Winter of Starvation

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made no-so-glorious supper by this... stack of yuck
Hungry Years in Petrograd, Ivan Vladimirov

The nights grew deathly cold, with the land barren and completely devoid of food. One fateful night, when on the brink of starvation, Pooh decided that in order to survive, the group must consume one of their dearest friends. And thus, Eeyore was no more.

— Opening monologue of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

When winter comes, not everyone has a house to go back to and a warm bed to curl up in. For people who have nothing at all, or those surviving in the wild, winter can be a death sentence without adequate food and shelter. No edible plants grow during the winter, all the prey animals have taken to their burrows, and what game you can find is probably as scrawny as you are (and that's assuming you have functional weapons and enough energy to hunt). Not to mention the risk of becoming deathly ill. You're getting colder and hungrier by the day, and your True Companions are starting to look pretty tasty...

In essence, this is any situation where characters become desperate for food during a harsh winter and may be driven to commit immoral acts out of desperation in order to survive, including theft and cannibalism—of their friends or even their family members. This trope can happen anywhere: in the wild, during a long journey, in a small town, or a big city, as long as you have a really cold winter, really hungry people or animals, and a lack of provisions. If cannibalism is involved, expect a reference to the Donner Party. Common victims of the Winter of Starvation include wild animals, the poor and homeless, orphans (the stock image of the ragged orphan shivering alone in the snow is a classic of literature), soldiers, and wilderness travelers. Can overlap with The End of the World as We Know It and Class 2 apocalypse.

Very much Truth in Television, especially in wartime. A good example from Real Life would be the Dutch Famine of 1944-1945.

Related tropes:

• Ascended to Carnivorism: In situations like these, even herbivores may be driven to kill and eat other animals.
• Cold Equation (forgive the pun): A group may decide it's better if only one of them dies than all of them die from cold and hunger.
• Emergency Food Supply Animal: Eating your beloved horse or dog is hard but it's still better than eating your friends.
• Endless Winter/Glacial Apocalypse: A common issue during this kind of weather.
• Hostile Weather: Hunger is hard enough without winter itself trying to kill you.
• I'm a Humanitarian: While starving in winter, characters may turn on their friends and eat them alive if desperate enough.
• Meat-O-Vision: A hungry character starts hallucinating and sees their friends as food. They may or may not actually try to eat them.
• Nature Is Not Nice: Especially when she's trying to turn you into a popsicle. A very scrawny popsicle.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: When the choice is between starvation or cannibalism...
• Offing the Offspring: During hard winter, parents may kill their children to eat them or to spare them from a slow, agonizing death of starvation.
• Snow Means Death: In this case, snow and hunger means death.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: When you're cold and hungry enough, everything starts to look like food.
• Wendigo: Often associated with wintertime starvation and said to result from someone who resorted to cannibalism to survive.
• Winter Warfare: This trope can trigger a starving winter, on account that War Is Hell, and that constant fighting between belligerent sides will cause food shortages for both civilians and soldiers alike.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• Peanuts: Implied by the opening line to one of Snoopy's novels.
  A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.

Films — Animated

• Wakko's Wish: Downplayed — it is a snowy winter, and there is a food shortage in the town, but the food shortage is said to be caused by poverty, rather than by the winter itself.

Films — Live-Action

• Cannibal! The Musical is based on the real-life incident of Alferd Packer, the sole survivor of his expedition party who killed and ate the five other members of the party in order to survive the winter of 1873-4.
• Played for Laughs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
  Narrator: In the frozen land of Nador, they were forced to eat Robin's minstrels. And there was much rejoicing.
  Knights: (weakly) Yaaaaaayyyy...
• Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey: Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood depend on Christopher Robin to bring them food. When he leaves the Hundred Acre Wood to go to college, their food supplies start to run low. Then winter comes, and everyone begins to starve. They are eventually forced to kill and eat Eeyore in order to survive, which traumatizes them so much they make a pact to abandon their humanity and never speak again.

