hungry gaps

Noun

hungry gap (plural hungry gaps)

1. The interval in early spring (approximately from March to May in the Northern Hemisphere) during which the remaining stores of the previous year’s winter vegetables are depleted, yet the forthcoming season’s summer crops have not yet reached harvest maturity, resulting in a temporary scarcity of fresh food resources.
   • At the very end of the Middle Ages, Breughel depicted country folk wrapped up in fits of mass hysteria, and the historical accounts of these rural frenzies have explained the delirium in terms of the slender diet on which the poor had to subsist during the hungry gap.1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 102