The huge disparity between the rich and poor and their outlooks in life (economic hardship)
In Panem, wealth is heavily concentrated in the hands of the rich and particularly in those living in the Capitol. As a result, huge disparity between their lives and the lives of the poor creates many conflicts. This problem reveals itself in numerous ways throughout the novel but among the notable is food. In the poor districts, many of the residents don’t even have enough to eat to survive the coming/following days. Katniss, the girl on fire, notes that starvation is common in District 12, and she has to hunt illegally in the woods beyond the district’s borders to feed her family. The novel suggests that most of the district’s residents are not able to or don’t know how to hunt, meaning even given the little Katniss’s family has, it’s still more than what many of the other families in her district will ever be able to afford. In contrast, when Katniss arrives in the Capitol, she is awed by the lavish feasts and elaborately prepared dishes. The food is rich and abundant, and Katniss, for the first time, gets to try hot chocolate.
The inequality between rich and poor can be shown mainly through/in the tesserae system. In theory, the lottery by which tributes are chosen, called the reaping, is random, in which, anyone can be picked. But in reality, the poor/people in poverty are much more likely than the rich to end up as tributes. In exchange for extra rations of food and oil, called tesserae, the children eligible for the Hunger Games can enter their names into the reaping additional times. Most children from poor families have to take tesserae to survive day by day/each coming-following day/the next