The Mennonite National Anthem 31:46

LinkedIn will help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else, even people who aren't actively looking for a new job. In a given month, over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking at LinkedIn, you're looking in the wrong place.

Hire professionals like a professional and post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Gladwell. That's linkedin.com slash Gladwell to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for Business.

Tractor Supply trusts 5G solutions from T-Mobile. Together, they're connecting over 2,200 stores with 5G business internet and powering AI so team members can match shoppers with the products they need faster. This is enriching customer experience. This is Tractor Supply with T-Mobile for Business. Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Pushkin.

Lester Glick's Diary, July 28, 1945. This morning I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. My face is now emaciated, sad, and flecked with black dots. Lester Glick was one of the 36 young men who signed up for the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Unlike so many of his counterparts, Glick did not leave an oral history of his experience at the Library of Congress. All we have is what he wrote in his diary.

This entry is from late in the study, after months of hunger. "My nose is bony. My cheeks protrude. My lips are big and flabby. My fluffy wavy hair has become coarse and straight. My comb is always laden with globs of loose hair. I can count my ribs in the mirror, and my collarbone sticks out as though dislocated. My arm muscles have dwindled so that I could reach around my arm above the elbow with my thumb and third finger.

I am so weak I can scarcely walk. I am tired, discouraged. My life has all been drained from me. And here's what Lester Glick wrote on October 19th, the second to last day of the experiment. Today turned out to be the worst day of my life. This evening Dr. Taylor called me into his office and told me I have developed a tuberculosis lesion on the apex of my left lung. I am to go home

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This is the final episode of our look at the starvation experiment run by Ansel Keys during the Second World War. Today, I want to tell the story of Lester Glick, the story of what happened to him after the experiment, and how he made sense of all the suffering he'd been through. Just tell me a little bit about your father, first of all. So, I look very much like him. He had dark, curly hair. He was...

About 5'5", I think, maybe 5'6", if he stood on his tiptoes, maybe. He was down to 114 pounds at his lowest weight. Lester Glick died in 2003, but I spoke with two of his children. That's his daughter, Chris. And he was a very thin man until he got out of the starvation experiment. I mean, before he went there, he was thin, but...

But then he had an eating disorder the rest of his life. So he gained and lost hundreds of pounds throughout the rest of his life. He was kind of roly poly is how I remember him. After I spoke to Chris, I called up Lester Glick's son, Byron. How do you think the experience of being involved in that experiment changed him? Completely and not at all.

It's clear to me that daddy's relationship with food and with his body was utterly and completely disordered and changed by the starvation experiment. In that regard, he never got over the starvation experiment. And dad talks as he was talking about his struggles with his weight that he never...

This is just amazing to think about. He never got over being hungry. He was always hungry, even when he had all the food he wanted. Something had happened in his physiology that broke the connection between his stomach and his brain. And it never cured. You know, I never saw my father cry, but I saw him as close to tears when he would talk about that experience.

It's making me cry. Like he would always keep candy underneath his seat, the driver's seat in the car, because he always wanted to have food close to him just in case he got hungry. And he described starvation as the worst deprivation there is for humankind. As a kid, sometimes I felt like he was detached. Looking back on it, I think he was scared.

And he was scared because he had experienced things that most people don't experience. I think my dad was scarred in the same way you hear about veterans being scarred about active war. That there's just some stuff you can't explain and you can't control. And it's scary. And part of me wishes that my dad had never had to experience that.

that he had had a sweeter life than he had. And he had a pretty sweet life. He had a good life. He would say he had a good life. But he paid a price for what he believed. And he kept paying that price his whole life. He was an amazing man. Byron and Chris both know what their father went through. But they also know what he became as a result.

For as long as scientists have puzzled about human physiology, they've wondered how the body responds to extended deprivation. When you don't eat enough, you get weak. We all know that. But beyond that, the details quickly get complicated. And those critical details obsessed Ancel Keys as he set out to design the starvation experiment. In 2021, the journal Obesity Reviews devoted an entire issue to the legacy of Ancel Keys.

The issue was organized by a physiologist at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. His name is Abdul Dallou. Give me an example of a question that is very difficult to answer in your world. I mean, we knew, right, from the beginning of 1900, from prisoners of war, from people being malnourished and recovering, that there was a tendency for body fat to be recovered faster than lean mass, than muscle mass, and so forth.

