From farm to plate, and who goes without.
10 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
An Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Food Security
FAO · 2008
Sets out food security as four separate conditions — availability, access, utilisation and stability — that must all hold at once, rather than a…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Rapid Rise of Supermarkets in Developing Countries: Induced Organizational, Institutional, and Technological Change in Agrifood Systems
Thomas Reardon, C. Peter Timmer & Julio Berdegué · 2004
Argues the rapid spread of supermarket chains across the developing world is reorganising food distribution from the top down — centralised…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
Amartya Sen · 1981
Argues famines are caused by failures of people's entitlement to obtain food — through work, trade or transfers — rather than simply by there being…
+2 more at this level
12 works
FAO
Sets out food security as four separate conditions — availability, access, utilisation and stability — that must all hold at once, rather than a single measure of enough calories existing somewhere.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Imperial College London
Argues that feeding a larger population depends on raising yields on land already farmed rather than clearing more, and that waste and diet composition matter as much as production.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO
Tracks how many people worldwide lack reliable access to enough food and argues that after decades of decline, conflict, climate shocks and economic downturns have pushed hunger back to where it was over a decade ago.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Reardon, C. Peter Timmer & Julio Berdegué
Argues the rapid spread of supermarket chains across the developing world is reorganising food distribution from the top down — centralised procurement, private quality standards, dedicated wholesalers — and that producers who cannot meet these new demands are cut out of the chain entirely.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gustavsson et al.
Produces the first global estimate of food lost and wasted across the whole supply chain and finds that in rich countries the losses happen mostly at retail and consumption, while in poor countries they happen mostly at production and storage.
link checked 17 Sept 2026van Huis et al.
Argues insects are a nutritionally and environmentally efficient protein source that could supplement conventional livestock at scale, and works through the practical and cultural barriers to eating them more widely.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO
Tracks the shift from wild capture fisheries, most of which are now fully or over-exploited, to aquaculture as the source of nearly all new growth in fish supply, and assesses how sustainably that growth is happening.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO
Assesses the hidden environmental and social costs of the global food system that market prices do not capture, and argues these hidden costs are large enough to change which farming and food policies actually pay off.
link checked 17 Sept 2026YaleCourses
Argues that diet is set by the food environment — pricing, marketing and availability — rather than by individual willpower, and examines the policy levers that follow from that claim.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Amartya Sen
Argues famines are caused by failures of people's entitlement to obtain food — through work, trade or transfers — rather than simply by there being too little food overall, reframing famine as a problem of distribution and rights.
Kym Anderson
Measures how far government policy pushed farm prices away from world market levels across 75 countries over half a century, and finds that rich countries protected their farmers while poor countries taxed theirs — the opposite of what each country's comparative advantage suggested.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO
Argues the world is running out of good agricultural land and water to expand into, so future food production has to come mainly from intensifying land already farmed rather than farming more of it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026