From Constant Famine to Overfeeding Problems
For most of human history, famine wasn't a crisis. It was a season. It was expected. It was woven into the fabric of life the way weather was — something that just happened and you either survived or you didn't.
The Great Famine of 1315–1317 killed millions across Europe. China's famines in the 1800s and 1900s killed tens of millions — the Taiping era famine alone may have killed 20 million people. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed an estimated 2–3 million. The Irish Potato Famine killed a million and drove another million to emigrate. The Soviet famines under Stalin killed millions more through a combination of collectivization, mismanagement, and deliberate policy. Mao's Great Leap Forward famine of 1959–1961 killed an estimated 15–55 million people — the deadliest famine in recorded history, and it happened within the lifetime of people alive today.
This wasn't ancient history. This was the 20th century. The idea that mass starvation was behind us would have been laughable to serious people as recently as the 1960s.
As recently as 1968, serious thinkers like Paul Ehrlich were predicting hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation in the 1970s and 80s. His book The Population Bomb opened with: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over." He predicted that India would never feed itself and that hundreds of millions would starve in the coming decades regardless of what anyone did.
He was wrong. Spectacularly, totally, completely wrong.
The Green Revolution — led by Norman Borlaug, a man who deserved ten Nobel Prizes but got one — transformed global agriculture in ways that are difficult to overstate. Borlaug developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that could thrive in developing countries. He took them to Mexico, then India, then Pakistan. The results were immediate and staggering. Mexico went from importing half its wheat to self-sufficiency within a decade. India doubled its wheat production between 1965 and 1970. Pakistan did the same.
Borlaug is credited with saving more human lives than any single person in history — estimates range from hundreds of millions to over a billion. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Most people today have never heard of him. But they've heard of whatever celebrity had a public meltdown last week.
Between 1961 and 2020, global cereal yields more than tripled while the amount of land under cultivation grew by only about 15% (FAO data). We didn't just keep up with population growth. We outran it. We more than tripled food output while barely expanding the footprint — through better seeds, better fertilizers, better irrigation, and better farming practices. The amount of food produced per acre today would have been considered science fiction in 1950.
The share of the world's population that is undernourished has fallen from over 35% in 1970 to under 10% today, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. In 1970, roughly 1.2 billion people were chronically hungry. Today, despite adding 4.5 billion people to the planet since then, the number is around 735 million — and a significant portion of that is concentrated in conflict zones where the problem isn't food production, it's distribution blocked by war and political instability.
Let me say that again: the world added 4.5 billion mouths to feed and the absolute number of hungry people went down. The rate of hunger fell from one-in-three to less than one-in-ten. On a planet with nearly three times more people on it.
Humanity spent 5,000 years terrified of not having enough to eat, and in the span of two generations, our primary nutritional crisis flipped to having too much.
The world's biggest diet-related health problem in 2026 is not starvation. It's obesity. The WHO reports that worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. More than 1 billion people globally are now classified as obese. For the first time in human history, more people are at risk from eating too much than from eating too little.
Let that one rattle around your skull for a second. Humanity spent 5,000 years terrified of not having enough to eat, and in the span of two generations, our primary nutritional crisis flipped to having too much. That's not a problem anyone in 1900 saw coming. That's not a problem anyone in 1968 saw coming, either — they were too busy predicting mass starvation that never arrived.