Getting the British public to connect with global hunger is a challenge. The issue can feel far removed from our daily lives, shaped as they are by the rhythm of regular meals.
Yet hunger is an all-too-real experience for 783 million people worldwide, which is more than the populations of the USA and EU combined, each one an individual with hopes and dreams not dissimilar to ours. Except, for them, the most basic human right, the right to food, is unmet.
Making that connection with a UK audience was the purpose of We Are What We Eat! the exhibit we staged in partnership with the Institute for Sustainable Food from the University of Sheffield, at a recent Science Museum Lates event.
Visitors can wander around the museum out-of-hours at these adult-only free events. Themed the Journey of Life, this Lates attracted more than 2,000 people. Many found their way to our activity on the second-floor terrace of that thought-provoking space.
Visitors were welcomed by the United Against Malnutrition & Hunger (UAMH) team, along with Toby Evans and Dr Moaed Al Meselmani from the University of Sheffield. Together we told the story of how food is foundational to development, and that poverty and poor soil reduce the nutrients children eat.
Malnutrition in pregnancy and early childhood stunts physical growth and brain development, causing irreversible damage. Our interactive exhibits demonstrated malnutrition’s devastating effects, how it can be treated, and the solution scientists are devising to improve nutrition even in the most challenging environments.
A customised bike trailer, verdant with four tiers of fragrant tomato and basil plants, was our exhibit’s showstopper. This novel hydroponic crop growing system had been specially built for the event by Jacob Nickles, Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield.
Each tier was filled with a different growing medium, demonstrating how plants mature in degraded soil, average soil, expanded clay, and nutrient-infused polyurethane foam. The plants were in various levels of robustness. Crops in the poorest soil were straggly and small. While plants in the foam were flourishing, the strongest and most nutritious. Dr Moaed Al Meselmani invited visitors to sample the leaves and fruit.
Hydroponics use up to 95 per cent less water than conventional agriculture, and growing crops in old mattresses had been his idea. Moaed, who is originally from Syria, pioneered a hydroponic system in Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, an environment beset by poverty and poor soil but abundant in old mattresses as it is where thousands of displaced Syrians live.
Now, thanks in large part to the University of Sheffield, four thousand refugees in the camp grow nutritious hydroponic crops to feed their families in one of the most water-scarce countries on the globe.
Dr Moaed Al Meselmani said: “Innovation and technology will play a major role in bringing about change and ensuring that those who are hungry or malnourished have access to wholesome food.
“We can create a more environmentally friendly future with better food security, less of an impact on the environment, and healthier communities by embracing hydroponics.”
Named a 2024 Goalkeeper Champion for his work towards a more nourished world, Professor Bhavani Shankar is a leader at the University’s Institute for Sustainable Food: “This work highlights the innovation required to address malnutrition in resource-poor and challenging environments, like refugee camps. It shows how nutrition starts from the ground up,” he said.
Malnutrition, although entirely preventable, is the number one cause of death in children under five worldwide. Survivors can be left with life-long disadvantages. Lates visitors were surprised as they lifted and compared two hessian sacks, each filled with rice to the heft of a two-year-old child. One sack weighed 12kg – the nourished child. The other was almost a third lighter at 8.5kg, the average weight of a malnourished toddler.
In the real world, those children could develop into five-year-olds, represented that evening as cardboard silhouettes by a height chart. Our nourished child was 110cm tall. Their 95.5cm companion had a far smaller stature because stunting affects the person’s entire physical and mental development.
We were in the Science Museum, and sometimes simple technologies are the most effective. Mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) bands are an example. These bands diagnose malnutrition in infants from six months to five years and have saved young lives the world over, alerting medical professionals to children in danger and needing urgent treatment.
The bands are colour-coded – red for severe acute malnutrition, yellow for moderate acute malnutrition, and green for nourished. In the red zone, the band’s circumference is the size of a bottle top, with the yellow only a fraction bigger, and the lower end of green still startlingly small.
By then our visitors had clearly connected with the issue, more aware of the tragedy of global hunger than before. So, the fact that malnutrition is a preventable condition remedied with simple, cost-effective interventions such as packets of ready-to-use-therapeutic food (RUTF) and bottles of antenatal multiple micronutrients (MMS) was welcome news.
Five hundred calories and nutrient-packed, RUTF can bring children back from starvation in weeks. Antenatal MMS containing fifteen essential nutrients can ensure a developing foetus gets the nourishment it needs. Costing less than 2 US cents per daily tablet, MMS is one of the best buys in global health and nutrition. Taken daily during pregnancy, it can prevent anaemia, support a healthy pregnancy, and reduce the risk of babies being born too small and vulnerable or stillborn.
As the event ended, the team agreed the common theme from the conversations we’d had with visitors was that malnutrition is an unacceptable reality in the twenty-first century. No one should die from it, and everyone should have the nutrition they need to thrive.
It is the very reason United Against Malnutrition & Hunger exists. Our alliance will continue to press for UK action on global malnutrition and hunger, by mobilising expertise and championing solutions that can end it.
