Food security is an important global policy goal; it is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015). The World Food Summit in 1996 was perhaps the first attempt to build a consensus on the operational definition of food security. However, there is ongoing debate and evolving conceptualisation of food security leading to disparate measures and empirical research approaches to food security. The presentation will set the scene by highlighting some of the global challenges to food security, the state of food insecurity in the world, the evolving conceptualisation of the concept and implications to policy. I will then discuss some approaches to food security research and empirical evidence from my research, focusing on a selection of case study results from micro-economic analyses of food insecurity in a developing country.