Sub-Saharan Africa has the fastest rate of urbanization of any region in the world and the highest proportion of under-nourished people.1 These facts alone should make urban food security a high research and policy priority, but the reality is that policy discourse on food security in Africa is still largely focused on how to increase food production by providing agricultural inputs to smallholder farmers in rural areas.2 This is despite a significant shift in the academic understanding of food security. In the years following the publication of Amartya Sen's book Poverty and Famines in 1981, increased attention was paid by food security researchers to the importance of the accessibility of food, in both physical and socioeconomic terms, over straightforward food availability.3 In recent years, the pendulum has swung back again to a narrow policy focus on production and food availability. Yet Southern Africa, for one, routinely attains food self-sufficiency in aggregate terms. At the same time, hunger and under-nutrition are prevalent across the region, in both city and countryside, in what has been described as an 'invisible crisis' of food insecurity.