This project examines humanitarian nutrition and its history from the 19th century to the present day.

Through archival research, fieldwork, and the analysis of humanitarian handbooks, it examines how Victorian technologies such as the soup kitchen were transformed into contemporary mechanisms for emergency feeding. This involved a series of historical transformations: from communal to individual designs, from vernacular to technical foods, and from personal to impersonal measurements.

Results will appear in a monograph, entitled On an Empty Stomach: the humanitarian approach to hunger.