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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.
Dana Simmons is an historian of science and technology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France.
"This book will not tell you what hunger really is, but rather what hunger has done and is made to do; it is a gut-wrenching account decidedly more stick than carrot. Interlacing political histories of dispossession with scientific histories of psychology and pharmacology, the chapters bear witness to the non-inevitability of a world in which widespread food insecurity surges alongisde the use of weight loss drugs. As such, On Hunger is both an original work of history and a call to action, a profound rethinking of scarcity and abundance through the politics of hunger."—Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
"Hunger is often considered a natural condition of life. In this brilliant and beautifully written work, Dana Simmons challenges that notion, revealing how American scientists and politicians have actively produced hunger as a tool of power and control. This gripping history documents the deliberate ways in which hunger has been weaponized to maintain empire, making the book an essential read for anyone interested in coercion, appetite, and the fight for survival. Through deeply researched, unsettling accounts of starvation, 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
"This sharp and sensitively written book on power, politics, and American hunger fills a major gap. By centering capitalism's role in inflicting hunger, 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
234 pp.6 x 9Illus: 13 b/w illustrations
9780520412989$34.95|£30.00Paper
Apr 2025