Production continues to rise globally, with significant increases in crops, meat, milk, eggs, and fish since 2000. Agricultural productivity has grown, using less land and labour, reducing hunger and improving nutrition in many regions. However, this progress is shadowed by severe environmental costs. Climate change threatens yields, especially in vulnerable areas, while food systems contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Historically, fears of population outstripping food supply—from Malthus in the 18th century to the warnings of the 1960s—were averted not by chance, but by deliberate action. The challenge ahead is to transform how we produce and consume food—sustainably increasing output while protecting the planet for future generations.

Investigates enslaved women’s caring labor after children’s weaning, but before they entered more formal work for enslavers at adolescence. Tasking elderly women with this role was financially advantageous for enslavers, enabling mothers to labor elsewhere and women’s relatively advanced age meant they would have been of less economic value for fieldwork. Prioritizes the evidence of the formerly enslaved in considering their perspectives on children’s eating, but also makes use of enslavers testimony to allow for a comparison of evidence. After considering enslavers’ regimentation of children’s eating and their perceptions and labeling of women who fed them, the chapter centers how enslaved children ate. It explains how the formerly enslaved voiced their memories of childhood eating in ways that conveyed the brutality of the regime without upending racial sensibilities of the day via animalistic metaphors. It then examines other people who prepared children’s food and mothers’ self-sacrificial actions. It addresses everyday hunger and the monotony of food regimes, and the implications of communal feeding upon health and hygiene, and the cruelty of quarters’ cooks.

Explores the scope and context of enslavers’ regimentation of communal food practices among adults. Addresses the complexities of quantifying different cooking and eating regimes and considers food cultures on special occasions. Emphasizes the everyday rather than the unusual, although people often remembered annual feasts because these events played an important part in enslavers systems of “rewards and punishments.” Explores the idealized tracts of enslavers to illuminate the ways in which they felt the food of enslaved adults should be regimented. Considers how the realities of that experience as recalled by those formerly enslaved sharpen the dichotomy between these two perspectives, even as the broad parameters of food regimentation and the role of quarters’ cooks remain broadly the same. Elaborates upon quarters’ cooks who additionally catered for enslavers, including occasionally enslaved men, and upon white women’s self-serving involvement in collective eating regimes. Finally, the chapter examines some of the horrific ways in which enslavers used food as a tool of punishment, a means of heightening enslavers’ power and control, and ultimately their profits.

What were the global dimensions of hunger during the First World War and its aftermath? By reviewing the causes, worldwide scale, and national specificities of wartime starvation, the development of transnational food and humanitarian networks can be explored. These linked hungry Europe to not only the United States but also to Japan, Australia, and various Scandinavian, South American, Middle Eastern, and African nations. The global experience of hunger helped to create and expand empathy for civilians and displaced populations abroad, above all for children as the iconic symbols of war victimhood. The saga of widespread hunger initiated by the First World War illustrates how humanitarian crises generated new approaches as well as emotional linkages between hungry populations and aid workers, transforming global public opinion.

From 1830, Irish literature shares with official and state documentation an intense interest in the details of everyday life while also drawing energy from O’Connellite mobilisation of the mass of the Irish people. An uncertain new sociology of literature emerged, characterised by hesitations and questions, part of an Irish romanticism darkened by detail. The chapter tracks Irish romanticism through to the period of the Great Famine and offers discussions of works by Maria Edgeworth, James Clarence Mangan and William Carleton.

Food in the era of the First World War was much more than a military necessity. The shortages of foodstuffs profoundly shaped states and societies during the conflict and beyond. Hunger in war was not a new phenomenon, but its experience during the First World War led to three main changes. First, it changed the social contract between citizens and the state. People who had suffered serial nutritional deprivation came to believe more forcefully than before that a primary responsibility of the state was to provide a bare minimum of supplies for their survival. States, too, understood that being able to provide foodstuffs for their citizens was essential for their legitimacy. Second, hunger in the era of the First World War brought a new emphasis on “nutritional sovereignty”: the idea that states must be able to produce their food supplies themselves, rather than import them. Finally, hunger in the era of the First World War was a turning point in the development of international aid. While international charitable aid had existed long before the War, the amount of aid given the number of different groups and institutions grew exponentially.

