evidence: These predictions from the U.N. may feel inevitable. But as a historian whose research focuses on famines in the 19th and 20th centuries, I have studied countless instances of avoidable starvation. What this history teaches us is that famine is rarely inevitable; it is a choice. That remains true today, even considering what we’re facing. [...] The potential famines feared by the U.N. need not come to pass. We should not accept a Malthusian fatalism when we have the food and understanding to prevent tragedy. The economic and technical elements of starvation are complex, especially at a time of social distancing. Yet the limiting factors are not technical but political. Famine is above all a problem of will. Governments must decide that fulfilling the basic biological need for food is the No. 1 priority. It is not impossible to unite the world’s abundant food supplies with its hungriest people. This may involve making sacrifices—economic ones regarding the allocation of resources, ideological ones regarding deeply held principles relating to free markets and individual merit. But the alternative is to deny millions of people their most basic social and biological existence, to quite literally expose them to death. And the virus has caused enough death already.