Short answer:

Underrepresentation in Wikipedia should not be taken to imply underrepresentation in scholarship. There's a lot of work on nutrition, food supplies and famines in human prehistory and history; much of it is technical and there to be read, whether a Wikieditor has gotten around to it or not. This is a more difficult subject to study as we move earlier in history. Saying something rigorous about historical famine requires data, and that becomes scarcer earlier. Finally, many of the people working in the field are not historians, but rather archaeologists and anthropologists, and it takes a while for these primary findings to be assembled into a synthesis that's historically meaningul.

Discussion:

There are many scholars who study food supply and famine in history. There are periods for which we have a lot of data -- say Ancien Regime France-- and there are others where we're pulling together scraps of information. Food supply and famine in the ancient world is important -- we know it because the ancients tell us just how much the grain supply mattered-- but we don't have anything like the data we do for 18th century France where we can, for example, examine the accounts for a convent school and make good estimates of how many calories the students were getting, and from what food sources.

There's an entire historical specialty in studies of the Irish famine of the 19th century, hundreds upon hundreds of books and papers. We have the advantage of its recency and a lot of data, and a very clear understanding of the historical importance.

We've got data on the French "great frost" and famine of 1709, a brutal hunger that killed many, and of course no discussion of the French Revolution is complete without a discussion of the people's hunger.

But you asked specifically about "pre-modern history".

We've got less data, so that makes it much harder to discuss, but that doesn't mean that there's no discussion. If we've got a source, there's discussion. So, for example, there's plenty of discussion of famine in the Roman world-- quite a bit of this literature is written by scholars of religion, as it's part of the landscape at the time of the birth of Jesus.

There are scholars who look at our evidence from Sumer and Babylon-- but the evidence is hard to interpret. We find people speaking of hunger frequently, but does this amount to famine, what are you going to say about the Sumerian proverb:

"Let the poor man die, let him not live. When he finds bread, he finds no salt When he finds salt, he finds no bread. When he finds meat, he finds no condiments. When he finds condiments, he finds no meat. When he finds oil, he finds no jar. When he finds a jar, he finds no oil"

Is that an attestation to a famine, or just a commentary on ambient hunger?

To do this kind of social history, we need numbers, or something we can turn into numbers. Doing this kind of social history demands that we be able to say something more than anecdotal; famine isn't "this is the story of a guy who was hungry" -- it requires some ability to make a statement about the prevalence of hunger. Very generally we get much better data as we get closer to the modern period. One of the most useful data sources is prices and markets-- that data gets much better from the end of the medieval period on.

So for example, one of the more intensively discussed pre-modern famines would be the Great Famine of 1315-17, which has the advantages of more data than from earlier periods-- there's good evidence for market prices, for example.

By contrast, we have a hard time getting a handle on the population of Rome, for example -- and without knowing population, many of discussions of famine become speculative.

Famine was common in China, but some of the most important work on China's population history, like Chao W-L, Hsieh S-C "History of Chinese population" [Beijing:1988] has yet to be translated. For an English reader looking for material on famine and food security in pre-modern China, you've got some work, but not a lot. If you can read Chinese there's much more.

Finally, much of the work on historic and prehistoric nutrition isn't done by historians, it's the work of archaeologists and especially physical anthropologists. [Mal]/Nutritional status leaves characteristic signs in bones and teeth, which survive well, and tell the story of the individual's lifetime feeding habits-- there's an academic journal devoted to only the study of historic bones and teeth, the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. If you're looking for primary research findings in historical human nutrition, this would be the place to have a look.

Sources:

DeWitte, Sharon, and Philip Slavin. “Between Famine and Death: England on the Eve of the Black Death—Evidence from Paleoepidemiology and Manorial Accounts.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 44, no. 1, 2013, pp. 37–60.

Gapp, Kenneth Sperber. “The Universal Famine under Claudius.” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 28, no. 4, 1935, pp. 258–265.

JENSEN, MORTEN H. “Climate, Droughts, Wars, and Famines in Galilee as a Background for Understanding the Historical Jesus.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 131, no. 2, 2012, pp. 307–324.

Richardson, Seth. “Obedient Bellies: Hunger and Food Security in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 59, no. 5, 2016, pp. 750–792.

Alfani, Guido. “The Famine of the 1590s in Northern Italy. An Analysis of the Greatest « System Shock » of Sixteenth Century.” Histoire & Mesure, vol. 26, no. 1, 2011, pp. 17–49.

NORTHWOOD, S. J. “GRAIN SCARCITY AND PESTILENCE IN THE EARLY ROMAN REPUBLIC: SOME SIGNIFICANT PATTERNS.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, vol. 49, 2006, pp. 81–92.

Moeller, Nadine. “THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD: A TIME OF FAMINE AND CLIMATE CHANGE?” Ägypten Und Levante / Egypt and the Levant, vol. 15, 2005, pp. 153–167.

Chu, C. Y. Cyrus, and Ronald D. Lee. “Famine, Revolt, and the Dynastic Cycle: Population Dynamics in Historic China.” Journal of Population Economics, vol. 7, no. 4, 1994, pp. 351–378.

SHARP, BUCHANAN. “Royal Paternalism and the Moral Economy in the Reign of Edward II: the Response to the Great Famine.” The Economic History Review, vol. 66, no. 2, 2013, pp. 628–647

Paladin, A, Wahl, J, Zink, A. Evidence of probable subadult scurvy in the Early Medieval cemetery of Castel Tirolo, South Tyrol, Italy. Int J Osteoarchaeol. 2018; 28: 714– 726. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.2694

Scott, AB, Hoppa, RD. The subtleties of stress: A comparative analysis of skeletal lesions between the Medieval and post‐Medieval Black Friars cemetery population (13th to 17th centuries). Int J Osteoarchaeol. 2018; 28: 695– 702. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.2691

Griffin, Rebecca, et al. “INEQUALITY AT LATE ROMAN BALDOCK, UK The Impact of Social Factors on Health and Diet.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 67, no. 4, 2011, pp. 533–556.

Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.

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