“Finish your food. There are kids starving in Africa.”
I’ve heard this phrase for as long as I can remember, and it has never sat right with me. I’ve always thought it was way too simple. It was presented as obvious, almost unquestionable. Hunger was something that existed somewhere else — somewhere far away. Somewhere unfamiliar like Africa.
While interviewing a senior about food insecurity for a class, I asked what shaped their understanding of hunger. They immediately brought up hearing that same phrase, “Finish your food. There are kids in Africa starving,” at the dinner table as a child. Even in conversations about food insecurity in 2026, hunger is still being connected to somewhere distant rather than spoken of as something people can experience domestically.
The phrase doesn’t just ignore the size and the diversity of the continent, but it does so with such certainty. It locates hunger so confidently in one place, as if it naturally and exclusively belongs there. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 700 million people worldwide experience hunger. And in the U.S., about 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2024, including students and working families. These families regularly choose between groceries, rent or school-related expenses. Or stretching meals across days. Or relying on cheaper, less nutritious meals because that is what’s affordable.
The reference to Africa reflects a broader pattern of reducing the entire continent to a single narrative, where”Africa” becomes shorthand for hunger and poverty. In the TED Talk “Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains that when a person or place is spoken of through one repeated narrative, it flattens reality and creates the illusion that a single story is complete. Framing Africa primarily through hunger does exactly that.
The phrase “There are kids starving in Africa” turns food insecurity into a comparison instead of a condition. “Clear your plate,” because someone else has less. “Be grateful,” because suffering exists elsewhere. But that comparison avoids the main questions that we should be addressing. Why pretend that hunger exists only in Africa? Why does hunger exist at all?
How we frame hunger shapes what people think the solution should be. When hunger is treated as something happening distantly, the response is often limited to short-term or charity aid such as UNICEF crisis relief efforts or U.S surplus food donations. But when it is recognized as an issue that affects Americans, food insecurity raises different, more nuanced questions about wages, food assistance programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and access to grocery stores. These are the kinds of factors that shape how hunger actually shows up in everyday life.
If hunger is something that happens “in Africa,” then it does not have to be recognized as part of everyday life in the United States. Here, hunger becomes disconnected from costs, from stagnant wages that fail to keep up with inflation and structural barriers like unequal access to grocery stores. This allows the governments to ignore food insecurity and shift the conversation away from the institution and to the individual. Food insecurity is not separate from these economic and social structures; it is produced by them.
American exceptionalism can obscure domestic realities by highlighting social problems as “elsewhere” rather than in the United States. This framing often defers attention to the Global South as the expected site for hunger, poverty and instability, while similar conditions at home are treated as exceptions. Consequently, it encourages awareness without understanding, and empathy without accountability. Hunger is not an issue that belongs somewhere else. It exists wherever systems fail to ensure consistent access.
MiC Columnist Chelsea Hermione Otchere can be reached at ckorang@umich.edu.
