Hunger

Abstract

Books about hunger and its causes are nothing new, as anyone who follows development literature is well aware. This is probably because hunger itself has been around as long as people have been writing books. Nevertheless, 1974 was the year of a “world food crisis”: the United Nations saw fit to convene a world food conference in Rome, and a spate of new books has appeared in its aftermath to discuss the problem. Why a crisis should have congealed in 1974 from the world's perennial hunger is one of the subjects ably considered by Collins and Lappe's Food First and Susan George's How the Other Half Dies. Why so much has been written about it is a subject worth considering here.