Feed the world: improving food emergency readiness

Hunger is still the world’s number one killer and a major problem in the developing world.

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It’s a simple but astonishing fact that the world’s number one killer is hunger, taking more lives every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Acute and chronic malnutrition is linked to a host of potentially deadly health risks, particularly in children, who need the proper nutrients to develop, both physically and neurologically.

On the ground level, below the endless political debates over how best to distribute food to a rapidly growing global population, organisations are responding to today’s food crises with a range of life-saving food products. Here we profile the energy-rich foods that are feeding those suffering from food crises today, as well as the innovations which could improve food emergency readiness in the future.

High-energy biscuits and food bars

The distribution of high-energy biscuits (HEB) and compressed food bars is often the first disaster food relief in the immediate aftermath of a natural catastrophe or emergency. HEBs are wheat biscuits made of high-protein cereals and vegetable fat, which contain vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients. Due to their remarkably high energy-to-weight ratio they are procured by major humanitarian organisations such as the World Food Programme (WFP).

Compressed food bars on the other hand consist of baked wheat flour, vegetable fat, sugars, soya, protein concentrate and malt extract, and can be eaten as a bar straight from the package or crumbled into water and eaten as porridge.

The variety of bars is, however, not restricted to dry biscuits and bars but can be extended to full meals in one single piece. Technological developments in the area have come in particular from developers of space food, who try to invent better and tastier food for astronauts and potential space tourists. The outcomes of this research, which concentrate flavours and nutrition into tiny packages, could eventually also be adapted by emergency food developers and producers.

At the UK’s National Science and Engineering Week, which took place at the beginning of March 2012 in London, artistic food designers The Robin Collective, Robert Gordon University space nutrition specialist Brian Ratcliffe and astronaut Helen Sharman, for instance, presented a dehydrated breakfast bar that delivered all the flavours of a full English breakfast in only a few bites.

Vital vitamins: the world’s ‘hidden hunger’

The deficiency of vitamins and other micronutrients has been described as the ‘hidden hunger’ of the developing world. Even though these vitamins are only required in tiny amounts, the absence of them can be disastrous for human health.

In the developing world, a shocking number of children have died or been left crippled by vitamin A deficiency, which weakens the immune system against infectious diseases, as well as causing blindness through xerophthalmia. Vitamin Angels, a humanitarian group dedicated to providing vitamin A and other micronutrients to at-risk populations around the world, estimates that nearly 700,000 children under five die every year from a lack of vitamin A, while more than 350,000 are left permanently blind.

While the provision of tablets is a popular means of boosting the vitamin A intake of at-risk children, the fortification of base foodstuffs like flour and sugar with the vitamin is seen as the more sustainable, long-term solution for people who are unable to afford vitamin A-rich foods, such as meat and fish.

Food fortification, which has been a standard practice in the developed world for decades, has some notable success stories in reducing or eliminating vitamin A deficiency in countries worldwide. One of the most notable programmes is the Strategic Alliance for the Fortification of Oils and other Staple Foods (SAFO), a public-private partnership between chemical company BASF and the German government’s Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

The SAFO initiative is active in around 30 countries, forging partnerships with industry to supply fortified food to reduce vitamin A deficiency. In the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador, SAFO worked with the local sugar industry to supply 100g a day of vitamin A-fortified sugar to at-risk people, a programme that has reportedly almost eliminated the problem from the city. BASF’s technology has also played a role, with the development of a ‘spot test kit’ for the speedy identification of vitamin A levels in food, which has been sent out to countries like Indonesia, Bolivia and Brazil.

US Army’s high-tech sandwich: feeding the forces

Feeding armies on the battlefield has always been a challenge: soldiers need food that is quick to prepare, easy to carry and enduring. Usually, armed forces get their daily food rations in form of allotted air-sealed packaging full of pastes and freeze-dried food, so-called meals-ready-to-eat (MRE). To get some variety into the unpopular diet, food scientists at the US Army presented a ‘high-tech’ sandwich in December 2011 that can be served fresh for up to three years.

