Describes the conditions that contribute to hunger, including poverty and environmental problems, and details efforts being taken to rid the world of the problem.

In the First World War the supply of food to civilians became as significant a factor in final victory as success or defeat on the battlefields. Never before had the populations of entire countries lived under siege conditions, yet this extraordinary situation is often overlooked as a decisive factor in the outcome of the conflict. Matthew Richardson, in this highly readable and original comparative study, looks at the food supply situation on the British, German, French, Russian and Italian home fronts, as well as on the battlefields. His broad perspective contrasts with some narrower approaches to the subject, and brings a fresh insight into the course of the war on all the major fronts. He explores the causes of food shortages, as well as the ways in which both combatant and neutral nations attempted to overcome them. He looks at widely differing attitudes towards alcohol during the war, and the social impacts of food shortages, as well as the ways in which armies attempted to victual their troops in the field.

Hunger is an issue which has been subject to much rigorous intellectual examination by economists, philosophers, sociologists, NGOs and governments. This volume provides a critical overview of current academic and political perspectives and then compares these views from thenon-hungry people with those of thehungry particularly from a broad range of poor communities in India. Their views are gathered using participatory rural appraisal techniques and the scale of the material presented is unprecedented. Not surprisingly, the comparisons show that the perceptions of the hungry are fundamentally different from those of the non-hungry. It makes compelling suggestions about how best policy makers can attempt to eliminate hunger based on what the hungry themselves suggest. The book also draws attention to the critical role of Common Property Resources and women in the fight against under-nutrition, which have so far been largely ignored.

Hunger is one of the governing metaphors for literature in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, writers and critics repeatedly describe writing as a process of starvation, as in the familiar type of the starving artist, and high art as the rejection of 'culinary' pleasures. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism argues that this metaphor offers a way of describing the contradictions of aesthetic autonomy in modernist literature and its late-twentieth-century heirs. This book traces the emergence of a tradition of writing it calls the 'art of hunger', from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century. It focuses particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy's delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism's post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.

Throughout the ages, more combatants and civilians have died in war of the effects of starvation and resulting disease than have been killed by bullet or bomb. The author of this fascinating work argues that, over the last 160 years, conflicts have been decided not just on the battlefield but by the denial of an adversary’s access to food. The starvation that followed led to military indiscipline, social unrest, and a failure of governance. Numerous examples prove his point, not least Germany in 1919. The Union blockade of the Confederacy in 1861 was a major factor in the outcome of the Civil War as was the American strategy against Japan in 1943-1945. The fates of besieged forces both at Vicksburg in 1863 and the British at Kut in 1916 were sealed when control of their respective supply routes was lost. Churchill’s fears over Hitler’s U-boat campaign were well justified. ‘Logistics’ is a modern word, but it describes a fundamental element of generalship, amply demonstrated at Metz in 1870 when logistic illiteracy resulted in a vast and hitherto undefeated French army having no option but to surrender. This thought-provoking book vividly demonstrates that extreme hunger is the precursor to starvation and, consequently, almost inevitable defeat. It proves that deprivation of food is a potent weapon that no commander can ignore.

The first book ever to examine the links between hunger and race, The Color of Hunger probes the contemporary and historical reasons hunger is concentrated among people of color, both domestically and globally.