Sustenance Conversations: On Hunger

Please join UCHRI and the UC Humanities Network for a conversation on our new annual theme, Sustenance, between Dana Simmons, author of On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic (UC Press, Open Access) and Charlotte Biltekoff. 

In On Hunger, Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in US history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Zoom registration

Dana Simmons is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Society, Environment and Health Equity at UC Riverside. Her work draws from Science and Technology Studies (STS), history of science, feminist studies, food studies, critical theory, and labor history, to examine how politics is scientized and how science is weaponized in the service of class, racial, and gendered violence. She is the author of On Hunger and  Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France.

Charlotte Biltekoff is Professor of American Studies and Food Science & Technology and Darrel Corti Endowed Professor in Food, Wine and Culture at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of  Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health  and Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge.