Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago appointed in philosophy, law, and divinity. She is an associate in political science and classics, a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program. In spring 2007, she was a visiting professor of law and classics, Sidley Austin Visiting Professor of Law, and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Visiting Professor at Radcliffe at Harvard University.

Nussbaum opens the panel by saying, “We turn now to a dark side of the relationship between women and food, and some of the most important themes of this conference. The differential access of women to adequate nutrition is one of the most prominent and baleful aspects of women’s inequality in the world. So we’re now going to explore that with three renowned experts on women’s hunger and women’s differential access to nutrition.”

She then introduces the panelists.

Megan Vaughan is the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. Most of her work has been on the social and economic history of rural societies in eastern and central Africa and has focused on food production and consumption, gender relations, and the social history of medicine.

Vaughan begins with an anecdote of a postwar Sunday dinner in an English working-class home. The women prepared the plates in the kitchen: one woman serving each plate, and her mother-in-law reallocating the foods on each plate so that the male family members received more and/or better bits of food. She makes the point that men may have higher caloric requirements, but that does not keep girls from being hungry.

She says she was reminded of this anecdote while reading Elias Mandala’s book, The End of Chidyerano: A History of Food and Everyday Life in Malawi, 1860–2004, on the history of food and hunger in Malawi, since he differentiates between crisis-level famine, chaola, and chronic hunger, angiala, which is much more common. Famine occurs rarely but is highly disruptive; whereas chronic hunger is seasonal, and it is the woman’s responsibility to ensure, through management of resources, that chronic hunger does not become famine for the family. Vaughan describes these management techniques, from stretching the food supply with cheap additives to doing casual labor, ganu, outside the home. She also describes the consequences of not managing the food supply well.

As she closes, she admits that Malawi’s tale is a bleak one and warns that listeners should not generalize using that country as an example. Malawi has seen some specific shocks, but other countries in Africa have fared better. Still, she thinks that the “coping strategies” employed in managing chronic hunger actually determine who does or does not eat—usually this is determined on a gender basis. Vaughan also says that even in a poor country like Malawi, globalization of the food industry has had an impact that is impossible to ignore: although many Malawians do not have food or fresh water, they do have their Coca-Cola. The company has entered into an agreement to carry out a multi-million dollar water project.

Mayra Buvinic is a sector director for gender and development at the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network of the World Bank. She is past president of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development and member of a number of nonprofit boards, including the International Water Rights Management Institute, Sri Lanka, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Nigeria.

Buvinic discusses the role of women in food security. In developing countries, women are really key to food security. When they have access to and control over food and resources, more resources are allocated to food and childcare. In Bangladesh, for example, the height of children whose mothers participated in a credit program increased by 13 percent compared to those whose fathers had access to the program. This means there is a 13 percent increase in child nutritional status as a result of women having access to income from a credit program.

Mother’s wages and income matter immensely for child well being, Buvinic says. In a study she did in Chile, she learned that when mothers were adolescent when they gave birth, independent of other factors, their youth had a detrimental effect on the height and nutritional status of their children. But when the mothers earned money and contributed to the household, the children of poor households fared much better than the average child.

Women face significant barriers to increasing their income and their access to and control over food, Buvinic says. Progress has been very modest. At the World Bank, Buvinic and others have launched a new gender action plan called Gender Equality as Smart Economics designed to advance women’s economic empowerment. The program is well funded, she says, and she and her colleagues plan to make women’s economic empowerment highly visible on the international scene.

Amartya Sen is a professor of economics and philosophy and the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Until recently, he was the master of Trinity College at Cambridge University.

Sen discusses famine, saying he was struck by the fact that the British reported more male than female deaths during the Bengal famine of 1943. He says that a statistical sampling error accounts for this disparity. Data was collected by asking people in the relief centers which of their relatives had died. Because the British were gallant, Sen says, women were disproportionately present in the relief centers; their reporting of the deaths of their husbands skewed the sample. Disregarding famines, women do survive better than men, Sen says. Although a higher ratio of males are born than females, fewer males survive.

Another of Sen’s concerns is the issue of whether men or women need more food. He says one reason the perception still exists that men need more food than women can be traced to the Handbook of Human Nutrition Requirement, published in 1974 by the World Health Organization. The handbook classified housework as sedentary activity, but the committee that produced this book did not have a single woman on it. “It’s possible that there wasn’t as much experience of household work as would have made a more informed judgment possible,” Sen says.

A third issue that Sen discusses is the ranking of inequalities. He talks about the difference in mortality rates attributable to differences in natality rates and encourages further scholarship in this area. When he first started working on gender issues in the 1960s, Sen says, people told him that he was taking attention away from class and income inequalities, which mattered more than gender inequities. “I think the whole question about how to integrate class, race, and gender is important,” Sen says.