Social Justice Watcher

Food, Food, Everywhere, but Not a Bite to Eat: The Truth Behind Responsibility and Food Insecurity

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:52:47 -0700

The first time I understood hunger, I was trapped in my room in Shanghai. It was the spring of 2022, and I was 12 years old.

The world was in total panic as a strange disease wreaked havoc, travelling across national borders and creeping past government mandates and lockdowns. Yet all I knew at the time was that my tummy rumbled, and the helpless face of my mother couldn’t assuage it.

At first, food didn’t even cross my mind as a concern; I was even happy I didn't have to go to school. I assumed food would keep coming because, well, it always had.

You see, for twelve-year-old me, Shanghai seemed endless, filled with stores, malls, and restaurants that were always full of food. Back then, the term “food insecurity” was a foreign phrase to me. But I would learn it much sooner than I expected.

I kept asking Mom for food and eyeing the fridge for the snacks that had always been there. For the first time in my life, I began noticing how much food was in the kitchen, or rather, how little there was.

My meals...Read More

Freedom from Hunger, Hunger for Freedom

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:50:43 -0700

Introduction

At family dinners growing up, after everyone laid down their chopsticks, my grandfather would always take one last glance at the few grains of rice left at the bottom of his bowl. At the time, I took this to be a habit of thrift, but as a teenager, I realized it came from his experience of China’s Great Famine between 1958 and 1962. The severe hunger and loss of life not only caused permanent damage to the Chinese nation but also affected the lives of survivors for years to come.

South African revolutionary and President Nelson Mandela once said, “Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs.” When a person constantly worries about how to access the next meal, it makes them less able to engage in, or reflect upon, other activities. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs places physiological needs at the base, suggesting that when people lack food, they are not truly free to pursue higher needs such as belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (McLeod).

However, Mandela’s claim captures only half of the relationship between freedom and hunger. While having enough food is required to practice many types of freedom, freedom is also necessary to preserve one’s right to obtain food. Drawing on interviews with my grandfather and a woman in Bangladesh, this...Read More

Food Production and Food Access: Why Greater Supply Does Not End Hunger

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:48:21 -0700

Over the last few decades, the world’s capacity to produce food has been improved by innovations in the field of agricultural science: a meta-analysis of 147 studies found, for instance, that the adoption of genetically modified crops increased yields by 22 percent on average (Klümper & Qaim, 2014). In spite of this improved productive capacity, however, hunger remains a major challenge globally. Greater supply, it seems, does not necessarily produce meaningful access. Though adequate production remains essential to solving the problem, the solution cannot be realised by solely focusing on output. With this in mind, the first section of this essay examines how failures of distribution prevent food from reaching particular communities, before the second considers the separate problem of affordability. The third and final section then turns to the importance of storage, as food can be lost even after it has been produced and distributed. Ultimately, by considering these different points at which access can break down, the essay argues that widespread hunger persists because increased production does not by itself ensure that food both reaches those who need it and remains affordable when it arrives.

When considering the relationship between production and access, distribution is the most immediate constraint, since increased production is of little value if weak transport infrastructure prevents food from reaching remote communities. In South Sudan, for example, more than half the country's roads become impassable for over six months during the rainy season: overland movement gets so unreliable that the World Food Programme has to pre-position supplies in remote areas before the rains hit (World Food Programme, 2021). In this case, the challenge is largely logistical: food exists within the wider aid system while still being...Read More

Built to Grow More

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:45:51 -0700

Introduction

“Enough” in the question of whether the world produces enough food is almost always measured at the moment a crop leaves the field, not at the moment a person eats, and that single choice of measurement point carries more weight than it first appears to. Counted at harvest, global agriculture already clears the bar with room to spare. Counted at the plate, after a large share of those harvested calories has been diverted into livestock feed, fuel tanks, and supply chains that lose food along the way, the surplus mostly disappears.

Two separate failures produce that gap, and neither one alone explains why it persists. The first is a straightforward matter of energy: converting a crop into meat or fuel destroys most of the crop's caloric value before a human ever consumes it. The second is a matter of institutions: the agencies, subsidy programs, and research infrastructures that govern global agriculture were built in the mid-twentieth century to solve a production shortage that no longer exists, and they have kept rewarding exactly the metric, tonnage grown, that the energy loss hides behind. What follows treats persistent hunger less as a story about scarcity or greed than as a story about a system optimizing, with real success, for a target that stopped being the right one decades ago.

I. The Energy a Crop Loses Before It Reaches Anyone

Gr

When Freedom Cannot Be Practical: Rethinking Mandela’s Claim About Food

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:39:59 -0700

“Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs.”--- Nelson Mandela

At first glance, Mandela’s statement seems almost contradictory. Discussions of freedom are often centered on political entitlements: the right to vote, speak, or to make decisions without being controlled by others. However, the task of eliminating hunger usually falls into another category of human right advocacy: securing the basic conditions for survival. Why does Mandela tie such physical needs to freedom?

The word that renders this statement so obscure is meaningless. Mandela does not mean that a hungry person has no access to freedom. That person can still vote, make personal decisions, and retain the same legal rights as other individuals. If these...Read More

Freedom on an Empty Stomach: Reflections on Mandela ’s Vision of Liberty and Food Security

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:36:51 -0700

Nelson Mandela did not just use his poetic licence when he said that “freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them” (2011, p. 159). He was correcting a mistaken notion that liberty is a legal or political right: the right to vote, to speak, to move; a right that can be given on paper, and that this is all it is. The same sentiment was echoed in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s own obituary of Mandela, which noted that he understood that the hunger of millions was both unjust and unsustainable, and that no hungry man, woman or child could be considered truly free (FAO, 2013). Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years imprisoned for demanding political freedom, understood better than almost anyone that formal liberty without material security is a hollow inheritance. A person who has a right to select a government, but not what, or whether, to eat, is not fully free. This essay suggests that Mandela’s statement is a rephrasing of freedom as a state that must be cultivated, literally, before it can be enjoyed, and that the current global food crisis, from the famine-stricken areas of Sudan to the violence-torn farmlands of Nigeria, is a testament to the need for this reframing, which is still relevant today, nearly three decades after Mandela first uttered his words.