Jokes

• The University of Colorado named their student union cafeteria "The Alferd Packer Grill," in reference to the infamous cannibal.

Literature

• In The Broken Earth Trilogy, a world that suffers periodic volcanic winters that can last anywhere from months to decades, this is accepted as a fact of life. During a Season, martial law is enacted, communities have the right to close their gates to outsiders, and food becomes anything that can pad out your stores and keep you alive a little longer. Survival is the highest virtue during a Season. You don't think about the meat.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Charlie's father loses his job screwing caps onto toothpaste bottles in the middle of winter, leaving him unable to provide for himself, his wife, his son, and the four grandparents. They have to cut down their already meager meals to a single slice of bread and half a boiled potato for each person a day. During this time, Charlie comes across a 50-pence piece in the snow and uses it to buy two Wonka candy bars. The second one turns out to have a Golden Ticket in it, making him the fifth winner of Wonka's contest.
• The Divine Comedy through Word of Dante depicts at least the inner circles of Inferno, reserved for traitors, as being frozen and cold.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fall of Gondolin: Downplayed. Tuor and Voronwë must traverse Beleriand during the five-month-long Morgoth-summoned Fell Winter despite their scarce supplies. When they run into an Orc camp, close to his destination, Tuor is so hungry that he would not mind eating them, but he does not go through with it.
• A Girl From Yamhill: Invoked; in her memoir, Beverly Cleary recounts an occasion in 7th grade when her writing teacher asked them to write a letter as if they were living in the time of George Washington, and she wrote a letter about killing her pet chicken to provide food for Washington's starving, freezing troops at Valley Forge. Her teacher praised her for using her imagination, while the rest of the class copied her poorly by writing about sacrificing pet lambs and calves for the troops. She felt contemptuous of them for copying her, especially since lambs and calves are born in the spring, not the winter.
• The Grasshopper and the Ants: In the winter, some ants are drying their corn and a grasshopper asks them for a few grains because she is very hungry. They ask why she didn't put away food during the summer, and she answers that she was so busy singing that she didn't have time. To that, they say, "If you spent the summer singing, you better spend the winter dancing."
• The Left Hand of Darkness:
  • Gethen is an iceball of a planet where starvation is always just around the corner. Stealing food is therefore considered one of the vilest crimes a person can commit.
  • While outlawed, Genly and Estraven resort to an 81-day, 800-mile trek across the polar ice in winter on starvation rations, a literally legendary feat of physical and mental endurance. Estraven's careful planning and survival expertise see them through, even though their food runs out three days before they reach safety.
• Kino's Journey: In one episode, Kino comes across a trio of men in a stranded truck, having been stuck since winter began. They're starving and too weak to do anything. They tell Kino they survived by eating their cargo. Then Kino learns that they're slavers...
• Little House on the Prairie: In The Long Winter, the Ingalls and their neighbors have to face a long winter, complete with deprivation. Eventually two of the young men make a long trip in snowy weather to get food for the town.
• The Little Match Girl: A little girl is trying to sell matches during winter in order to make money, but nobody's buying them. She is very hungry and starts imagining happy things like a roast goose for dinner as she lights her matches to stay warm. She freezes to death over the night but is taken to heaven by her grandmother.
• Pale: In a vision Verona sees of Crooked Rook's past, the latter once killed two practitioners but spared their 14-year-old daughter and her 10 younger siblings, only to leave them to starve in the dead of winter since the prior fight left only enough food stores to feed Rook and her allied Others, and the daughter refused to be turned by Rook into an Other so that it would be easier for her to hunt in the two weeks it would take help to arrive.
• The Song of Hiawatha: Canto XX, "The Famine," tells of a particularly long and harsh winter when game becomes scarce. It ends with Minnehaha dying of starvation and illness.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Exaggerated Trope — Planetos has Bizarre Seasons which vacillate greatly in length, usually somewhere between one and ten years. (What is a "year" if not a cycle of four seasons? Don't ask.) Several years of summer is great; several years of winter is devastating. And if year-long winters aren't bad enough, there's also the "Long Night" — a legendary and probably historical generation-long winter — which some people say will someday happen again.
