A famine food or poverty food is any inexpensive or readily available foodstuff used to nourish people in times of extreme poverty or starvation, as during a war, an economic depression or famine. Quite often, the food is thereafter strongly associated with the hardship under which it was eaten, and is therefore socially downplayed or rejected as a food source in times of relative plenty.
The characterization of a foodstuff as "famine" or "poverty" food is primarily social. Some foods, such as lobster and other crustaceans, are considered poverty food in some societies and luxury food in others, and these distinctions can change over time.
Foods associated with famine need not be nutritionally deficient, or unsavoury. Having been driven to consume them in large amounts and for long periods of time, however, people often remain averse to them long after the immediate need to eat them has subsided. That remains the case even if such foodstuffs might otherwise constitute a healthy part of a more comprehensive diet.
Read more about Famine Food: Examples of Famine Foods, Other Sources of Famine Food
Famous quotes containing the words famine and/or food:
“They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide ... ?”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbisms does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.”
—Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)