Hunger

Defining and Measuring Hunger

In a very basic sense, hunger is the experience of not being able to consume enough and the right kinds of food. While this seems straightforward enough, the identification, explanation, and alleviation of hunger are fraught with disagreements over conceptual issues related to the socially and culturally complex and dynamic relationship between human beings and food. An effort to produce a body of scientific knowledge related to that experience emerged with the modern state and its imperative to measure, quantify, and, thereby, manage and regulate the population. For well over a century, intellectual debates over the concept and phenomenon of hunger have concerned questions of objectivity, universality, reliability, validity, and statistical precision. To take one example, in the late decades of the 1800s, British nutritionists, social reformers, government officials, and colonial administrators considered local food practices—whether they reflected “rational” behavior or not—and optimal diets as they argued over the discovery of universal standards by which to determine who in Britain and its colonies was “hungry” and who had died as a result of “starvation.” In the United States, social, political, and policy debates since the 1960s have increasingly revolved around questions about the validity and reliability of hunger data, leading to a broad, state-sponsored effort to develop methods for the scientific measurement of hunger. These examples also serve to illustrate the point that scientific knowledge about hunger, no matter how technically precise, is infused with, and shaped by, politics (power relations), culture (social meanings), and the environment (human relationships with biophysical systems). In short, the task of defining and measuring hunger confronts powerful social, political, economic, and environmental geographies in the relationship of people to food and, therefore, in what constitutes hunger. In the early 2000s, conceptual debates about hunger have settled on three prominent, not uncontested, understandings of hunger.

The World Geography of Undernutrition and Malnutrition

The two most commonly recognized forms of hunger are undernutrition and malnutrition. Very basically, undernutrition occurs when a person is unable to consume enough calories to remain healthy and active on a continuing basis, depending on her or his age, sex, height, age, and daily physical exertion. Malnutrition specifies a person's inability to consume a nutritionally balanced [Page 1487]diet. This can involve either deficient or excessive consumption of particular nutrients, such as proteins or carbohydrates. Both of these kinds of hunger result in a range of physical and mental effects on the body, most notably stunting (low height for age), wasting (low weight for height), underweight (low weight for age), impaired cognitive development, greater susceptibility to disease and injury, and, in the case of malnutrition, obesity.

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