You don’t really need a conspiracy to prefer more precise terms.
The entire planet is 3 missed meals away from total anarchy. The reason it is prominent (IMO) is that any politician who fails to deliver on food may as well dumpster the rest of their platform. Ensuring the acquisition and availability of food is every country's #1 priority, and "food security" covers all of the political and logistical and agricultural activities that need to happen for that priority to be delivered.
I could ask why use the term "Hunger" rather than "Starvation" or "malnutrition" etc.
Food security I think of as a measure of the risk associated of available nutrient supplies not being adequate to meet the need (not the market demand, as that may differ) of people in a particular locality.
Hunger is an end state feeling in a human-being when they feel the need to eat.
You can have terrible food security and no hunger if there is tremendous risk of mass starvation due to small unforseen disruptions in supply, but there is existing supply and forecasted supply to meet demand if all goes well.
Except, it didn't?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
Just because you are just now noticing something common doesn't mean it recently became common.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=world+hunger%2... is a much more readable and accurate graph.
Note how both are ~equivalent for a majority of the time, barring 1943 - 1951 (slight edge for food security) and 1960-1970 (larger lead for 'world hunger'). At 1970, food insecurity takes and maintains control.
This is likely because it - as discussed in the rest of the thread - encompasses more, and is a more useful term for scholarly discussion.
Sounds like this term became popular in the 1970s. That was a while ago :)
My lay observation is that “food security” has been the standard term in non-profit/NGO contexts for at least 15 years, while “hunger” is still colloquial. My guess for why is precision.
The intermediate names Carlin mentions, however, are absolute euphemistic bullshit. "Battle fatigue" and "operational exhaustion" were strictly rebrands with the intent of minimizing the problem.
Hunger, in the strictest sense, is about a lack of calories.
This made sense as a metric to track, when the issue was almost entirely people who starved to death. Now however, first in the developed world and also in many developing countries the issue is also calorie quality, usually a lack of access to non-junk foods. You can now be both malnourished and obese.
People being hungry near you is an 'individual problem', but with police intact you're roughly fine (under assumptions). If your country is facing food security crisis, it will likely spread to other domains and you are not fine.
https://foodforward.org/food-security/what-is-food-insecurit...
No need for silly conspiracy theories.
Hunger of the previous generations was mostly due to countries not having enough agriculture or imports to feed their population.
Today with modern farming and agriculture methods, hunger is mostly a distribution issue, rather than a we don't have enough food issue, so now food security is used as a more general term. My hunch is driven by -- may be getting the exact specifics wrong - that countries like America throw away enough food daily to satisfy much of the remaining world hunger.
To those saying that "hunger" refers specifically to a physical state, we used to have the term "world hunger", and we obviously weren't talking about the planet itself being hungry.