Book Review of George Kent’s “Caring About Hunger”

Abstract

Reading George Kent's 2016 book, “Caring about Hunger” (Kent 2016) is refreshing and helpful, as it is a reflective essay on the interrelations between and among the various facets and factors that produce hunger. At the same time, it is an attempt to produce a conceptual and informative foundation as to how to reconstruct a response to the problem at all relevant levels, i.e., international and global institutions, the government, local, and the personal, emphasizing the care for children. The fact that the book was completed in 2016 and is even more pertinent today, in 2023, shows the continuities and worsening of trends such as caring, but not caring enough, in terms of both first and second-order consequences of the quality and mixing of, for example, industry made milk for babies and the highly preferred mother's milk. The many and manifold exposures George had to virtually each of the less than fully caring institutions that created worsening realities in the food production, distribution, and trade were in geographies of the advanced countries and the less developed and in virtually all levels of hunger, where food production did not accord with actual supply at household level. His dealing with fisheries, for example, started with Hawaii Coastal Zone Management (1975), then he got a sabbatical to study fisheries as a model for global resource management (1977-1978), and later continued to the nutrition objectives that were to be achieved in fisheries’ policies (1985) in Thailand and Indonesia. He then continued with UNFAO in the very same area of concern. Thus, he was able to view hunger creation and response at all relevant levels. He has devoted more than 40 years to developing the conclusions and insights he reviews in 8 chapters of key concerns in this book. He took the same type of gradual collection on the spot of lessons re fisheries into the other key components of the food machinery globally and within many countries. In the early parts of the book, terms like holocaust and genocide are used to define the magnitude, de facto, of hunger’s disastrous reality, even when it is not caused by