Day 16: Valuing food as a human right, and why we need to transform our food system

Today was the first day of the UVM Food Systems Summit, and keynote speaker Smita Narula did an excellent job introducing us to the summit's theme, "The Right to Food: Power, Policy, and Politics in the 21st Century." She provided us with a big-picture perspective on transforming the food system, particularly through a human rights-based approach to food. By thinking about food as a human right, not a privilege, we can shift the conversation and drive policy toward a sustainable, nourishing, just food system. Though I must admit her 75-minute presentation was somewhat vague in what actual action we can take to create changes, she did a damn good job of summarizing what's wrong with our current food system and why it needs to be transformed, using incredibly powerful and inspiring language.

With the "right to food" as the theme of the summit, Smita defined this term as a concept with four main tenets: accessibility, adequacy, availability, and sustainable production. (1) Accessibility to food is nondiscriminatory and takes into account both physical access, which means proximity to food and access to transportation, and economic access, which means affordability without tradeoffs. (2) Adequacy means food that is nutritious, safe, culturally appropriate, and meets dietary needs. (3) Availability refers to both having adequate food in nearby stores, but also availability of the resources necessary for producing food, including land, seed, water, and basic equipment. (4) Lastly, the food to which we all have a right must be produced and sourced sustainably.

http://www.uvm.edu/foodsystems/?Page=summit.html&SM=summitmenu.html

Smita described food insecurity as a daily, perpetual struggle that connects hunger to obesity, and our food system to poverty, racism, classism, and gender inequality. People are impoverished by the design of our system, not by chance, and a gross imbalance of power embeds injustices and dispossession of resources into our society. Instead, we need a political and economic system where people can provide for themselves in dignified, healthy, sustainable ways. Rather than allowing markets and corporations to control the center of food conversations, we need to focus on farmers, foodmakers, distributors, and laborers, while prioritizing local production of real food, not commodities.

My biggest takeaway from Smita's speech is that our food system is not the only system that needs a radical transformation, if we want to live in a world where every human being has the right to consume (and produce) healthy, nourishing, good food. This relates well to the conversations we've had on this trip surrounding values, going back to the very first day with Paul Costello at the VT Council on Rural Development and Chuck Ross at the VT Agency of Agriculture. Although in those conversations we talked about VT's traditional values, such as community, local economies, and conserving nature, Smita's frame of food as a right also boils down to values. If we want to think about food as an essential human right that everyone in the world must be able to enjoy, we have to place food at a higher value than corporate power, profits, growth, efficiency, and cheap labor.