On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief by Tom Scott-Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief by Tom Scott-Smith A. R. Ruis Tom Scott-Smith. On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020. 268 pp. Ill. $35.00 (978-1-5017-4865-3). Tom Scott-Smith’s anthropological “history of the present” is an attempt to examine “how humanitarian strategies for managing hunger have changed profoundly over the last two hundred years” (p. xii). This was the period, Scott-Smith argues, in which changing moral philosophy, transnational and colonial entanglements, [End Page 260] and travel and communications technologies led to the development of a robust, professional, and international humanitarianism in Western countries. Over that period, humanitarian food aid shifted from a local, small-scale effort to communally correct the moral failings of the deserving poor to a large, multinational enterprise of delivering medically and technologically optimized nutriment in individualized portions based on physiological need. Much of the book covers well-trod territory for historians of food and nutrition science—Count Rumford, Justus Liebig, Wilbur Atwater, Ellen Richards, and so on—albeit with a focus on how their work influenced the theory and practice of humanitarian food aid, which is more novel. The book is well written, engaging, and accessible on a topic deserving of greater attention from historians and social scientists, but it is also a deeply frustrating work. Problems with both argumentation and historical scholarship abound, significantly detracting from potential use of the book in both research and teaching. The argument for changes in moral philosophy is particularly underexamined, and even the basic chronology is confused. For example, Scott-Smith writes that “from the 1940s onward, starvation began to be widely understood as a biochemical state: a physiological problem rather than a moral one” (p. 11), and then, not twenty pages later, claims that by the mid-1800s “the empty stomach was soon presented as a deficiency in nutrients rather than a collective moral failing” (p. 30). Not only is there a century-long discrepancy in the supposed shift, but Scott-Smith seems to argue that moral explanations for hunger could not coexist with biochemical ones, or that they simply vanished once “science” offered a better explanation. Historians of public health and social welfare in particular have shown how pernicious moral explanations for “physiological” phenomena have been, and Scott-Smith’s argument is particularly strange for an avowed Foucauldian who frames emergency nutritional provision as “a technology of power” (p. 16). And as Bruno Latour reminds us, all technologies have morals.1 To be fair, Scott-Smith is not wrong to argue that explicit assessment of individuals’ morals has largely disappeared from processes of determining eligibility for aid, but that does not imply that moral assessment is not embedded in systems of aid distribution. Part of the challenge is that Scott-Smith is not very clear about the operationalization of “humanitarian strategies for managing hunger.” At times it seems as broad as it sounds, while at others it seems limited to emergency nutritional support, though there is no discussion of how the very concept of emergency changed in this period. Given the broad temporal and geographic scope, the book seems to include examples that happen to support the argument rather than a systematic consideration of hunger relief grounded in historical context. In starting with soup kitchens and ending with Plumpy’nut, it is unclear that the trends Scott-Smith argues for aren’t in part due to category errors. For example, school meal programs are fundamentally hunger relief initiatives—even emergency ones at times—but by and large they do not fit the model of internationalization or technological optimization Scott-Smith proposes, and at least in parts of the United [End Page 261] States eligibility remains based on individual means testing, which looks more like nineteenth-century soup kitchens than modern food aid in South Sudan. More generally, On an Empty Stomach does not differentiate consistently between state and non-state actors, domestic and international hunger relief, small- and large-scale efforts, which leads to some contradictions. For example, the U.S. government engaged in international food aid long before it engaged in...