And this was quite a problem because when you think of you are rehabilitating a patient who has, let's say, cancer or infection or whatever, they lose weight because of the disease. When you have to make them recover, you would prefer them to recover tissue, organ and muscle because that's where the functionality is critical, right? But they have problems to recover tissue.

muscle mass, muscle function, and relatively ease to recover fat, especially in the abdominal area, which is where the bad fat is situated. Muscle is a lot more important to regaining your health than fat, but the body wants to recover fat first after extended weight loss, and not just a little fat. Not only do they recover their fat faster, but they recover more fat than they lost.

That's what I mean. So they recover more weight and it's mostly fat. Why does the body do that? And is there something that science could do to make the body switch tactics and build lean muscle instead? You could imagine all the areas where the answers to these questions would be useful. Keyes was focused on people suffering from malnutrition during the war. Concentration camp survivors, for example. That's one area.

Deleu mentioned people recovering from serious illness. Cancer patients after chemotherapy. That's another. But there's also people trying to recover from eating disorders. People struggling with obesity. Trying to maintain weight loss. 85 to 90% of those who lose weight gain it back. We need to understand that process. But there's a problem. There's no easy way to do good experiments on starvation and its aftermath. I mean, how would you do it?

You need to carefully control what people eat, when they eat, how much they eat, and you have to do that from month on end because nothing useful about diet can be learned from a few weeks of observations. You can't run experiments with prisoners or people locked up in a psychiatric hospital because that would be unethical. You need people who consent to be starved and have the discipline to follow up on their commitment. But how do you find people who fit that profile?

A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health organized something called the Calorie Study, where 143 adults signed up for two years of stringent dieting. The goal was for them to cut their caloric intake by 25%, and they received, quote, an intensive lifestyle intervention to foster adherence, individual counseling, group sessions, consultants.

How much caloric intake did the volunteers end up cutting from their diets when all was said and done? Not 25%, 12%. After all that effort, the volunteers on average only got halfway to their goal. And can you blame them? It's just too much to ask someone to give up a quarter of the calories they consume and to do that every day for months on end. Except, that is, if we're talking about Ansel Keys' guinea pigs.

Abdul Dalu told me that when he started working in the field of obesity and metabolism almost 30 years ago, he quickly realized that the best source of data on some problems, and in some cases, the only source of data, was the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

Ansel Keys kept meticulous, comprehensive records on what six months of starvation looked like, and then Keys collected another mountain of data that could help answer questions about body fat. Once the volunteers started eating normally again. What we know about the human body of a normal weight person reacting to starvation is based on the Minnesota Experiment. The Minnesota Experiment is the gold standard.

I did a thing in my podcast this season where I asked researchers for their magic wand experiment, which is the experiment that they would do if I gave them a magic wand and they could wave away all logistical, financial, practical, ethical, whatever constraints. And I'm curious...

If I gave you a magic wand, what is the diet or nutrition study that you would do? You mean ethical also is, we forget about it. To try to do a similar study, but now we have so much more technology. We can monitor physical activity. A lot of the changes of functions, functional, whether it's muscle, whether it's energy,

immune function and all that. What you're saying is you'd simply redo the Minnesota study, only this time use modern methods to gather an order of magnitude more data. Right. The whole point of a magic wand experiment is that it's the experiment you could never do in real life. Ansel Keys did the perfect experiment without a magic wand.

And why was Ancel Keys able to do that? Because he was lucky enough to find volunteers willing to starve themselves to the point where their faces were flecked with black dots, their noses were bony, their cheeks protruding, their hair coarse and straight, and falling out in big globs. This is a really, really, really huge contribution to humanity. And they were not forced to do it.

When the U.S. entered World War II, Lester Glick was 23 years old. He declared himself a conscientious objector. He had grown up in a Mennonite family, attending one of the historic peace churches where pacifism is a tenet of faith. Glick was assigned to Ypsilanti, Michigan, to the state mental hospital. He was the night charge attendant on the active tuberculosis ward. Then, one day, he saw a notice on a bulletin board.

And at the top, there was a statement that said, will you starve that they be better fed? So Lester Glick would have seen this. That spoke to him in his language. That's Dwayne Stoltzfus, a historian at the same Mennonite school Lester Glick once attended, Goshen College. I think...

