Carlin Casey first considered the idea of human starvation when he was seven years old. Back then, in 1992, his mother, Mary, read aloud to him and his little sister, Karina, from an unusual bedtime story, Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.” The family led a life of relative abundance. At their pueblo-style home in California’s Coachella Valley, Mary blasted Madonna in the kitchen as she made her kids burgers or big plates of spaghetti, lighting candles and burning essential oils (“for the vibes,” Carlin told me). Curled up in bed, listening to his mother describe Anne Frank’s privations, Carlin wondered, what was it like to experience a hunger so cutting? “Now, when I look back on it,” Carlin said recently, “I think maybe that was my mom’s way of trying to warn me—trying to prepare me for how cruel the world can be.”