  • In the North where winters are long and brutal, old men will sometimes announce that they are "going hunting." This is a euphemism for them willingly going off to die so there is more food for the younger members of their family.
    [Arya] remembered a tale she had heard from Old Nan, about how sometimes during a long winter, men who'd lived beyond their years would announce that they were going hunting. And their daughters would weep and their sons would turn their faces to the fire, she could hear Old Nan saying, but no one would stop them, or ask what game they meant to hunt, with the snows so deep and the cold wind howling.
  • In A Dance with Dragons, during the march from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell in the middle of a blizzard, Stannis Baratheon's army quickly starts to run short of food and other provisions. Wagons start breaking down, men start wandering off and dying in the snow, and any horse that breaks a leg is butchered on the spot for meat. Four soldiers are burned alive as sacrifices to R'hllor for cannibalizing another man, despite their pleas that he was already dead and they were starving.
• Warrior Cats:
  • The Clan cats always go hungry during leaf-bare (their term for winter), as prey becomes scarce, and what little fresh-kill there is has to be rationed and given to the most vulnerable members of the Clan first—elders, kits, and nursing queens. Deaths from illness or starvation during leaf-bare are common, especially for elders and young kits. RiverClan has it easier, as they can still catch fish from the river, but sometimes they don't even have that because the river may freeze over or become contaminated by Twoleg garbage.
  • In the side story "A Dark Path Chosen," ThunderClan is enduring a hard leaf-bare, and Poppydawn, one of the Clan elders, has become ill and weak. Darkstripe and Longtail are sent out to hunt, and Longtail manages to catch a fat squirrel, but Darkstripe eats it and convinces him to have some too, reasoning that they need their strength to hunt for the Clan. By the time they get back, Poppydawn has starved to death. Longtail is horrified at what they've done, but Darkstripe shuts him up by threatening to lie to everyone that he chose to eat the squirrel and refused to let him (Darkstripe) bring it back to camp.
  • In Bluestar's Prophecy, during a hungry leaf-bare, Bluefur makes the hard decision to bring her kits to RiverClan, their father's Clan, as during this time the river is full of fish, and RiverClan never goes hungry even when the other Clans do. Her other reason is that with Tawnyspots' illness, Thistleclaw is poised to become ThunderClan deputy and eventually leader, which will destroy the Clan due to his bloodthirsty nature—and Bluefur will not be chosen in his place if she is a nursing mother. She is able to bring Mistykit and Stonekit to RiverClan, but Mosskit dies along the way due to hunger and cold.
• The Wheel of Time: Part of the Dark One's attack on the world is to spread unending heat and drought. The heroes fix it with global Weather Manipulation magic, but it causes the next winter to be unusually long and harsh, and food shortages become an escalating concern for the rest of the series.
• White Fang: When White Fang is a pup, he endures a hard winter and is the only survivor of his litter, implied to be because he has more wolf in him than his siblings. His mother Kiche becomes so desperate for food that she breaks into a lynx's lair, eats her kittens, and brings the remaining one home to feed her pup, incurring the wrath of the mother lynx. She manages to fight it off and survive.
• World War Z:
  • While being interviewed by the author, Jesika Hendrix says her parents grabbed a good deal of instant food, and went north with her in a camper, figuring that during the winter the zombies would freeze and they would be free of the threat. Except that with a massive societal collapse, the instant food ran out quickly, and they couldn't grow new food quickly, especially in winter. She herself was sick in bed in the family camper when she heard raised voices in argument, a gunshot, and suddenly there was a stew with meat in it back on the menu. She didn't ask where the meat came from. She didn't want to know.
  • On top of the specific horrors that Jesika recalls happening in the Canadian wilderness (murder, fighting, social breakdown, starvation, cannibalism, brutal fighting), she mentions that so-called "Gray Winters" have happened since the zombie war. While eleven million people died in North America, she says that thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of refugees spilt into Siberia from urban areas of Japan, India, and China (not to mention other cold areas such as Iceland, Greenland, and Scandinavia). The ash from their fires literally turned the sky gray for years afterwards, and presumably a large amount of that was caused by the makeshift cremation of human bodies. Even a hardened refugee like Jesika says she can't bear thinking about what happened to people in other countries, with even less understanding of extreme cold.

