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The housing crisis — foreclosures, homelessness, renters cutting rents, disappearance of credit, slowdown in construction and home-buying — has gotten much more attention than the food crisis. The growth economy and Wall Street’s “financial instruments” have been more important to corporate media and politicians beholden to their more affluent constituents. And rising hunger can be silent, for a time.

But food is coming on strong as more serious: people can double up in a bed to stretch housing, but a plate of food split two ways means two still-hungry people. One billion people already go without sufficient food daily, a 1-7 ratio. In the U.S. it is 1-6, with record high Food Stamp reliance. One in four U.S. children are “food security at risk” (hungry). Trends indicate things will get worse before they get better: in the U.S., soaring farm values reflect that crop prices have risen because demand for food is growing around the world, while the supply of arable land is shrinking. In Iowa, 25 percent of farmland buyers are investors, double the proportion 20 years ago.

The food crisis and the housing crisis are really one. Over recent centuries, privatizing property has cut billions of people off from a direct connection to the land. When people lose the security of an ancestral home and are robbed of the right to hunt, gather and farm, cities of worker-slaves must toil to pay rent and buy food. Sometimes ancestral homes are given up voluntarily, but the image of benign, romantic migration is an exaggeration. Land grabs, cash-crop deals with foreign powers and transnational corporations (e.g., Walmart) have disrupted and and killed millions of people in recent decades. The more population grows, the harder it is for people to get along and share. Fences go up and the commons are stolen by the greedy few — the hallmark of Anglo-American culture (i.e., The Enclosure). Bye-bye free food. Until…?

Besides housing, the other major expense for the majority of people in a market economy is food. Food has in recent years become expensive on a record pace. There are sporadic shortages due to climate-change related disruption in farming. Petroleum is the more direct, constant factor in rising food prices. The exact nature of the factors involved, including how may migrant workers are harvesting crops, will not matter much to a hungry population.