Hunger

List of Tables List of Figures Preface Introduction The Analytical Framework Methodology Worldwide Impending Hunger: The Empirical Picture The Evidence of Effective Malthusian Pressures: The Empirical Record Changes in the Agricultural Tehcnology Summary Appendixes Bibliography Index

This book recognizes that any attempt to reduce hunger requires a sound understanding of which people are affected. It differentiates between food shortage (regional food scarcity), food poverty (inadequate household food supplies), and food deprivation (individual malnutrition) in order to identify the causes of hunger and recommend ways to effectively target interventions. It also focuses on a critical second question--how do we know who the hungry are? The authors explain commonly-used means of measuring hunger, the assumptions embedded in these measures, and what can and cannot be concluded from the evidence. They examine how rules for food distribution operate under normal versus crisis conditions. The shortage/poverty/deprivation framework is designed to call attention to hunger even when food is abundant, as well as to learn how hunger is avoided even when food is scarce. With many tools in place for combating hunger, the book draws attention to the policies that are working and to the individuals, households, and communities that are underserved. The book refines common thinking about the underlying causes of hunger by examining who are most affected.

The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life. Taking as her focus the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when soul food emerged as a pivotal emblem of white radical chic and black bourgeois authenticity, Witt explores how this interracial celebration of previously stigmatized foods such as chitterlings and watermelon was linked to the contemporaneous vilification of black women as slave mothers. By positioning African American women at the nexus of debates over domestic servants, black culinary history, and white female body politics, Black Hunger demonstrates why the ongoing narrative of white fascination with blackness demands increased attention to the internal dynamics of sexuality, gender, class, and religion in African American culture. Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue for food as an interpretive paradigm which can challenge the privileging of music in scholarship on African American culture, destabilize constrictive disciplinary boundaries in the academy, and enhance our understanding of how individual and collective identities are established.

Struggling with Development is a study of the complex relationships among international development, hunger, & gender in the context of political violence in the Philippines. This ethnography demonstrates that gender-specific international development, which has among its main goals the alleviation of hunger in women & children & the raising of women's social position, has instead perpetuated the problems of hunger & gender inequality in societies. Lynn Kwiatkowski questions the international "women in development" thrust of some feminist & development scholarship & organizations, arguing for a critical reevaluation of the hegemonic Western international development project.

In the 1980s record numbers of Americans have qualified for food stamps and food aid in other forms despite increasingly rigid standards of eligibility. This new study examines the policy processes that have shaped food assistance programs since the Kennedy administration and looks at prospects for resolving the political stalemate over food aid that has overtaken national policy. Focusing on conflicts over policy objectives and budget, the author traces the ups and downs of the struggle between the executive branch and Congress to control both policy and appropriations. This is a clear and balanced analysis of one of the gravest policy dilemmas facing the naton.