Live-Action TV

• Sesame Street: Downplayed in one episode, where most of the food is okay during the winter, but there's an oat shortage due to the cold weather, meaning the Bear family can't have porridge. To deal with this, they decide to hibernate, but they just can't fall asleep, so they decide to just eat cereal instead of porridge.
• Yellowjackets:
  • In the pilot flash forward, it's winter (there is snow on the ground) and the surviving Yellowjackets have devolved into ritualistic cannibalism in the Canadian wilderness.
  • Season 1 ends with a clear division between winter and autumn, as Jackie is accidentally frozen to death after the first snowfall of the season. Season 2 shows everyone becoming more and more desperate — cannibalizing Jackie's body in a moment of desperate starvation, until they finally agree to the first card draw to hunt each other, ultimately killing and eating Javi.

Music

• Rush: In "Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres", when the people start following Dionysus, they're too busy partying in the forest to think about storing food for the winter and are caught off guard when winter eventually comes and "[brings] wolves and cold starvation". This disillusions them to the Heart after they've already rejected the Mind.
• Vocaloid: In mothy's song "Flames of Yellow Phosphorus," a reimagining of The Little Match Girl, Rin's father has locked her out of the house in the middle of winter until she sells all her matches, but nobody is buying them. She's so hungry and cold that she burns down their house with him inside, steals what coins she can find, and uses them to buy a loaf of bread. Unfortunately, she doesn't even get to eat her bread because she's caught the next day and executed by being burned at the stake.

Mythology & Religion

• Norse Mythology: Before Ragnarok began, the Sun and Moon were swallowed by Skoll and Hati, triggering a great winter that caused humans to commit atrocities because of starvation.

Podcasts

• Episode 58 of The Magnus Archives, "Trail Rations", has Jon Simms read a letter from the 1840s about an unknown woman on the Oregon Trail, whose husband is killed by an acolyte of the Flesh. His corpse begs her to eat him in order to survive the winter; she chooses to freeze to death instead.

Tabletop Games

• Dead of Winter is a (primarily) cooperative game about surviving a hard winter during the Zombie Apocalypse. Exposure is as much of a threat as zombies while scavenging for supplies; many random events explore the challenges and Cold Equations of sustaining the colony on limited resources; and Renovating the Player Headquarters with something as simple as fireplaces can be a life-saving effort.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Bheur hags (pronounced "ver") have power over winter and blizzards, and love to invoke this trope on travelers and towns, taking sick delight in watching all the desperate things people do in the name of survival.

Theatre

• In Hadestown, Eurydice is driven to leave Orpheus and take Hades' offer of work and shelter when a winter storm, represented by the Fates, tears away her food and coat and leaves her cold and starving while Orpheus is preoccupied working on his song.

Toys

• Little Miss No-Name is a doll from 1965 with wide eyes and a tear dripping down her cheek, clad in a burlap dress with Pauper Patches. Her box's packaging shows her standing outside in a snowstorm and her right hand is extended outward, making her appear to be begging.
  I need someone to love me
  I want to learn to play
  Please take me home with you
  And brush my tear away.