The secret of the cutting-edge sandwich is however not a new technology, but rather a sandwich without water or oxygen, the two main originators for mould and decay of food. To develop the sandwiches, US Army food scientists used ingredients such as sugar (for instance to be found in jams or jellies), salt or honey, which do contain moisture but lock it inside the ingredients, avoiding it from reacting with the bread and therefore preventing bacteria from growing.

As the bacteria that thrive in water also flourish in oxygen, the researchers packed the sandwich in an air-sealed package in a second step. To get rid of the remaining oxygen in the package, they inserted an oxygen scavenger, a small packet of iron filings that absorbs the oxygen from the ambient air and locks it up in a layer of rust, making the sandwich highly resistant to decay for a long time.

Freeze-dried survival food

One of the most common emergency responses for disaster situations are freeze-dried foods of all varieties. With a shelf life of up to 25 years and easily transportable in big buckets filled with individual nitrogen-packed pouches, freeze-drying is perhaps the best method of conserving foodstuffs. Whole meals can be preserved by freezing the food and reducing the surrounding pressure to allow the frozen water in the material to sublimate directly from the solid phase to the gas phase.

While early freeze-dried food often ended up a tasteless pulp, recent technological developments have substantially improved the equipment and methods of freeze-drying. At the beginning of May 2012, US-based Survivalist Foods introduced a new array of seasoned freeze-dried meats. The likes of roasted chicken, teriyaki style chicken, roasted ground beef, stroganoff style beef, vegetables with gourmet sauces and more were included, resembling a restaurant menu rather than a variety of emergency food to choose from.

According to the company, there are several advantages of choosing freeze-fried foods for meals in disaster situations, with the exceptionally long shelf life being only one of them. The meals not only retain colour, texture, flavour and nutritional value, but are also lightweight and easy to transport in high-impact plastic containers.

Ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs)

During a serious food crisis, the ability to respond quickly to the needs of vulnerable people is essential. The development of ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs) in the mid to late 1990s has been a vital weapon in the fight against chronic and acute malnutrition ever since, especially when provided to high-risk groups such as children.

RUTFs are designed to provide life-saving, high-energy content in a simple and ready-to-eat form. One of the most well-known RUTF brands is Plumpy’nut, a peanut-based paste that provides 500kcal with every 92g sachet, developed by French nutrition company Nutriset in 1996. One of the chief benefits of RUTF products, such as Plumpy’nut, is the fact that they can be eaten straight from the sachet, without any preparation or added water necessary. This mitigates the risk of bacterial infection from contaminated water, a potential problem for reconstituted nutritional products like F-100 therapeutic milk.

Since its initial development, Plumpy’nut has been joined by a whole range of Plumpy products and supplements. Plumpy’doz, for example, is a nutritional supplement that can reduce the incidence of acute malnutrition in young children during the lean times between local harvests. At the end of March 2012, the WFP announced that it had airlifted nearly 200 metric tons (MTs) of Plumpy’doz to Chad, which is suffering a major drought. The supplements were then taken by truck to the eastern regions of Wadi-Fira and Sila, where they are being used to supplement the diet of 36,000 at-risk children under the age of two.

But in emergency situations where every day counts, the process of transporting bulk shipments of RUTFs to the areas that need them can be a time-consuming process. With this in mind, Nutriset launched a new initiative in 2005 called PlumpyField, a network of manufacturing partners in developing countries that allows faster response to food crises and provides a boost to local economy. The PlumpyField network now numbers 12 manufacturers in the developing world, and in 2011 nearly 12,000MTs of the 46,000-MT global production of Plumpy’nut was made in developing countries. By 2014, Nutriset wants 54% (55,960MTs) of its total Plumpy production capacity to be based in the developing world.

By Elisabeth Fischer and Chris Lo