The orthodox explanation of hunger, first mapped out by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, focuses on the relationship between human population growth and food supply. It asserts that population growth naturally outstrips the growth in food production, so that a decrease in the per capita availability of food is inevitable, until eventually a point is reached at which starvation, or some other disaster, drastically reduces the human population to a level that can be sustained by the available food supply.