Video Games

• Against the Storm: Every year, the third and final season is The Storm, which doesn't have snow but is exponentially and supernaturally worse. In the cold and dark, crops don't grow and you can't plant any^note Your farmers can still work, but all they do is spread fertilizer so the soil has a small chance of boosting yields, the negative environment modifiers for your run activate all at once^note if Hostility is sufficiently high, and worst of all, everyone is at their most miserable, taking a whopping 4 damage to their Resolve per Hostility level (which indicates how much the forest and its gods hate you), which sometimes convinces them to abandon your settlement and make a run for it.
• Cooking Companions: Karin explains that when she was a child, she and her parents were suffering in a brutal winter. Their food got so low that she almost froze to death, and her father still tried to keep them all alive by collecting firewood. Eventually, she and her mother were able to share a meal — half a rat each.
• Darkest Dungeon II: The Crusader's backstory, as revealed through his Hero Shrines, reveal that he enlisted to earn money and thus protect his family from starvation. His first Hero Shrine shows a flashback of him struggling (and failing) to reap enough crops as a farmer during a harsh winter.
• Don't Starve: The first base game has two seasons, Mild and Winter. Naturally, the colder season is by far the hardest, requiring a pileup of resources in the warmer season and constantly making fires, thus depleting them in order to gain other resources necessary to keep going.
• The ever-worsening status quo in Frostpunk, owing to the Glacial Apocalypse and Endless Winter that entails. One of the earliest laws the Captain can pass is to put sawdust in meals. God help you if this isn't enough... Heating and social tension also bite you if you fail to keep them under control.
• Going Medieval: This is generally averted on easier difficulties but can happen if the difficulty is really turned up. Once winter comes and the temperatures drop, your settlers have about a day to collect any fruits and vegetables still growing before they all die off. If your food stores run out before spring, your only choice is to hunt game. During a particularly bad winter, repeated cold snaps can kill off any animals on the map and deprive your settlers of that food source as well. If desperate, you can tell your settlers to turn to cannibalism.
• Kingdoms Reborn: Crops are harvested in the autumn, and trees stop producing fruit in the winter. If you don't have enough food supplies, your citizens will start starving to death, and if you don't have enough fuel, they'll freeze.
• The Last of Us: After Joel gets wounded and is unable to do much, Ellie watches out for him and goes out on her own for supplies and hunting wildlife, a matter made worse by winter and her unskilled capacity to catch anything. She runs into a group of survivors led by David, who promises safe haven, but once they get close enough they catch and imprison her — it is quickly revealed through Joel who has recuperated enough to come and find her, that David's cult is very much into No Party Like a Donner Party, catching survivors, and even going after some of their own who disagree with David.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe: In the early-game, the United Kingdom — an already-faltering Nazi puppet state in this timeline — soon experiences the Big Freeze of 1963. Unless the player commences a herculean effort to prevent it, thousands of people nationwide will freeze to death from the weather compounding the already poverty-stricken situation, and even success here doesn't prevent the British Civil War.
• Northgard: Winter causes food production to slow down and increases wood consumption rate. A clan that fails to either stockpile resources over the rest of the year or keep consumption stable will have unhappy, unproductive villagers, which can exacerbate the situation.
• In Project Zomboid, preparing for the oncoming winter is your first major hurdle as the game begins on the 9th of July. As the weather will only get colder from here, and stay that way until it warms up next spring, you are basically guaranteed to freeze and starve to death if you don't get to work creating or securing a safe and warm place to stay, gathering supplies, and finding (or making) a reliable source of food and water. Being hypothermic will reduce your stats and eventually your health, and being tired, hungry, or unfit will make hypothermia come on much quicker than normal, and hypothermia makes it harder to safely rest, find food, and exercise, you will quickly spiral downward and die if you're not ready for winter.
• Red Dead Redemption II: Chapter 1 opens with the gang on the run from the law in the snowy Grizzlies West mountains, forced to take shelter in an abandoned mining camp. They have limited food provisions, with the camp chef giving Arthur a can of "Salted Offal", essentially canned animal entrails, implying the desperation of the situation. A gang member who was shot during the failed heist immediately before the game, Davey Callander, dies from his wounds and the presence of his body, while not commented on in-story, certainly brings the idea behind this trope to mind. Thankfully, Arthur and Charles are able to hunt up some deer before they have to resort to anything worse...
• Rebuild: The mobile version adds winter as an additional challenge. Once the cold season rolls around, all your farms stop producing food and the game becomes a desperate struggle to keep your supplies from running out while still trying to save the town from a zombie apocalypse. If you manage to survive until spring, you will get either a good ending or a bad ending depending on whether or not your survivors ended up succumbing to cannibalism.
• Stardew Valley: Hay is used to feed animals and is obtained by harvesting grass or wheat in the spring, summer, and fall. Grass doesn't grow in winter, so if you don't stock your silos with enough hay to feed your animals during the winter, they will become hungry. While they won't die, they will become sad and will not produce animal products.
• This War of Mine: Several episodes deal with the approaching winter season, if not in the middle of them — making it a race of gathering supplies, building interior gardens, and keeping your crew healthy and away from exposure all throughout the duration. It only gets harder to do so as the season deepens.

