At the risk of sounding insensitive to a real problem in America, I’d say there’s a large difference between hunger (the topic of the linked article) and starvation.
Even the first example in the article is a child who refuses to eat the free preschool provided breakfast , so his mom has to compensate by giving him extra chicken nuggets, hot dogs and tater-tots at lunchtime.
I’d say not that large. A large part of the American problem, as that article elaborates on, is malnourishment, not outright lack of any food whatsoever. But I’d still call that starvation, not hunger.
[emesis warning]
The child’s described as a ‘stubborn 3 year old’.
Maybe he’s just holding out for tater tots. But maybe he’s got significant sensory issues, and can’t express them clearly yet.
There were a number of things that I couldn’t eat as a child: because any attempt to do so made me puke them back up, entirely involuntarily. Two of them were things that people routinely fed to children under the presumption that ‘all kids like this’. They extremely often showed up as part or most of school lunches. It would have done me no good if I’d tried to eat them; I’d only have lost extra calories puking them back up.
I was lucky. My parents had plenty of food at home, and my mother could, and did, pack me a proper healthy lunch with no problem. (My parents also never harassed me about things I really couldn’t eat: I was lucky there too.) But I’ve got a lot of sympathy for little kids who won’t eat something.