Are Poor People Actually Hungry?

Quote of the day: "There is no absolute scarcity."

A few days ago we explored a central economic question: Is it possible to get trapped in poverty?

Yesterday we explored one possible answer — the nutrition-based poverty trap, which claims that the poor simply don't have enough to eat. Therefore, an assumption states that just by eating more, the poor can start doing meaningful work and get out of the poverty trap zone. 

Today, after reading another section titled “Are there really a billion hungry people?”, I am going to explain why the hunger-based poverty trap and everything that seemed to make logical sense in the previous blog is flawed. 

Here is the strange case. The poor don’t choose to spend as much as they can on food since they have many other choices. 

In fact, a study found that 1 percent increase in overall expenditure only translated to about a 0.67 percent increase in the total food expenditure. 

What’s more surprising is that even the money spent on food is not all spent on maximizing calorie intake. Instead, the poor buy better-tasting, more expensive calories. Getting the calories was not a priority. It was getting more delicious.

The poor don’t want to eat more even when they can. What is going on here? Are they actually classified as “hungry”?

Since the poor decide for themselves on how much they eat, maybe they know what they are actually doing. Maybe in reality, eating more doesn’t make one more productive, and the nutrition-based poverty trap doesn’t exist. The poor actually have enough to eat. 

Even though starvation does exist in today’s world and food is not shared equally among us, most people are still able to afford enough to eat since calories are quite cheap. 

This may explain why people choose to do something else with their money or choose better-tasting food, since consuming more calories and productivity increase aren’t correlated after all.

Since calories don’t play an important role in productivity, this could explain why a large number of beggars exist today—maybe they are simply lazy, incapable of work.