Perhaps a meal was not the ideal setting to talk about something as unappetizing as a hunger strike. But there was no way, even with lunch on the table, to avoid that grim topic with Karen J. Greenberg, who has made herself an expert on matters of torture, terrorism trials and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There, dozens of inmates are refusing food to protest their years of incarceration without trial. Instead, they are being force-fed through tubes inserted in the nose. The last thing their American captors want is for any of them to die — or die for lack of nutrition, anyway.

“It’s not surprising that this has happened, not surprising at all,” Ms. Greenberg said at Morandi, an Italian restaurant on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, not far from her apartment. “What is startling is how it has taken the detainees to bring to a crisis what so many of their lawyers and well-meaning human rights activists have tried to do for 12 years. They’re in control of this issue. They certainly are, because the only power they have is threatening to die.”

“They can’t tolerate it anymore,” she said. “It is despair, in our faces. Sure, there are people who would say: ‘They’re bad people. They deserve it.’ But that is not how we as Americans think about our punitive systems.”