<p>Humanitarian food aid is often positioned as a neutral and scientific response to crises, designed to secure biological survival most efficiently. However, especially in today’s reality of protracted displacement, hunger cannot be reduced to a technical problem alone. This article examines humanitarian food aid through the lens of culture to explore how its care logic is shaped by the underlying structure of power and knowledge. It argues that nutritionism, a reductionist view of food as nutrients, underpins the biomedicalized and standardized design of food aid, and interrogates what such approaches leave behind. Contemporary humanitarian food aid, while lifesaving, reframes hunger not as a political and historical condition but as a matter of biological management. This completely obscures the social, cultural and embodied dimensions of hunger and human beings; through practices like nutrient and anthropometric measurements, care becomes selective, operating through regulation and exclusion, while risking dehumanizing recipients and reinforcing dependency. By foregrounding culture as a constitutive of care, this article reconceptualizes food aid as a site of power and epistemic violence, contributing to the depoliticization of hunger. It concludes by proposing pathways toward the repoliticization of hunger through culturally responsive approaches essential for sustainable and decolonial humanitarian practices.</p>