In a world which will spend more than £8 billion this year on perfumes, and £12 billion on petfoods, Aguek was at her wit's end to survive.
A Sudanese villager we met when travelling through the famine-threatened province of Bahr El-Ghazal last May, she and a friend were foraging for their day's food.
Their target was a colony of soldier-ants, massing ominously on the red ground. By breaking into their nest, the two women were able to steal the grass-seed the ants had stored underground.
As we passed, they were sieving out the seeds from the clay and the ants. They told us this would make a good soup for their family that day. Tomorrow would be, well, another day.
I wrote about the women at the time, but the scene stays with me still. There is despair in this vignette, obviously, but there is also hope. Human resourcefulness in the face of hunger is unbounded, it says. And maligned peasant farmers can call on generations of lore in their struggle for survival.
A few hundred miles away, we came across more hungry Sudanese. The men of the village were meeting in the shade of an acacia tree. Across from them, in the hot sun, were ranged 30 bright blue, empty buckets. They were donated by an American aid agency, the village elder told us: "We asked for food, but they only had buckets." The meeting was trying - and failing - to find a use for the gift.
On this day, World Food Day, it is worth remembering that the main problem in feeding the world is food distribution, not food scarcity.
More than 840 million people in the world are chronically malnourished, yet consumption in the West has reached record levels.
Women like Aguek were starving earlier this year while the West was weighed down with food surpluses. Parts of Sudan were in famine while others were producing an abundance of crops. Even within villages, we witnessed considerable variations in the access of different families to food.
Today, Aguek is, I hope, still alive. The worst of the crisis is over - for now. Between May and June, about 1.5 million people were affected, and several thousand died. But a massive relief effort and a ceasefire in the civil war have allowed a semblance of normal life to return.
"If ever there was a famine that was fabricated from man-made causes - principally war - it is Sudan. This is definitely not a problem that can be blamed simply on lack of food," said Mr Stephen Jackson, director of the international famine centre in UCC.
Even during the ceasefire, the necessities of war continue to pervert the food supply situation. Aid workers estimate that 20 to 30 per cent of the food aid delivered to government-held regions in Sudan has been diverted by the army for its own use. And SPLA rebels in the south have been blamed for stealing up to 15 per cent of supplies that arrived in the areas they control. That, it seems, is the price you pay for saving lives.
The other near-famine of the past two years, in North Korea, has similar origins in politics. "Here it's a case of famine deriving from a corrupt and discredited political structure, combined with the fact that the international community allowed the communist regime to remain in isolation for so long," said Mr Jackson.
Images of famine in the developing world perpetuate the notion that the world cannot feed itself, and even aid can severely distort local economies. However, Mr Jackson maintains food security "is really about access to, and command over, food and seldom about mere scarcity".
And war isn't the only reason for such widespread inequality in access to food. "How can we talk about an urgent need to bolster food surpluses when the EU has been struggling with huge food surpluses over the past 20 years? If these food mountains have declined in recent years, it is only because of the set-aside policy."
Western agricultural policies, particularly the provision of heavy subsidies, are hindering developing countries from competing on a level playing pitch. Not only that, but heavily-subsidised EU produce is destroying internal markets in the developing world and causing widespread hardship in many parts of the developing world. The West preaches free trade, but conveniently ignores the elaborate system of direct and indirect price supports it has erected for its own farmers.
South Africa knows all about this. In the bad old apartheid days, tariff barriers existed to protect internal markets. Now the world is full of goodwill for Nelson Mandela's state, but it shows no mercy in trade matters.
The Cape valley, with its bounty of grapes, peaches, apricots, apples and other fruit, is in crisis. Thousands have been laid off in the local canning industry after export incentives were reduced in line with a move towards free trade. But Europe's heavy subsidies for agriculture have remained untouched, allowing its producers to undercut the South Africans at home and abroad.
Beef dumping by EU producers is also causing grave problems for farmers in South Africa and neighbouring Namibia. Meanwhile, Spanish fishermen are eyeing up the fishing grounds off South Africa, having nearly exhausted European seas. And local distillers of sherry and port, whose ancestors emigrated from Spain and Portugal over a century ago, fear the EU will try to prevent them using these terms on their products.
Mr Jackson believes Ireland could play a valuable role in helping Africa add value to the food it produces. The success of our own farming sector in developing co-operatives and processing more raw goods at home is relevant in this regard.