Hannah Ritchie

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61 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Hannah Ritchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Food Programme · The Weight of the World · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

So I'm Hannah Ritchie.

I'm deputy editor of Our Road in Data.

We are a non-profit and an online web publication, basically a website, where you can go and basically try to find data on what we frame as the world's largest problems and how to solve them.

And that's everything from poverty and inequality to climate change to global health to war and conflict.

And what we do is we kind of sit between academia and these kind of international data providers.

And we try to make that information and that research understandable for a general audience, policymakers, anyone basically trying to understand and make a difference in the world.

So we see ourselves as a bridge between kind of the experts that are often talking in jargon and then the general public and non-experts.

So if we look globally in 1960, taking the kind of average person calorie supply per person per day was around 2,200 kilocalories, right?

So that's kind of, if we distributed it evenly across everyone, we'd each get around 2,200 calories per day.

That's increased to around 3,000, right?

So that's really quite significant rise.

I think what's actually quite stunning about that is to take into consideration how global population has increased over that period, right?

So the total amount of calories we can produce has increased even more, but we have seen this substantial rise from around 2,200 to around 3,000.

We often frame this as a very negative story, and it does have very severe health consequences.

But from the standpoint of being able to produce food, enough food for a really quite rapidly growing population for a lot of the 20th century, we have actually been able to do that.

When you were looking at this in the kind of mid 20th century, there was this big panic that we wouldn't be able to do that and we wouldn't be able to meet everyone's needs.

We actually have been and then some, right?

So actually, when you look at this from purely a kind of scientific point of view or, you know, this kind of view of agricultural productivity or crop yields, we actually have done a pretty amazing job of being able to produce huge amounts of food.

It does then have this end result that we maybe have a surplus.

Probably over the last 30 or 40 years, you've seen the most substantial rise.

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