Grad Chat - Queen's School Of Graduate Studies

Topic: Treating hunger: medical expertise, nutritional science, and the development of technical food solutions. Overview: I looked at how, starting with World War II until contemporary times, hunger came to be predominantly seen as a medical object, and food relief was reconceptualized as medical treatment. The scientific community's research of hunger gave it a medical connotation that influenced the way hunger was managed: from the development of technically-engineered nutrition solutions that were guided by medical expertise to making hunger relief subjected to medical supervision. A medical framework reduces hunger to a biological problem, missing the socio-cultural experience and politico-economic roots of hunger. Further, it favors fast-acting, industrialized, expert-designed, and short-term nutritional solutions. This materialized in various products starting in the 1950s until current times. In viewing hunger through a medical prism, the broader structural causes of hunger and socio-cult