The social and affective dimensions of food insecurity: Ethnographic insights into hunger, distress, and well-being in South Africa

Abstract

Food insecurity is widely recognized as a determinant of health, yet its emotional and psychosocial dimensions remain underexamined. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in urban and rural South African settings, the study examines how hunger is experienced and managed in everyday life, revealing it as both a social and affective condition that shapes distress, caregiving practices, and well-being. Rather than viewing hunger solely as material deprivation, the analysis highlights its entanglement with emotion, identity, and moral responsibility. Participants described how chronic scarcity produced anxiety, shame, and guilt, undermining self-worth and belonging while intensifying gendered expectations of care and provision. Women in particular carried the emotional labor of managing household shortages, often sacrificing their own needs to protect others. Acts of concealing hunger demonstrate how suffering becomes both embodied and socially regulated. Situating these experiences within structural inequality and everyday moral life, the paper reconceptualizes hunger as a psychosocial form of social suffering that links material precarity to mental distress and relational strain. These findings extend understandings of the social determinants of health and call for food and nutrition policies that address not only access and adequacy but also the emotional, relational, and mental health consequences of chronic food insecurity.