A Story About Hunger That Is not About Food

I keep returning to one image. A woman stands in a narrow kitchen, balancing a pot on a stove that barely works. Behind her, a child does homework on a crowded table. Outside, the air is heavy, not with famine, but with exhaustion.

There is food in this home, but there is also hunger. Not the kind that comes from empty shelves, but from systems that no longer see how everything connects: how housing and health, emotion and appetite, technology and policy, all shape what ends up on a plate.

When I began working on the collection “Beyond 2025: Strategic Insights, Innovations, and Policy Shifts for Global Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Solutions,” I thought I knew what hunger meant.

But the stories changed that.

• In Chile, families squeezed into small spaces were 30 percent more likely to go hungry — not because they lacked food, but because they lacked room to live.

• In Spain, food waste was less about ignorance and more about emotion: the guilt, the habit, the quiet comfort of pretending nothing spoils.

• In Saudi Arabia, digital platforms quietly rewrote what people eat — faster than public policy could ever catch up.

• And in China, data gaps reminded us that even research has blind spots — that some realities still go uncounted and unheard.

Each story whispered the same truth: hunger does not start in the stomach; it starts in the systems around it.

That realization is unsettling, because it asks us to look not for charity, but for coherence.

It asks:

• What if the real crisis is not scarcity, but fragmentation: of trust, of governance, of empathy?

• Can we build resilience into systems instead of asking families to keep bending?

• And how do we make technology accountable for what it feeds us, both literally and emotionally?

Beyond 2025 is not a roadmap. It is a mirror.

It shows how much we have pulled apart the very things that should hold us together, and invites us to imagine a world where policy is written with compassion, where innovation begins with care, and where nourishment becomes a shared language of justice.

Because hunger, in the end, reveals who we are, but also who we could become.

What connections are we still refusing to see, and what would change if we finally did?

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