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University of California Press
Open Access

On Hunger

Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic

by Dana Simmons (Author)
Price: $12.99 / £10.99
Publication Date: May 2025
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780520412996
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 13 b/w illustrations
Series:

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In this book, Dana Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in U.S. history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.

About the Author

Dana Simmons is an historian of science and technology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France.