The Second World War is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the understanding of malnutrition and starvation, whereas the significance of the First World War has been largely overlooked. This chapter examines some of the major lines of research into hunger and malnutrition during the war of 1914–18, as well as the state of scientific knowledge on the eve of that conflict. It argues that the war brought major shifts in the understanding of a number of deficiency diseases – scurvy, pellagra and beriberi – as well as in the physiology and pathology of hunger. Privation of military and civilian populations and the opportunity to study malnutrition in controlled environments created opportunities for scientific research, while wartime imperatives, both political and military, provided the impetus and resources necessary for systematic investigation. Cumulatively, these advances were transformational but not all of them resulted in lasting achievements. In this respect, nutritional science provides some useful insights into the complex relationship between war and scientific and medical change.

Perceptions and bias help explain animosity over food supplies between urban and rural civilians. While differences in rural and urban hunger existed in some places, caution should be exercised when attributing the destitution of urban dwellers to greed or acts of self-preservation by rural farmers. Greater proximity to major food sources did not always equate to greater access to food. Furthermore, proximity to food in both urban and rural areas was not fixed, but changed over the course of the war and its aftermath. People fled or were forced from their homes in both urban and rural areas. This movement of people blurred rural and urban distinctions as people from the countryside flocked into cities and people in the cities took shorter trips to the countryside to search for food. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of predominantly urban children travelled temporarily to rural landscapes in the early 1920s. Analyses of anthropometric measurements of school children in Germany and Austria suggest that rural and urban differences were small. During the War, children in Vienna may have suffered more nutritional deprivation overall then in other parts of Austria, but after the War, Viennese children had the fastest rate of recovery.

Food insecurity during the First World War made hungry civilians around the continent search for alternative modes and means to fight hunger in war and post-war Europe. A transnational comparison of survival strategies, employed by individuals throughout Europe, demonstrates how ordinary civilians responded to the shortcomings of official food provisioning. The chapter explores how civilians turned to home-based agricultural production, made trips to the countryside or participated in black market. As regular circuits for obtaining food were very restricted, individuals circumvented official distribution means by relying on the alternative economies of grey and black markets. Bartering, especially, became an important means to cope with the economy of shortages. Relying on informal channels, as this chapter demonstrates, the hungry population traded jewellery for potatoes or furniture for meat. Civilians sometimes even resorted to illegal and criminal activities such as fraud and theft to meet their basic needs. In Eastern and Western Europe, individuals of course took actions in different forms, depending on the severity of the food scarcity, but, as this chapter argues, the strategies they used also shared many similar features and delineated new modes of social interactions, and new relationships to the licit and the illicit in wartime.

This chapter focuses on an alleged rebellion by enslaved people in Jamaica in 1776. A broader global perspective on the American Revolution, one beyond the thirteen rebelling mainland colonies, underlines how freedom and unfreedom intertwined together in complicated, surprising, and sometimes horrific ways in 1776. The chapter argues that calls for liberty on the mainland tightened the noose of slavery in the Caribbean. In Jamaica, the American Revolution gave even more force to already powerful waves of racist fear and violence, making dismal slavery even grimmer. Enslaver anxieties centered on control of arms and violence against white women. Moreover, what happened in Jamaica affected the course and shape of the American Revolution. The events of 1776 in Jamaica also highlight that the Age of Revolutions was equally an age of racism and retrenchment as it was one of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.

Jewish experiences, from life in cramped Judenhäuser always subject to Gestapo violence, to the suffering of individuals and families in a variety of ghettos in eastern Europe, are discussed. This includes the geographies of the Holocaust, house committees and activities within and outside ghetto walls, and also communal organizations, economic activities, self-help, and familial strategies.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.