Want Amidst Plenty: Food Insecurity in Rich Liberal Democracies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter is about food insecurity, a social problem common across rich liberal democracies. In these countries, food insecurity and hunger are thought of as problems located overseas—surrounded by landscapes scarred by drought or battered by civil war. Countries populated with supermarket aisles brimming with foodstuffs and pizza delivery services are clearly not food insecure. And it’s true: rich liberal democracies are not food insecure countries. Yet the United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all share a persistent trend—that a significant minority of their populations suffer food insecurity. A broadly accepted definition is that: • food security exists when there is access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life, where there is at a minimum: a) the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, and b) the assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways. Year after year households in wealthy societies, despite being surrounded by readily available and safe foodstuffs, suffer food insecurity. The Problem In some areas, the readily available foods are not nutritionally adequate. These are often called “food deserts.” In many more places, nutritionally adequate foods are available , but are not accessible by those households which are unable to buy them. In rich liberal democracies, the normal and socially acceptable way to acquire food is to purchase it. If a household cannot buy enough food, it is food insecure. If a household does have enough food but someone had to visit a food bank (food pantry), a dumpster, or a community kitchen to get that food, it is food insecure. A household is also food insecure if they are not confident that they will be able to get enough nutritious food in the near future. These criteria may appear to offer a low bar for qualification as food insecure, but it is not unreasonable to expect that citizens in rich liberal democracies should be able to live without the fear that they will be unable to get enough nutritious food to eat. A portion of the population in “first-world” countries brimming with food should not consistently have difficulty in accessing food.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".