To most economic historians, hunger itself is a fixed category. We know what it is, that it has remained the same over time, and that changes in its distribution have had far reaching effects on our economic development. The pages of this journal are a testament to the quantity and quality of scholarship in economic history about hunger. The story, we now know, is not one of slow and steady progress but one of fits and starts and reversals, and the current obsession with the ever-expanding waistlines in developed (and now developing) countries certainly acts as evidence that the story is far from over. What can we make, then, of a book that takes this nutritional history as “given” ? It turns out, a great deal. Rather than analyze hunger as nutritional depravation, complete with per capita calorie estimates, food quantities, and disease rates, James Vernon takes a postmodern approach—he sees hunger as a cultural category that has evolved over time in a symbiotic relationship with modern political and economic development. Vernon, in essence, looks at the other side of the hunger coin. He is not interested in how we escaped the traps of chronic malnutrition, but in how that escape changed the way that we think about and act on hunger.

Vernon is not setting out to write a history of hunger in the traditional sense. His approach is decidedly postmodern, the focus of the book is on the British Empire, and he covers the period of, roughly, 1820–1960. This approach allows him to organize the eight chapters of the book thematically, focusing on the science of hunger, nutritional education campaigns, the politics of hunger, and so on. There is some overlap between chapters, but the heart of the story is told in the first four chapters, where Vernon lays out the demise of the Malthusian approach to hunger and the rise of a more empathetic, humanitarian response. While I have some quibbles with Vernon's take on the morality of Malthusian theory (for example, Malthusian thinking has not gone away, and it still plays a large role in policy debates on issues as varied as environmental regulation and family planning), he makes the point that the hungry were, through the nineteenth century, blamed for their hunger. Hunger, and poverty more generally, were seen as the result of moral failings or laziness. Indeed, Vernon points out that hunger was seen as fit punishment, that those who had experienced it would then do everything possible to never experience it again. Hunger was not only natural, it was necessary for our moral well-being.

The change in our view of hunger begins in the mid-nineteenth century. Vernon begins by noting how investigative reports from prisons (which regularly starved inmates), and stories of how hungry families found their way to their current circumstance, began the movement to change the view of hunger. Hunger also became a political act in itself, where hunger strikes were used in parts of the British Empire as a sign of protest. Over time, hunger came to be seen as the result of some sort of political failing (although Vernon never traces the idea that the government was responsible for feeding the hungry to its origin), and now that the victims of hunger were seen as innocent victims, it was only natural that political and economic institutions step in to act. Key to this change was the development of nutritional science, which gave us new ways of thinking about hunger (for example, making the necessary distinction between undernutriution and malnutrition), of measuring hunger, and provided a scientific framework that we still use today to think about human nutrition and to design policies to counteract it. (The question for preventing hunger is what to feed the hungry.) The four chapters where Vernon lays out this story are both learned and timely, and Vernon makes a convincing case that the conception of hunger underwent fundamental changes during this time.

The remaining chapters show how this change in the concept of hunger was put into action. I was especially intrigued by Vernon's description of consumer education campaigns, which sought to shape demand for food and educate citizens on what a healthy diet was. While these ideas would seem primitive to us today they were a fundamental change in consumer behavior. I would have liked for Vernon to develop the themes in that chapter more, because recent scholarship points to the fact that these campaigns would have been unlikely without a change in the cultural category of consumer (see Donohue, Kathleen G. Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). A better discussion of the integration of the education campaigns with a decided movement in the production and marketing of food would have made the chapter even more engaging. Vernon also describes how the hunger of the 1930s and the period immediately after the Second World War helped in the establishment of the modern welfare state in England.

Overall, this is an enjoyable book that economic historians interested in nutrition should seek out. It provides a fresh perspective on the changing meaning of hunger in the modern word, which influences not only our domestic policies but international efforts as well. There are some shortcomings, however. Since Vernon takes the nutritional history as given, we learn little about how people's thoughts on the problem of hunger changed. Similarly, Vernon does not consider the fact that the changing conception of hunger was the result of the economic and institutional changes beginning in the seventeenth century. We know now, for example, that hunger had already changed in nutritional ways by the time the conception of hunger began to change in the nineteenth century. Would such a change have been possible without two centuries of nutritional change? Even with these shortcomings, Vernon's book is an interesting, insightful take on hunger.