Efforts to address food insecurity are often viewed as unsuccessful due to a lack of charity. People often think that if they donated more, fundraised harder or stocked more shelves, fewer people would go hungry. However, in Utah and across the United States, food doesn’t fail because people don’t donate enough. It fails because it spoils, costs too much to produce or it can’t be distributed efficiently enough to reach the people who need it the most.
This is a key difference. When we treat starvation only as a charity problem, we overlook the systems that cause food to be deficient in the first place.
In fact, a shockingly small number of donated food actually makes it to a plate. This is because it goes bad before it can even be distributed, or it breaks down during transport. Sometimes, it even becomes too expensive to store, leading to it being wasted. The most well-run food banks, such as the Utah Food Bank itself, struggle with balancing nutrition, shelf life and cost. In Utah alone, roughly 600,000 tons of edible food are wasted each year, even as hundreds of thousands of households struggle to put meals on the table, showing how inadequacies in storage, processing and distribution contribute to hunger just as much as a lack of donations. Therefore, hunger isn’t just due to moral failure. It is due to structural problems, which require design-based solutions.
Food isn’t just something we grow or donate. It is something we engineer. From the moment it is processed, every choice affects shelf life, cost and nutrition. The way ingredients combine, the amount of moisture kept and the stability of proteins determine whether a product is feasible outside a factory or grocery store.
This is where chemical engineering can solve the problem. Chemical engineering focuses on designing systems that work under real-life conditions. These engineers often ask questions like: How do we make something affordable without sacrificing quality? How do we prevent breakdown over a period of time? How do we increase production without also increasing cost and energy use?
These questions determine whether food reaches people in need or if it gets wasted along the way.
I’ve started to see this for myself through an independent research project I am doing where I am designing a low-cost, shelf-stable protein bar. This may seem simple at first, but what would be the most cost- and energy-efficient way to do this? You can change just one ingredient and the bar crumbles, but if you add too much moisture, it will spoil even faster. Increasing protein causes texture to suffer. Every improvement comes with a tradeoff, and every decision, even one as easy as what to use for protein, can affect cost, stability and nutrition.
That experience made something clear: Hunger is not just about availability; it’s about optimization.
Yet, engineering is rarely a part of discussions about food insecurity. The answer typically seems to be to donate and volunteer more, which are undoubtedly essential, but far less so than investing in food science, processing efficiency and system-level design. We never ask ourselves how preservation and production methods can reduce waste before food even reaches a pantry.
This disparity is evident in education as well. Students often learn chemistry as a set of equations to memorize and a stack of worksheets to do. But chemistry is much more powerful when it is applied to real problems, like keeping food safe and affordable. Teaching students how to think in systems, rather than random facts, prepares them to solve challenges that can’t be fixed through good intentions alone.
None of this is an argument against charity or teachers. Donations do save lives, and community volunteering programs do very vital work. But charity addresses the symptoms of food insecurity, not its root causes. Engineering, on the other hand, addresses the structure within.
If we want to reduce hunger in a lasting way, we need to stop treating food like a gift that appears on shelves and start treating it like the engineered system that it is. That means supporting food science research, investing in practical engineering education and rethinking how we design the systems that feed people.