Web Comics

• Ava's Demon: Odin's home planet was condemned to Endless Winter when its sun collapsed into a black hole, setting off brutal wars to claim its dwindling resources.
• Team Fortress 2: Played for laughs in A Cold Day In Hell. While stranded in the snowy mountains of Siberia looking for Heavy, Soldier starts imagining weasels as food like pie and roast chicken, his own hands as sandwiches, and Scout as a giant hot dog. Then it turns out Scout really is wearing a giant hot dog costume, salvaged from the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's crashed plane.

Web Original

• Fluffy Pony: In the winter, starving feral fluffies in urban areas may have to eat garbage to survive, often with lamentations of "Nummies nu taste pwetty...nummies nu smeww pwetty..." If they get desperate enough, they may resort to cannibalizing other fluffies, with parents even eating their foals.

Western Animation

• Looney Tunes
  • In "Daffy's Southern Exposure", Daffy Duck postpones flying south for the winter and is caught in a sudden cold snap. He wanders around in a blizzard calling out for food (pausing to tell the audience, "What are you laughing at? I'm really hungry.") until he finds a cabin where two old ladies take him in... except they are really a wolf and a weasel planning to eat him for dinner.
  • In "Snow Business", Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird are Snowed-In with no food in the house except for bird seed. Along with Sylvester trying to eat Tweety, which is just par for the course, a mouse, who has been starving for so long he "forgot what food looks like", decides to try and eat Sylvester.
  • In "Along Came Daffy", an early version of Yosemite Sam and his lookalike brother are trapped in a cabin during the winter. With no food in the house, they see each other as food and try to eat each other, but are interrupted when Daffy, a cookbook salesman, knocks on their door and they decide to eat him instead.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Hearth's Warming Eve", the story of the founding of Equestria is told. The three pony tribes' original homeland was attacked by Windigos, malevolent ice spirits that fed on the tribes' hate for one another. The blizzard killed all the crops the earth ponies were trying to grow, but the pegasi still accused them of keeping their food stores to themselves. The earth ponies in turn accused them of causing the blizzard, while the pegasi pointed the hoof at the unicorns.
  Commander Hurricane: All I wanna know is why the earth ponies are hogging all the food!
  Chancellor Puddinghead: Us? We're not hogging all the food, you are! Oh, wait. You're right. It's us. Well, it's only 'cause you mean old pegasusususes are making it snow like crazy!
  Commander Hurricane: For the hundredth time, it's not us! We're not making it snow. It must be the unicorns! They're doing it with their freaky magic!
  Princess Platinum: How dare you? Unlike you pegasi ruffians, we unicorns would never stoop to such a thing!
• Woody Woodpecker, "Pantry Panic": When the local meteorologist predicts a freak winter blast in Woody's neighborhood, everyone evacuates south to warmer climates. Woody, on the other hand, is too stubborn and overconfident to listen. The storm indeed arrives, and Woody's fine, if knocked around a bit, by the wind (even being used as a shuttlecock in a badminton match between two cloud people). That is, until a whirlwind invades his home and steals all of his food. Two weeks later, while literally staring a personification of starvation in the face, a not-so-innocent hungry "kitty" cat arrives, looking for food. Hilarity Ensues as Woody and the cat try to one-up each other in cannibalizing the other.

