Craig Hadley, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Emory University will talk about how food insecurity occurs when individuals face unpredictable access to safe and nutritious foods. Although a common public health problem, food insecurity has rarely been a research priority among those studying population health; however, this has been changing in the face of the global recession. Dr. Hadley will discuss the current global food insecurity situation and highlight studies that have been carried out in East Africa examining the impact of food insecurity on social, physical and mental health. He will then use data from an ongoing longitudinal study to examine the impact the 2008 global food crisis had on Ethiopian adolescents and specifically test several hypotheses promulgated in the popular media about who was most affected by the food crisis. The results suggest that youth are not buffered from the negative impacts of the global food crisis. They also suggest that the patterns of vulnerability among Ethiopian youth differ considerably from those reported in popular media outlets. He will show that these data offer a cautionary tale to broad generalizations about who is being affected by the food crisis and suggest novel hypotheses and new research directions.