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I'm writing a scene where 2 characters come across a village ravaged with famine. Where children are malnourished skeletal figures. As one of them makes to give one child a loaf of bread, the other experienced one, forbids it.
His rationale "As soon as we move away, the others (in extreme hunger) won't hesitate to rip apart the child alive to get to that morsel of half-eaten food"
What phrase/word can I use to describe this extreme form of hunger. the best I could come up with is 'ravenous'
It is not a synonym for 'extreme hunger', but I suggest desperation, given by Lexico as
desperation
mass noun
A state of despair, typically one which results in rash or extreme behaviour.Her story is one of poverty and desperation typical of a country that has known nothing but war for the past decade.
So the sentence could be
As soon as we move away, the others (in desperation) won't hesitate to rip apart the child alive to get to that morsel of half-eaten food.
The phrase 'in desperation' could also be 'out of desperation'.
Some suggestions:
Oswaal ICSE Sample Question Papers Class 9 English Paper 2 Literature
"The dogs were skeletally thin, but could not be opposed because they were driven by the madness of hunger."
The people of North-East Brazil are starving...
...I have seen deaths like these and they are not very pretty. The people of Bom Jesus sometimes refer to them as doença de cão - literally dog's disease. They are referring to rabies, which in Portuguese is called raiva - literally rage, fury, madness. The madness of hunger is indeed very much like rabies and it is truly a dog's death.
References to the delírio, the madness of hunger, can be found as early as the sixteenth century in the writings of Portuguese navigators, and it is still a recurring theme in Brazilian literature now. It is the subjective voice, the primary experience of hunger....