Real Life

• The Great Ukrainian Famine, called Holodomor, unfortunately known for being the greatest loss of life by a man-made famine in recorded history, 3.5 to 5 million deaths. It took place between 1932 to 1933, and by most accounts, it literally emptied villages and towns making them almost ghost-like. Worst still, there are many reports from survivors from that time which agree that instances of cannibalism/necrophagy were so great that with certainty there were even more that have gone unreported.
• "Starving Time," or the winter of 1609-1610, in the British colonial settlement of Jamestown in North America. Jamestown was already ill-suited for permanent settlement, as it was in a place where the water was potable for only half the year and most colonists knew little about farming. However, in 1609 it suffered a series of setbacks that exacerbated the existing food supply issues, including a hurricane that delayed a fleet of supplies, a drought that left the area barren of crops, and a cessation of trading with local Native American tribes with the departure of John Smith. Out of 500 colonists, only 61 survived the winter, and there is evidence they resorted to cannibalism to do so.
• The "Hongerwinter", the Dutch famine of the 1944-1945 winter in the final months of World War 2, was a rare case of a developed country suffering one albeit at the frontline of the largest war in history. An estimated 18000 to 22000 excess deaths, mostly among older men, took place in this time due to malnutrition. Notably, Audrey Hepburn almost starved to death and was reduced to eating nettles and tulips.
• The Siege of Leningrad is the most lethal siege in all of history, and a large portion of its deaths were of the area's civilians, who mostly starved to death. The winter of 1941 and 1942 being one of the coldest in all of Europe for the 20th century may also have been a significant factor for many of the civilians that were too far away from food distribution considering starvation losses peaked in the winter time, though the freezing temperatures also facilitated quicker supply transportation into the city from the nearby Lake Ladoga freezing over. The degree of hunger the city faced led to reports of cannibalism, the prevalence of this reaching the point that the city's police were known to use the threat of throwing a suspect into a jail cell full of cannibals and distinctions had to be made for corpse eating and murderers (usually to be imprisoned and shot in that order). A majority of the perpetrators were illiterate (or very basically educated) single women with children and with no previous criminal record, which lead to some clemency. ^note Despite this, the actual amount of cannibalism that is believed to have actually occurred during the siege is considered to be surprisingly low (some 2,000 people were arrested for it) considering the mass starvation and it was generally of the already-dead — the murder of other civilians was far more likely to be for the purpose of just stealing their ration cards.
• Valley Forge was one of many winter encampments that the continental army stayed in after the failed Philadelphia campaign. Staying there for six months, nearly 2,000 soldiers died of malnutrition or disease. The imagery of Valley Forge played a large part in American myth; images of a bitter cold, snow-blanketed encampment with American soldiers clinging to life through sheer patriotic determination have become commonplace decades after the revolution, with Valley Forge now seen as a symbol of American perseverance in the face of hard times.^note In reality, the primary factor for Valley Forge's casualty rate was not the weather, but the chronic supply issues. Death rarely came from the temperatures alone, but due to the lack of clothes, equipment medicine, and food. The coldest of the winter encampments was Jockey Hollow, which endured the harshest of the winters, but miraculously only sustained 100 casualties.
• "The Hard Winter," or the winter of 1880-1881, was one of the worst on record for the American Plains, with non-stop blizzards from October of 1880 to April of 1881. Contemporary accounts refer to this as "The Hard Winter," "Snow Winter," and "Starvation Winter," owing to the inability of supply trains to traverse the snow and reach remote frontier tows. Even in March of 1881, snowdrifts were higher than the trains. This winter is documented in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, a semi-autobiographical account of the family's time in De Smet, South Dakota (see "Literature").

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