Spanning the years between the Bengal Famine and the formulation of India's first Five-Year Plan, this chapter investigates the consolidation of claims made about food and its proper provision by the leadership of the new state. The promise of sustenance grew more daunting when nationalist leaders realized the magnitude of India’s postcolonial challenges: much of the country's agricultural land was now in Pakistan, refugees were making increased demands on the state, and food and currency reserves were nearing depletion. This chapter traces the transfer of power in India’s Food Ministry and diplomatic corps, investigates the a major food experiment in the form of an ill-fated effort to deregulate markets in food, and examines popular visions of the food problem in the years after independence. Placing the machinations of government in conversation with popular sentiment expressed in pamphlets and petitions, this chapter argues that this period of fundamental political and economic uncertainty also saw a democratization of visions of development. This proliferation of plans for how India might achieve plenty, it suggests, was tied to evolving understandings of the meanings of self-rule and self-reliance, and changed notions of citizenship and welfare that would structure later developmental schemes.