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In Niger, a woman named Aisha is asked what she would request from a magician who could grant anything. The author reads this as the deepest injury of chronic hunger: it shrinks what a person can imagine wanting to the bare minimum needed to survive.
The world produces enough food to feed far more people than live on it, so hunger is not caused by a lack of food. People go hungry because they cannot pay for food, or cannot secure the land and water to grow it. That makes hunger a political and economic choice about who gets access, not a natural or technical limit.
When grain is traded as a financial commodity, speculation on futures can drive up prices without any change in harvests. Diverting maize and other crops into biofuels adds to the pressure.
Foreign states and corporations lease or buy vast tracts of farmland in poor countries to grow food or fuel for export. Local farmers lose the land they fed themselves from, while the harvest leaves the country. A hungry region can end up exporting food grown on its own soil.
Attention goes to the spectacular famine, with its emaciated bodies and emergency appeals. Most hunger is quieter than that: chronic undernourishment that stunts children, weakens adults and kills slowly through ordinary illnesses. Because it produces no single event, it produces no news, and its ordinariness is what lets it last.
The book keeps asking how the well-fed manage to live knowing that thousands die of hunger every day, deaths that could be prevented. It argues that indifference is not simple ignorance. Indifference is how we live with a known cost, relying on distance, statistics and the sense that the hungry are 'others.' Charity that leaves the underlying order untouched is part of that same arrangement.