On Hunger

In this book, Dana 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.

“An original work of history and a call to action, this book offers a profound rethinking of scarcity and abundance through the politics of hunger.” — HANNAH LANDECKER, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

“Through deeply researched, unsettling accounts of starvation, Dana Simmons asks us to confront an uncomfortable truth: that hunger is not a consequence of nature but a strategy of domination.” — EMILY YATES‑DOERR, author of Mal‑Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm

“Simmons’s sweeping history shows how hunger is used by the powerful to exercise control over us all.” — RACHEL LOUISE MORAN, author of Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America

“A compelling and original account of how the unnatural state of hunger has long been used as a central technology of power in the quest for white supremacy.” — NANCY D. CAMPBELL, author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose

DANA SIMMONS is Associate Professor in the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France.