Researchers who are figuring out how to better feed the world need to know something before they can start: how well is the world being fed right now? That is, they need to be able to measure and quantify people’s access to affordable and nutritious food. That access to good food is called food security.

But it can be logistically challenging and expensive to measure food security, especially if you want to get repeated measurements to monitor changes over time. Photography could be a powerful and inexpensive tool that captures information about food security that is hard to get through interviews and focus groups.

Chris Bielecki used photography in his research to measure how people’s access to healthy food is changing over time in Guatemala.

Photo: Chris Bielecki