Food and Human Rights (original) (raw)
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‘Food is fundamental to life’ (Sbicca 2012: 456) and this shared need establishes food as a site of potential for connective and convivial practices and relations. Yet, when we realise that more than one billion people are undernourished worldwide (Food Ethics Council 2010), despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed billions more than the current global population of 7 billion (Holt-Gimenez, Shattuck et al. 2012), the social, political, economic and environmental challenges posed by contemporary food systems start to become apparent. Given current global production levels – whether we agree with the social and environmental implications of these or not – it is clear that malnutrition rates worldwide are not simply an indicator of agricultural praxis but demonstrate the continued, broader social and structural issues of access, equity and justice. Recognising that many feel increasingly disenfranchised from formal political representation, marginalised by a hegemonic neoliberal capitalism or disconnected from ‘healthy’ social or environmental relations, food offers an opportunity to re-engage individuals and society with critical questions and practices of justice because, as Allen (2008: 159) notes, ‘no other public issue is as accessible to people in their daily lives as that of food justice. Everyone – regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or social class – eats. We are all involved and we are all implicated’. The multiplicity of ways in which we can engage with food – including growing, buying, eating, cooking, writing, processing, marketing, selling and watching – enacts its radical potential as a set of dynamic socio-material relations (Alkon 2013, Alkon, Block et al. 2013) that can both conform to and subvert existing practices and understandings, enabling food to ‘speak’ to many different people in a range of different contexts. Although this multiplicity has its dangers (Heynen, Kurtz et al. 2012), it also means that food matters and matters in complex and diverse ways: ‘It rallies people and it often induces unexpected changes in society’ (Van der Ploeg 2013: 999).
Six Questions for Food Justice
In July 2014 the Food Justice: Knowing Food/Securing the Future workshop at the University of Reading, UK brought together over 60 academic and civil society delegates to discuss the contemporary state of food justice. While food is essential to the growth, development and health of human life, and to social well-being (Riches 2018), an array of contemporary challenges demonstrates that our food system does not ensure freedom from want and oppression, or environmental sustainability (Allen 2008). Indeed, when we consider the number of malnourished children that live in countries with food surpluses it becomes clear that a more equitable and healthy food system is substantively not an issue of production but, rather, of access and justice.
How does the human rights perspective help to shape the food and nutrition policy research agenda
Food Policy, 1998
Declaration of Human Rights. The last 10 years, in particular, have witnessed an increased recognition of the importance of the human rights approach for designing policies and interventions that promote food and nutrition security, as evidenced by the highly visible role given to human rights at the 1996 World Food Summit. But, given that the design of effective policies and interventions is based on good analysis and information, what are the implications of the human rights approach for the food and nutrition policy research agenda? This is the question we address in this paper. We note several implications of the human rights perspective in terms of (1) new research areas,
Food is a Human Right,” in Richard Pierre Claude and Burns H. Weston, Human Rights in the World Community: Issues and Action. Third Edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 191-201.
SOC 324: Food Justice Syllabus - Fall 2022
2022
Food justice includes all ideas and practices that strive to eliminate exploitation and oppression within and beyond the food system. We therefore begin the course with a structural analysis of the major inequalities people experience in their relationship to food, paying close attention to the ideological and material drivers of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, institutional racism, and white supremacy. Beginning with these broad and intersectional roots grounds our further engagement with the goals of food justice, which necessarily aim to transform economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological life. We will encounter an array of visions, tactics, strategies, and scales of action of the food justice movement, and its allies. In the process, you will discover how activists and scholars draw on movements for economic, gender, racial, and environmental justice, and more, and explore the possibilities for building innovative crossmovement ties that engage in a range of food politics. In sum, we will learn in order to act.