Twenty seven years after the publication of the widely-acclaimed work “the socio-economic determinants of food consumption and production in rural Sierra Leone”, the agricultural household model used by John Strauss remains a powerful tool for the analysis of household behaviour in low-income agricultural economies. This current paper uses data from a household budget survey and the framework provided by the agricultural household model to investigate the determinants of household food insecurity in Turkana County of Kenya. It establishes that environmental factors, geography and household characteristics, specifically demography, play a significant role in explaining food insecurity among the people of this community. A complementary study is required to deconstruct further the role of production-related characteristics such as land size and land quality, input prices and mechanization since the data used could not establish any clear association with per capita calorie intake in Turkana.