The UN counts people as hungry only when their calorie intake becomes ‘inadequate to cover even minimum needs for a sedentary lifestyle’ (i.e. less than about 1,600 to 1,800 calories per day) for ‘over a year’.18 The problem is that most poor people don’t live sedentary lifestyles; in fact, they are usually engaged in demanding physical labour, so in reality they need much more than the UN’s calorie threshold.
