The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE

A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we can take to change course.

"This book should be required reading for the entire human race."
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of We Are the Weather

At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 150 countries pledged to eradicate hunger by 2030. But with only a few years left, we’re far from reaching that goal. Instead, hunger is on the rise—America itself recently experienced levels of food insecurity not seen since the Great Depression. How could the richest nation in the world have so many people going hungry?

In The New Breadline, aid worker and activist Jean-Martin Bauer unravels this paradox. Bauer’s family fled to America during the terrors of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Now on the brink of mass starvation, Haiti and its grim history inspired Bauer to make food justice his life's work. During his long career with the UN, Bauer learned firsthand that the problem of hunger is always political—and like all political conditions, hunger, he knew, was something we could work to change.

Drawing from his fieldwork in the most hunger-prone countries across the globe—from Haiti, where elites hoard imported French cheese, to Madagascar, where foreign corporations are snatching up valuable land from local farmers, to right here in America, where the lines at food banks continue to grow—Bauer weaves profound personal insight with a keen understanding of the structural systems of racism, classism, and sexism that thwart true progress in the battle against hunger. The New Breadline is an inspiring call to action to end what he persuasively argues is one of the greatest threats to our society, boldly envisioning a world where we can always feed ourselves and one another.

JEAN-MARTIN BAUER has served with the World Food Programme in the Sahel and central Africa and has responded to food emergencies in Afghanistan and Syria. Bauer has led WFP country offices in the Republic of the Congo and in Haiti. His work has also focused on leveraging digital tech and analytics to fight hunger. A Washington, DC, native, Bauer holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School.