For centuries people have claimed to live without food for years, and the most famous cases drew large crowds. In 1669 John Reynolds reported to the Royal Society on Martha Taylor, a Derbyshire woman who was said to have gone a year without eating. Many so-called fasting women were poor, religious and rural, and visitors paid to watch them. Ann Moore, in Tutbury, was caught in 1813 secretly being fed by her daughter and confessed to deceit. In 1867 Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl, died after a 24-hour watch, and an autopsy showed she had been secretly eating. The cases show how belief, spectacle and money fed one another.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.