My parents never said this to us. They weren’t and still aren’t that worldly to care where there may be starving children.
But as a child I was aware of the starving children in Bangladesh since my mom, even though not worldly, was a Beatles fan and had the Concert for Bangladesh album. When I turned 7, the collective consciousness turned to the starving children of Ethiopia due to Live Aid.
There were six of us being raised by a single mom. There were people starving right there. Not much question about eating, if it was there; we ate it.
Dad: Never heard that line from him.
Grandparents: America, Great Depression.
“I used to eat a hard-boiled egg for lunch because that was all we had. Stop complaining.”
“Don’t drink water at work because if you go to the bathroom too many times the boss will fire you for malingering.”
“I made $10/week, Shorty made $5, and we still saved!”
… and on, and on.
Never had it used on me personally, but there version I’m familiar with is “Africa”.
It was ethopia when I was a kid.
Africa. My friend’s mom said ‘theres starving people in China’, but this was 1990 when she said that and I thought ‘I don’t think thats right’. Maybe in the early 70s, but not in 1990. Even I knew that was BS at that time.
Africa.
Never had the tactic directly used as a guilt trip, but the referent for my cohort was Biafra as well.
Africa, or Ethiopia more specifically. I’m pretty sure my mom gave me an occasional “starving children in China” line at the end of dinner, but in the 80s, starving Africans were so prominent we got multiple pop supergroups singing songs about it.
There were so many of us at the table nothing was ever leftover. If the lights went out at suppertime you might lose a body part. Daddy never had to make us eat.
At my house the lil’wrekker was the picky eater. I swear she has the constitution of a canary bird. Many, many days I had to beg her to eat. Starving kids in another place didn’t matter to her, at all.
Ethiopia. I don’t recall my parents ever using the “there are starving people in ________, so eat your ________” line, but for this Gen X’er, “Ethiopia” was definitely the place with iconically starving people when I was growing up.
Africa, 1960s. My grandfather, born 1900, said his parents gave him the same line and he never got the logic either. I don’t remember what continent/country they used.
Same here, although my mother may have started a little earlier with “the starving children in Africa”.
The idea is that while children in Africa are starving, it’s pretty ungrateful to not eat everything that’s dished up in NZ, half the world away.
Cripes – this pre-dates my suggestion of Belgium and World War I. On reflection: Dickens’s Bleak House features Mrs. Jellyby, who is deeply concerned about the sufferings of the hapless people of Borrio-Boola-Gha on the left bank of the River Niger – laudable in itself, but she’s so taken up with this stuff, that she neglects her own kids. One can imagine Mrs. J. – at the times when she remembered the existence of said offspring – urging them to be mindful of the hungry children in B-B-G, and eat up their own meals; and her kids responding to the effect of, “Mother dear, will you please kindly shove it”.
I never got the “starving children in _____” meme but I remember turning up my nose at Mom’s home made vegetable beef soup and being told, “If you were starving and came across this in a trashcan in the alley, you’d eat it with delight.”
I immediately imagined a new trashcan filled to within two inches of the brim with soup, still steaming. Well, yeah.
Africa - the entire continent, I guess. Sometimes Ethiopia specifically. And my parents never used this line, but I heard it many times from school, friends’ parents and probably even TV.
China when I was grade school, then it became Africa, and by college it was simply “the world”. It was never one of those things used to make us eat something but it was something we were aware of; that reminded us that no matter how bad things were for us sometimes lots of people had it worse. Yeah, sometimes we kinda foraged --------- but at least we had the ability to do so.
This, exactly, from my experience in the UK in the 80s.
China, and once or twice also India. But in my family this sort of thing was said only rarely, and as a joke, more often by my older siblings than by my parents.
The joke version in my family is whenever someone almost spills a drink: “Careful with that! There are sober people in China, you know.” 