Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes international health constructions of “global hunger” to address how anthropological methods might examine negotiations between bodily experiences and scientific standardizing practices.

Paper long abstract:

Renewed fears about rising population rates and climate change have coincided with mounting concern for global hunger. Yet 'global hunger,' although it mobilizes considerable energy among international health and development organizations, is hardly a stable or steady thing. In some sites hunger is measured through national population and agricultural statistics. Others make use of qualitative surveys that ask about perceived levels of satiety. Still others depend upon caloric or nutrient intakes and body mass averages. While each of these approaches crafts divergent embodied materialities of what hunger can be, they generally claim to represent 'hunger' as though the term has a universal meaning. The consolidation of this multiplicity is all the more apparent with attempts to quantify global hunger, which represents diverse experiences and sensations of desire for food, and various methods for assessing dietary wants and needs within a single metric. This paper moves between research conducted with international organizations working to account for global hunger and fieldwork in a Latin American community routinely characterized by the global health community as having a high rate of hunger. I ask how various metrics of hunger hang together, where they begin to fall apart, and how policy makers negotiate the uncertainties present within the standards they employ. More generally, I raise questions about ethnographic possibilities for examining global facts, whose representative forms diverge from the description of everyday life experiences typical of anthropological fieldwork, but which also circle back to influence quotidian practices in influential ways.