"When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was thirsty, did you give me something to drink?" It is that kind of language. So it very much is responding to Christ's invitation to go out into the world, not to stay in your church, but to go out into the world and to do good work and be judged by those actions.

Matthew 25, verse 35. The same crucial verse I talked about a few episodes ago in talking about refugees and acts of kindness. My friend Jim Leptisan, who's a Mennonite pastor, calls Matthew 25 the national anthem of the Mennonite church. The verse that defines the Mennonite religious calling. To welcome the stranger, to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry. For Mennonites, certainly of luster glicks,

but I would say across generations. The reading of Matthew 25 is a literal reading. It is a powerful invitation to step out of your comfort zone and go to places that are dangerous and risky and uncomfortable in order to do good. And this is another front spread over the face of America. Like the other fronts, it is big.

So Lester Glick moved to Minneapolis and took one of the long line of cots that Ancel Keys had set up underneath the school's football stadium. He became a guinea pig. Now, did Lester Glick understand in that moment what he was getting into? Of course not. Nobody did.

That's the point of an experiment. The subject commits to an uncertain outcome. But over the course of his long year in Minneapolis, he documents in his diaries his descent into a kind of hell.

He is just one of the kindest, most gracious people. But as he writes about his experience, he writes about getting really angry, angry with the officials in charge because they've taken away his allotment of bread. He's no longer getting the two slices he thought he was going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough. Back when Lester Glick had been working at the state mental hospital in Michigan, he wrote with pride about the connections he made with patients who could not speak.

He loved to work with patients and help them. But now, in his hunger, he was becoming isolated, antisocial. He started to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs. And so there is this separation that starts to take place, this breakdown in relations that is not at all in keeping with the real Lester Glick, but was the new malnourished Lester Glick who was...

separated from all the people around him. He understands that what it means to be hungry is not a momentary physiological deficit. It is a profound and overwhelming deprivation on every level. Yeah, it's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against the building up of community that he's been a part of since childhood.

that church community, the family community, had shaped who he was in the most basic ways. In the bit of scripture so essential to Mennonites, for I was hungry and you fed me, Lester Glick now understands what hungry means. It's not just calorie deprivation, it's the absence of any kind of sustenance. And then...

At the end of his time in Minneapolis, he discovers he has developed tuberculosis as a result of his ordeal. So Daddy's plan had been to go to medical school when he was in college and he was going to be a doctor. And then when he got TB during the starvation experiment, his doctors told him that he couldn't withstand the rigors of medical school and medical education and then medical practice. And so they advised him to do something else and he chose social work.

His life took a profoundly different turn. He got a master's and then he got his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis because he felt like as he practiced social work, that social work education was what his calling was. So he wanted to teach other people how to practice social work with the principles of

loving kindness, and not just as a sort of mechanical practice of obtaining services for people. Glick started a school of social work at Goshen College, his alma mater in Indiana. He went on to start another school of social work at Syracuse University, then one at the University of Southern Mississippi. He's a social work school planter. Yes, yes, that's exactly right.

In Glick's self-published memoirs, there's a chart called Places I Have Called Home, which takes up an entire page, 38 addresses in all. Webster Groves, Missouri, South Main Street, Goshen, Indiana, Ramsey Avenue, Syracuse, New York, Montague Street, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, crisscrossing the country his entire adult life in pursuit of the hungry. One of the things, one of the practices that he enforced while we were

growing up is that he wanted us to know what hunger was like as well so we could be empathic for people who were not able to eat like we were. So Wednesdays, every Wednesday, all we could eat was white rice all day. And we had limited servings. Some of my first memories was, you know, eating rice on Wednesdays. And then, I mean, I did that until I went to college. How did you and your siblings...

feel about that? Did you understand the point of it? I don't think we did, except we knew how important it was to our father. And we laughed about it and kind of kidded him about it. But I don't remember any of us ever saying, this is stupid. We're not doing this. We just, we did it. It's not a trivial thing if you're hungry to be fed. It's one of the greatest services you can do to another human being.

When he was dying, they lived in a little retirement community and they had these little individual sort of apartments where people could live that were freestanding. And daddy, he always was a gardener. He had a really great green thumb. And so he had a large garden where he provided fresh vegetables for all the people in the 12 little units where they lived.

