6 Cups of Soup and a Gut Punch I Won’t Forget

A few years ago, during an outreach in Manhattan, a young man approached me on the sidewalk. I’ll call him Leon. He was soft-spoken and polite. A little worn out. He asked if we had anything to eat, so I helped him with a cup of our famous vegetable soup—made fresh that morning in our 80-gallon soup kettle.

As we talked, he would finish his soup and I just kept asking volunteers to bring more. One refill turned into two, then three. By the time he finished his sixth, I casually paused and asked him, “Hey man… When was the last time you ate?” He shrugged a little, looked down, and said, “I had some crackers like three days ago.”

That moment has stuck with me not just because of the hunger in Leon’s eyes, but because of how easy it is to miss hunger altogether when you’re not looking for it.

In cities like mine—and probably yours—hunger doesn’t always look like desperation. It doesn’t always look dramatic. We don’t typically see distended bellies and emaciated children. Sometimes it looks like someone sitting quietly on the sidewalk eating soup, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Sometimes it looks like a parent skipping meals so their kids can eat. Sometimes it looks like a teenager living in a motel with a vending machine dinner, or a senior citizen managing diabetes with whatever the food pantry hands out that week.

This month, I want to talk about urban American hunger. The kind of hunger that is chronic, complex, and largely invisible. The kind that intersects with homelessness, poverty, disability, trauma, and systems that are simply not built to support the people who fall through the cracks.

I’m calling this short email series Hunger in Plain Sight because we need to start seeing the full picture. When someone doesn’t have a kitchen or a refrigerator, when they live in a shelter with inconsistent meals, when they can’t afford groceries and have no place to store them even if they could, eating becomes an exhausting, daily crisis that ultimately consumes every other aspect of their lives.

Each Friday in August, I’ll share one piece of the puzzle and outline how hunger shows up in our cities in ways we don’t often talk about. We’ll look at why proximity to food doesn’t equal access, why cheap food is often the most expensive choice long-term, and how chronic hunger leads to devastating health outcomes, especially when someone doesn’t have stable housing.

We’ll start next week. But for today, I just wanted to say: if you’ve ever assumed that people who are hungry will “just find something,” I hope Leon’s story gives you pause. Six cups of soup. Three days without food. A reminder that hunger isn’t always loud, but it is always real—and it’s closer than we think. Until next week,

With gratitude,

Josiah Haken