Freedom as a Material Condition, Not Just a Legal Status

The notion of freedom that has been passed on in the...Read More

The Distance Between Food and a Meal: Why Abundance Does Not End Hunger

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:33:29 -0700

In June 2026, the World Bank judged global food availability adequate. Several weeks later, five United Nations agencies estimated that 645 million people experienced hunger in 2025. The same publication also estimated that 2.69 billion people could not afford a healthy diet (FAO et al., 2026). There is an interesting contradiction with food production that can fill granaries without allowing some households a single meal. Prices and physical access are responsible for part of the distance between the granary and the dining table. Meanwhile, rights and public protection are also significant factors. Global agriculture has improved its productive reach much faster than public institutions have secured human access to food. Market access and public institutions allow hunger to continue via their determination and sometimes the negation of access for some groups. In many regions suffering from conflict and climatic extremes, public commitments have not succeeded in restoring access at scale. Therefore, the distance between food and a meal measures unequal control over resources and inadequate protection against loss. Hunger survives abundance since crops and access constitute different achievements. Furthermore, the widespread issue of hunger outlives known remedies as finance and accountability have lagged behind aspiration.

Sen (1981) has expounded this contradiction with its perhaps most famous explanation by arguing that famines can unfold amid adequate national stocks after households lose the means to acquire food. Families may lose earnings and productive assets as a result of exchange opportunities closing and public transfers vanishing. Sen has called these routes ‘entitlements’: socially recognized means of commanding food. The concept of ‘entitlements’ deals with a wholly different household question: can this person...Read More

Why does hunger persist in a world capable of producing enough food for everyone?

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:28:57 -0700

World agriculture already has enough calories to feed all the people in the world, but hundreds of millions of people are still hungry every night. This is not a paradox of scarcity but one of access, distribution, and instability. Over 20 years ago the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and World Food Programme (WFP) noted that "hunger in a world of food abundance is principally a result of negligence, as it lies within mankind's capacity to put in place the policies, institutions, technologies and logistics both to prevent and eradicate hunger (FAO et al., 2002). More than two decades later, that observation remains strikingly true. Although the report notes modest improvements in global hunger over the past three years, the most recent State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report estimates that about 645 million people were hungry in 2025, and that about 2.7 billion people did not have access to a healthy diet (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, & WHO, 2026). Hunger is not a problem of food abundance, but is best understood as a product of a complex array of factors: armed conflict and displacement, poverty and unaffordability, climate volatility and increasing input costs, and chronic underinvestment in the rural economies of the majority of hungry people. If hunger is a systems failure, not a production failure, then the first step to improving real food security in the world is to understand this.

Abundance Without Access

Over...Read More

Why does hunger persist in a world capable of producing enough food for everyone?

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:26:59 -0700

The Leverage of the Full Granary: Why Hunger Outlives Abundance

World cereal output has exceeded aggregate human caloric requirement for roughly half a century, and the surplus is not marginal. The puzzle therefore cannot be agronomic. Nor is it dissolved by the reflexive answer that the hungry are poor: poverty is the same fact stated in the currency of money rather than grain, and restating a problem is not explaining it. What requires explanation is why an economy that can produce enough consistently arranges itself so that some people cannot claim any of it — and why that arrangement survives every technical improvement thrown at it.

The most powerful available account begins by severing hunger from supply altogether. Starvation, on the entitlement analysis, is a failure of the bundles a person can lawfully command, not of what exists within reach; Bengal in 1943 killed on a harvest that was not markedly deficient, because wartime inflation and wage stagnation collapsed the exchange rate between rural labour and rice (Sen, 1981a; Sen, 1981b). Famine becomes legible as a distributive event with market microfoundations. Later quantitative work has largely vindicated the frame: episodes once filed under crop failure turn out to be dominated by shifts in relative prices and purchasing power (Ó Gráda, 2007), and food abundance at the national level travels perfectly well alongside acute local deprivation.

That account has partial explanatory power, and its limits appear precisely where its elegance lies. Entitlements are treated as a mapping —...Read More

The Social Distribution of Hunger in a World of Abundance

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:25:04 -0700

In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic closed restaurants and schools almost overnight, dairy farmers in the United States dumped thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and plowed fields of ripe vegetables back into the soil (Yaffe-Bellany and Corkery), even as lines of cars stretched outside food banks. The food existed; it simply could not reach the people who needed it. That single season exposed a reality that holds even in ordinary times. We already grow approximately one and a half times more food than the current population needs (Mulhern). And yet hunger has not disappeared: the United Nations estimates that around 645 million people faced hunger in 2025 ("State of Food Security"). These two facts sit uncomfortably beside each other. If there is enough food, hunger cannot simply be a matter of scarcity, of the world running short. It must instead be a problem of distribution: who is able to obtain the food that exists, and who is not.

This shift in thinking was made famous by the economist Amartya Sen, who argued that starvation results from “some people not having enough food to eat,” rather than from there being too little food in the world overall (Sen). His central concept is what he called entitlement: the set of legitimate means through which a person can get hold of food, whether by growing it, buying it with wages, trading for it, or receiving it from the state. On this view, people go hungry not when food physically disappears, but when their entitlement fails: when they lose the ability to command food through any of these channels, even while food still sits within reach, untouched.

This essay argues that hunger persists in a world of plenty because food is distributed through social...Read More