Critical food insecurity

We all eat, but not all of us can access the food we need to live a healthy and active life. This is true for those in wealthy and emerging countries. In most instances, it is the most vulnerable who bear this burden disproportionately. This unit explores the scales, causes, and consequences of food insecurity and who is most likely to experience hunger and hardship.

This module is divided into four sections. The first section focuses on the global scale of food insecurity and how we have sought to increase food production and distribution to meet the worldwide need and year-round demand. The section concludes with a discussion of the food insecurity of those who produce the food needed to meet this demand (lessons 1–4). The second section (lessons 5–7) introduces the causes and effects of household-scale food insecurity through the concepts of access, foodscape, food desert, and affordability. The section also investigates the social implications of food insecurity, such as the loss of commensality. The third section (lessons 8–9) highlights two areas linked to systematic and disproportionate food insecurity burden in order to explore how Sen’s concept of entitlement can explain this. The final section (lesson 10) introduces ways that we have sought to meet the needs of people at the household scale who are food insecure and seeks to provide a critical interrogation of the role of food aid as a mechanism for addressing food insecurity.

By the end of this unit, students should be able to do the following:

1. Define food insecurity and describe how it manifests itself at multiple geographical scales (e.g., the region, nation, city, household, and individual);

2. Identify the causes and effects of food insecurity and how these interconnect and reinforce each other across geographical scale;

3. Contextualize how disadvantage linked to different forms of inequality disproportionately creates hunger and hardship for some groups more than others;

4. Critically evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of different solutions to address food insecurity at both the global and household scale.