects of starvation on men were quickly reversed when their calorie intake was increased.

Blickenstaff reminisced that the year-long period was divided into three phases: a standardization period of three months, a semi-starvation period of six months, and a rehabilitation phase of three months.

During the standardization period, Blickenstaff lost 15 pounds: He had weighed 165 pounds when the experiment began. By the end of the semi-starvation period, he was 112.5 pounds. The rehabilitation period helped him gain enough weight back to weigh 135 pounds - still 30 pounds less than what he was when the experiment started.

"During the course of the semi-starvation period we ate twice a day," Blickenstaff said. "I was taking 1,000 calories a day. They were feeding us like people in central Europe at that time - spaghetti, macaroni, bread, and potatoes, carbohydrates, very little fat and very little protein.

"We had three menus that were repeated, so every third day, you got the same thing."

Being starved, Blickenstaff said, the repetition of the menus did not dampen the appetite of the men.

"Your whole life revolved around food," Blickenstaff said, about the mental effects of starvation. "Food was the only think you could think about and talk about. I could remember some speakers came to talk to us about political issues and we weren't interested in that. But when another speaker came to talk about how soybeans could solve the world's hunger problem, everyone was interested."

Blickenstaff, who's now a part of the Music in the Mountains choir and the Grass Valley Men's Chorus, said during the experiment his interest in music declined. So did his interest in girls. With a dry laughter, Blickenstaff recalled how he would go to a movie and be most interested in scenes where the actors were eating.

"Walking by a bakery was like walking by a bank," Blickenstaff said. "It would be nice to have what was in there, but it was out of question."

Commitment toward the experiment, backed up with close monitoring by the researchers stopped most of the human subjects from cheating. Those who did were dropped from the group.

Blickenstaff, whose parents then lived in Chicago, never met with them during the experiment though he corresponded with them through letters. He also does not remember having visitors.

Tucker interviewed Blickenstaff for his book. Blickenstaff's memories provided material for his research.

Today, though Blickenstaff is going strong at 82, the experiment for which he was once paid just $10 a month, has left an indelible impression on his mind.

As a peace-lover he now knows better than many others "how important it is, if you're really going to have peace and democracy, to feed people adequately."

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To contact staff writer Soumitro Sen, e-mail soumitros@theunion.com or call 477-4229.