Zero Hunger and good health go hand in hand. Let’s be #HealthyNotHungry!

During the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the World Food Programme launched the Healthy Not Hungry campaign which aims to accelerate progress to Goal 2 — Zero Hunger, and Goal 3 — Good Health and Well-Being. The Healthy Not Hungry campaign is a joint initiative of the World Food Programme (WFP), Project Everyone and UNICEF. The campaign focuses on the close relationship between ending hunger and the ability to live a healthy, active and full life.

January 23, 2017 - Last update: February 10, 2023

Photo: Twitter/@JamieOliver

Zero Hunger and good health go hand in hand — a hungry world will never be a healthy world.

The Healthy Not Hungry campaign recipe has five main ingredients:

Putting the furthest behind first to save and change the lives of the poorest two billion people;
Paving the road from farms to markets to ensure everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food;
Reducing food waste so that all the food produced reaches the plates of those who need it;
Encouraging a sustainable variety of crops to increase the nutritional value of diets and support farmers growing local varieties;
Making nutrition a priority, starting with the first 1,000 days of life, to combat stunting and promote a healthy development in all children.

Read more about the five steps.

The secret ingredient: chefs

As part of the campaign, the World Food Programme is engaging men and women who work with food on a daily basis and who care about producing and consuming healthy and sustainable meals: also known as chefs! Chefs around the world have responded enthusiastically to the call — over 20 of them – with chef’s from SUN Countries Burkina Faso, Guatemala, Kenya and Peru have vowed to support the Healthy Not Hungry campaign.

Chef Abegan of Burkina Faso, judge on the first-ever pan-African cooking TV show “Star Chef”, kick-started the campaign preparing lunch at a local school in Dori, the capital of the Sahel region. Dori is also home to the WFP’s innovative project Projet Lait, which enables local dairy producers to market their goods to school feeding programmes. Read more.

Chef Quintana of Guatemala hosted a Healthy Not Hungry dinner at his restaurant Quintana Bistrot in Guatemala City to raise awareness about the importance of sustainable food systems for development.

Chef Jethwa of Kenya hosted a Healthy Not Hungry dinner at one of his restaurants in Nairobi, the Seven Lounge & Grill. and

Chef Acurio of Peru held a Healthy Not Hungry dinner in Lima, which also served as the launch of chef Acurio’s Food Revolution campaign in Peru. The goal of this campaign is to advocate for healthy, diverse diets and for home-cooked meals. One of the main themes at the dinner was child malnutrition and anaemia, and chef Acurio worked on a menu that reflected how these issues can be tackled through sustainable food systems. The dinner was held at the chef’s restaurant in Lima, Astrid & Gaston.

See more about the partner chefs.

Healthy Not Hungry dinners

Building on these new partnerships, over the first three weeks of January, WFP is holding a series of 12 dinners in as many countries. From Guatemala City to Johannesburg to Tokyo, leaders, influencers, celebrities, civil society and activists will come together to dine on sustainable meals cooked up by well-known local chefs, and discuss steps to Zero Hunger. Chefs have been challenged to create meals with meaning that will inspire action, with the dinners aiming to raise awareness of the importance of diet diversity. Aware that today food systems have overlooked the vast majority of the world’s 30,000 edible plants and that 60% of all kilocalories consumed are from wheat, maize, rice, and potatoes, WFP has called on each chef to prepare dishes based on the four staples but also with ingredients from the 29,996 other species not regularly consumed by the global population.

Hot dinner data

With ‘hot dinner data’ WFP showed how a simple bowl of food in Malawi costs much more than in Davos when the cost of the meal as a percentage of a person’s average daily income is measured. WFP found that as a proportion of income, people in the developing world can pay 100 times more than rich-country counterparts for a basic plate of food. When the most deprived, conflict-ravaged places are factored in, the cost can be up to 300 times higher.

Take a bowl of bean stew – a hot, nutritious meal consumed across regions and cultures. This meal would cost someone in Switzerland a mere 0.41 percent of their daily income to make, that is, 0.88 Swiss francs (CHF) or less than a U.S. dollar. A person in Malawi, meanwhile, would need to spend 41 percent of their daily income to be able to eat the same meal. In Swiss terms, this would translate to CHF86.53, or 100 times more than the actual cost in Switzerland. Find out more.

The Hot Dinner Data analysis aims to hold a new mirror up to the world – one which illustrates the distortions in the purchasing power of the rich and the poor as they try to meet their basic food needs, it is a reminder that access to affordable, nutritious food should be a right for all.”

Arif Husain, WFP’s Chief Economist.

How to get involved

Want to join in the Healthy Not Hungry campaign? The challenge to you is to make a nutritious meal using local, sustainable ingredients, avoiding the four dominant staple crops of wheat, rice, potatoes and corn. Then share something about your dinner using the hashtag #HealthyNotHungry.