But that's a smaller proportion of people than ever before. So not only are we capable of supporting more people total, but a far smaller percentage of those are hungry.
No, what I'm saying is, if you're trying to figure out "how well we're doing" at solving some particular problem, then you have to look at proportions. Any group of humans will suffer various things, the point is to decrease the likelihood that they do. If there's a group of ten people, and five are hungry, then they're doing worse on that metric than a group of a hundred people where five are hungry. This doesn't change when the groups you're looking at are "humans in past" and "humans presently".
that's more people than were alive globally in 1700 [1]. looks like the last 300 years have been a complete catastrophe with respect to hunger.
[0] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
[1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...