In the context of World War I, a massive famine struck Mount Lebanon that cost the lives of approximately a third of its population. Despite the fact that social scientists generally agree that famine is man-made, and not a cruel joke of nature, in the case of the Lebanese famine the environment may not be neglected as a contributing factor to starvation and hunger. Harsh winters, little rain, heat waves, and not the least waves of voracious locusts from the Sudanese desert added to the enormous wartime requisitions by the Ottoman Fourth Army and an Allied naval blockade resulted in a demographic and environmental catastrophe of unprecedented scale. The famine would not only circumscribe the wartime experience of civilians in Mount Lebanon, but also would have long-term effects by shaping social and cultural configurations of post-war Lebanese society. Famine, according to economist Mohiuddin Alamgir, may be defined by its symptoms including the uprooting and separations of families, changes in consumption patterns and breakdown of traditional social bonds. All these aspects circumscribed the Lebanese famine and contributed to the fragmentation of the citizenry. Based on the parish records and institutional diaries of religious orders in the mountains, this paper explores the effects of hunger on communal relations. These unique and newly discovered records reveal in great detail the collapse of neighborliness, subsiding charity and desensitization in light of overwhelming mortality, shifts in consumption patterns and strategies of survival that range from eating of alternative ‘famine foods’ to—in extreme cases—cannibalism. Consequently, I argue that the lack of food that increasingly marked everyday life initiated modes of competitions that damaged the citizen’s trust in their local (municipal) leadership and increased the schism between classes. Furthermore, the social interactions were increasingly located outside the frame of morality and represented the collapse of communal links down into the most fundamental unit of society, the family. The famine produced a fragmentation so deep that its memory would be destructive to the unity of the young, tenuous and most of all artificially delineated Lebanese state in the post-WWI period. As a result we see a state-sponsored forgetting, leaving the memory of the famine to linger uncomfortably below the surface.