3 ideas
Under dystrophy, the starving person stops experiencing the body as the self and starts treating it as an external, hostile mechanism that must be managed, fed and dragged through tasks. Every action, from climbing stairs to dressing, is broken into deliberate steps that previously ran automatically, so ordinary life becomes a continuous project of conscious effort.
People in extremity constantly build explanatory stories that recast their selfish or humiliating acts as rational, necessary or even virtuous, because the self cannot bear to see itself as simply degraded. Reading behaviour through these self-justifications shows that people are defending a coherent identity as much as they are defending their physical survival.
Ginzburg observes that obsessive talk about food, recipes and prewar meals flourished once supplies began to improve, in contrast to the terrible silence of the queues in the worst winter. In that later phase such talk served as a form of self-assertion and social exchange, letting people display competence and stay connected around the resource that had dominated their lives.