At the outset of the Industrial Revolution – somewhere in the latter part of the eighteenth century – food scarcity, famine, hunger and death by starvation were features of all societies and cultures around the world. Climatic variability, the unreliable quality of some human patterns of food production, war, unrest, colonization, slavery and land degradation all contributed to the relatively frequent appearance of times of famine and hunger in all parts of the world. The ever- present threat of death by starvation was one of the unifying conditions of humankind. The Industrial Revolution signalled a dramatic transformation of this universal reality, eventually banishing food scarcity from the industrial world (even if food availability became