References to the right to food are increasingly common within campaigns, blogs, articles and social media posts, brought about in part due to rising levels of hunger and inequality, increased levels of emergency food aid and a growing familiarity with rights based approaches to entrenched issues.
The right to food is paradoxically regarded as both highly complex, and incredibly simple. In our reading and conversations over the past year, we have heard that the right to food is an undeniable moral fact, a highly contested legal concept, an activist statement with limited practical application, a part of a broader rights package that needs to be in balance, and much more besides.
So what is the right to food? Do we have a right to food in the UK? Whose duty is it to ensure it? And how can we use it as a tool to address injustices in our food systems, and our society?
We have found it most useful, right now, to think about visualising the many tensions, applications and concepts within the right to food. There are many interconnected pieces which contribute to the bigger picture. It is our intention to begin to ‘map’ this, exploring what each represents and outlining key concepts, groups and actions within them.
We’ve made a start on naming the pieces, and we want to hear from you whether they resonate.
What do you think? Have we got the ‘pieces’ right? Let us know what’s missing, or needs renaming or removing.
Each piece on its own is only one bit of the puzzle, and like all good agroecological systems, we need all parts of the puzzle to be looped, linked and learning from the others. We don’t have all the answers, and we still won’t at the end of this process. But we will have better questions.
We are doing this as we believe the right to food can and must be a robust lever for change in UK food systems. But for this to be the case we need to unpick the complexities of the right to food by:
We’re kicking off 2025 with a powerful session at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, bringing together Dee Woods (Landworkers Alliance & Granville Community Kitchen), Kay Johnson (The Larder) and Pete Ritchie (Nourish Scotland) to explore the right to food at different points in the system – local, national and global. Then in March, working with Belfast Food Partnership, we’re hosting a citizen-centric workshop as part of the Imagine Festival, using creativity and conversation to illuminate what a right to food could look like in Belfast.
And we’ll be continuing to hold space for conversations, host webinars and workshops and listen to and learn from all of you as we develop and evolve this jigsaw into a rich, dynamic and useful capture of the complexity and opportunity for the right to food.