Can beggars be choosers?

As a shockingly picky child who rejected everything from unpeeled apples to mashed potatoes, I was the victim of every method of persuasion my parents tried to expand my palate — bribes of candy, hiding foods in other foods, even heartfelt pleas about starving kids hungry enough to be grateful to eat anything.

I didn’t think that last part was true — I couldn’t imagine any hunger powerful enough to overcome my disgust at seafood. While this was the naive view of a privileged seven-year-old, I later realised I was right in a different way. Not about chicken nuggets being peak cuisine, but about the idea that emotional reactions to food — often dismissed as “wants” — cannot be ignored, even for those in need. This idea is central to one of the most significant problems we face in humanitarian aid.

While hunger does make us more receptive to different foods, there are limits to this acceptance. We see this clearly in the case study of Plumpy’Nut, an incredibly powerful Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) widely used to combat malnutrition. With its calorie and nutrient-rich mixture of peanut butter, milk powder, and essential vitamins, the paste helped 95% of the Malawian children in its first six-week trial in 2001 make a full recovery, while only 25% of children treated through hospitals did. It’s still being used today, including in the Gaza famine.

However, in her book First Bite (2015), Bee Wilson reveals a different side of this otherwise miraculous invention — its reception outside of Africa. In Bangladesh, a place where 2 in 3 children live in food poverty, the sweet, sticky paste hasn’t been nearly as well-received as we might think. Out of 149 Bangladeshi caregivers, six out of ten said Plumpy’Nut was not an acceptable food, and 37% of caregivers said it made their children vomit. Many children despised the smell of the peanuts, a food foreign to Bangladeshi cuisine, while others reviled its sweetness and thick texture. This is despite 112 parents also admitting that it had helped children gain weight.

It was as if they refused to accept that this strange brown paste, so unlike food as they knew it, could satisfy a child’s hunger even despite seeing real results.

If it were true that a “really hungry” child would eat anything, then residents of Dhaka slums ought to be overjoyed to receive free packets of Plumpy’Nut. However, they were clearly not, showing that food-induced disgust is psychologically and culturally hardwired rather than a mere matter of fussiness.

Cultural beliefs persist even in extreme conditions, so we must take them into account when designing effective humanitarian aid. Even under a utilitarian worldview that prioritises physiological “needs” over “wants” in an attempt to save as many lives as possible, aid only has good consequences if it is accepted. When it incites physical revulsion, the intended benefits vanish, leaving behind not only wasted resources but also preventable lifelong medical consequences. In order to truly “feed the most people,” providers of aid are ethically obligated to ensure that it aligns with cultural expectations.

However, this example also highlights a deeper moral problem. By ranking “needs” over “wants,” we send the message that people in need don’t deserve to have their preferences or cultures considered. When we treat the defining parts of someone’s identity as secondary, we risk dehumanising them — reducing them to interchangeable bodies to be fed, instead of people with dignity. Treating aid as a one-size-fits-all endeavour also renders the recipient’s cultural context, like the Bangladeshi aversion to peanuts, an inconvenient obstacle rather than essential knowledge. This perpetuates the core power imbalance of aid: the giver defines the problem and solution, while the receiver is stripped of agency, reduced to a passive vessel for Western benevolence, resulting in a reinforcement of dependency under the guise of charity rather than any true empowerment. 

As philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in her book Creating Capabilities (2011), true wellbeing isn’t merely about fulfilling basic biological requirements like calories. It’s about expanding the substantive freedoms and capabilities people have to live lives they value, including the ability to use their senses without revulsion, to participate in cultural practices, and to make choices about their own nourishment. Forcing a child to eat something they do not culturally see as food, despite its nutritional value, actively damages this capability.  

This hierarchy of needs and wants therefore doesn’t alleviate suffering holistically — it trades one form of deprivation (hunger) for another (the denial of autonomy).

Even though research has now expanded into culturally appropriate RUTFs, such as a mung bean cake called “hebi” for use in Vietnam, it is revealing that these initiatives only began after the failure of Plumpy’Nut. When it comes to for-profit enterprises targeting wealthier consumers, market research is an essential part of preparation — think KFC rice and congee in China, or the Teriyaki McBurger in Japan. We know people have different palates across the world, and usually consider it. So why assume Plumpy’Nut would succeed unchanged in both Malawi and Bangladesh, two places with completely different cuisines?

We cannot simply rely on trial and error to improve the ways we distribute humanitarian aid. To truly help people — people, not just bodies to be sustained — we must consider the full picture of their identities. Dignity is the foundation upon which effective, lasting help is built because ultimately, humanitarianism that ignores the human is a contradiction. As citizens in a world where humanitarian crises dominate headlines, understanding these dynamics matters not just for policymakers, but for anyone who donates, protests, or speaks out in response to global events.