And when he got sick that year, he couldn't maintain his garden anymore. And he was very concerned about where his neighbors were going to get their fresh vegetables if he wasn't able to provide them for him. The more time I've spent looking at the starvation experiment, the less I've understood why so many people in the scientific community are uneasy with what happened. People say nothing like that could and should be done today.

But why? What exactly is it about the experiment that is so incomprehensible to us today? I think the answer is that we focus far too much on what was given up in the moment by the volunteers, and we forget about what was gained down the road as the result of that suffering. The Minnesota experiment left a permanent mark on nearly every one of its participants. They understood something about food and hunger that they hadn't before their experience.

Of the 18 who left their oral histories with the Library of Congress, seven signed up for something called Heifers for Relief, a program that after the war shipped livestock from America to Europe. The volunteers took trips back and forth across the Atlantic, taking care of the animals. Another Minnesota participant worked in relief camps after the war. Sam Legg, one of the leaders of the guinea pigs, worked with the Quakers to buy food for the hungry in post-war Europe.

Marshall Sutton traveled to the Middle East to feed refugees in Gaza. Several more went to divinity school. Another man spent 30 years as a missionary in South Africa, Mozambique, and Kenya. And Lester Glick set out to plant social work schools throughout the United States, feeding the hungry in spirit, but also just the hungry.

Because after his year in Minneapolis, he no longer made a distinction between spiritual and physical deprivation. In his diary of his experience in Minnesota, Glick wrote when he was deep into the starvation phase: "Books on starvation tell us that hungry people eat clay, wood, bark, unclean animals, and often become cannibalistic. Yesterday I took the lead out of a pencil and began chewing the wood.

It tasted all right. For some crazy reason, I crave raw horseradish, sassafras roots, and rabbit meat. I think about how cannibalism is a terrible option for a starving person and try to put it out of my mind. But I can't seem to stop thinking about it. You don't really get over feelings like that. The best you can do is channel them into something else. For Glick, it became cinnamon rolls.

After his year in Minnesota, he became obsessed with them. He cut out a picture of cinnamon rolls from a magazine and carried it with him at all times. It was in his wallet until the day he died. So, um, dad was known for his cinnamon rolls. He made these deep fried cinnamon rolls that were just amazingly delicious things. And, um,

And he would make literally thousands of rolls. There's a picture of me or one of my siblings sitting at the kitchen table and the table's covered in rolls. There are rolls on the counters behind us. And dad took great delight in taking those rolls to people, of bringing them into church and people enjoying them. And it's kind of a microcosm

of what dad was up to his whole life, of giving people some kind of sustenance that brought them to an unexpectedly good place. Byron was in a little office in his home in Wisconsin, remembering his father, who had been dead for 20 years. But there was something in that specific memory of the cinnamon rolls that moved him. Yeah, yeah.

Byron, this has been, I have one last request of you. Sure. I would like you, can you read that passage from Matthew? Give me King James. Let's do it properly. Actually, let me run get a Bible. He left the room and came back with a family heirloom, his grandfather's Bible, battered, leather bound, handed down from his grandfather to his father and from his father to him.

Byron, look for the passage in Matthew, the Mennonite national anthem. For I was in hungered and you gave me meat. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. Naked and ye clothed me. I was sick and ye visited me. I was in prison and you came unto me. Verily,

I say unto you, insomuch as you have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, you have also done it unto me. That's beautiful. Yeah. Byron, thank you so much. This has been, what a wonderful, what a wonderful father. Oh, man.

Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lee Evengestu, and Jacob Smith with Tali Emlin. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. And engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Voice acting by Tim Haller.

Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Sean Carney, Morgan Ratner, Mary Beth Smith, Jordan McMillan, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Royston Berserve, Daniela Lacan, Nicole Morano, Isabella Narvaez, Lee Talmolad, John Schnarz, Jason Gambrell, Amanda K. Wong, Kazea Tan, and of course, our fearless leader, El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

If you target towns and cities, it's as clear as day that there will be civilian victims. In 1945, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo, destroying a quarter of the city and killing more than 100,000 people. I wrote about this infamous bombing campaign in my audiobook, The Bomber Mafia. And one of the survivors' voices we hear is from a project called Paper City.

Paper City is now out as a groundbreaking feature documentary. Director Adrian Francis explores what we choose to remember and hope to forget. To find out more, visit papercityfilm.com and follow at Paper City Tokyo on social media.