Rethinking Food Security Measurement: Methods, Validity, and Decision-Ready Innovations

The global challenge of ensuring food security has become increasingly complex in the face of social stress, climate change, economic instability, and shifting consumption patterns. Reliable and nuanced measurement is essential—not only to track progress toward global goals (e.g. SDGs) but also to design effective, context-specific policies that reflect the lived experiences of individuals and communities.

This Research Topic seeks to advance current debates on how food security is conceptualized, measured, and interpreted. It welcomes contributions that apply established regional and international frameworks, such as those developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—including the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) and the Global Food Security Index (GFSI) —while also encouraging research that moves beyond them. The aim is to showcase how diverse methodological perspectives and analytical innovations can expand our collective understanding of food (in)security in its multiple dimensions.

In particular, this collection is interested in approaches that go beyond the conventional FAO scales, capturing aspects of food (in)security that are not limited to monetary definitions. For instance, some recent methods have enabled researchers to explore the intersection between food deprivation and broader forms of vulnerability—revealing valuable insights into issues not fully explained by absolute or relative monetary poverty alone (Marchetti and Secondi, 2022). Such approaches highlight the importance of developing integrated frameworks that jointly consider the conditions of the food poor and the food secure, especially in high-income or developed contexts where hidden forms of food insecurity persist. This line of inquiry answers the calls for eradicating hunger in all its forms and ensuring food security for all populations.

The Research Topic welcomes a wide range of conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions, including (but not limited to):

• Development and validation of alternative indicators and measurement tools;

• Evaluation and critical discussion of methodological limitations in current food security assessment instruments;

• Integration of qualitative and quantitative data for comprehensive and context-sensitive analysis;

• Application of new technologies (e.g., big data analytics, remote sensing, digital surveys) to enhance monitoring and early-warning systems;

• Comparative analyses of measurement methods across spatial, temporal, or socio-economic contexts;

• Exploration and reduction of cultural or contextual biases in food security assessments;

• Incorporation of multidimensional poverty, livelihood, or wellbeing frameworks;

• Methodological reflections on the subjective and objective dimensions of food insecurity.

By fostering dialogue among disciplines—economics, sociology, nutrition, geography, and data science—this collection seeks to capture the complexity of food security measurement. Ultimately, it aims to enrich academic and policy debates by providing new evidence and perspectives that better illuminate the diverse realities of food security across the globe.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: food security measurement, methodological innovation, contextual validity, decision-ready analytics, technology integration

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.