The Right to Food

by Tayo “Jay” Basquiat

One evening when I was in college, my fellow students and I amassed in the usual line at the dining hall doors. Instead of proceeding to the trays and food line as usual, we were given numbers and told to find our numbered place at the tables inside. Seating was arranged such that most of the tables formed a square around the perimeter of the room with chairs placed on the outside of the square so that diners faced the center of the room. In the center of the room was a table for ten, elaborately set and decorated. Each of us found our way to our designated place, the room abuzz with curiosity and nervous laughter. My place was in the outer square; one of my best buddies took his place at the center table. The smell of food emanating from the kitchen was unusually scintillating.

Soon, a small army of servers came with our dinner. They started with the center table: mixed green salad, fresh-baked bread, honey butter, and some kind of cheese. I watched my friend dig in; he was grinning ear to ear. We, at the outer square, waited for our food. Nothing. Someone across the room picked up a knife and fork in each hand and started banging his fists on the table, chanting, “We want food!” Some joined in, others just laughed while speculation continued as to when we in the outer square were going to get to eat. I watched my friend at the center table; he looked very smug.

Next, the servers brought the main course to the center table: roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, more fresh bread, and milk. The smell reminded me of home. I couldn’t wait, thinking surely this time the outer square would get food too.

And we did: the servers brought out three very large pots. The place-settings at the outer tables consisted of a paper placemat and a glass. In the center of each mat, we each received a big dollop of white rice. Other servers filled our glasses with water. That’s it. No utensils, no roast, no bread. I looked at my friend at the center table, and when our eyes met, he laughed and exaggerated his enjoyment of a large bite of roast beef. Eating my meal—even with just my fingers—took about two minutes tops. I was angry and then envious when I saw the dessert course, again, only for the center table diners.

At this point, some of the center diners started showing signs of discomfort regarding their situation. The angry taunts from the outer circle diners couldn’t be silenced. Something that started out feeling like a game suddenly felt like a huge injustice. Each student at that meal paid the same meal fee as part of the dining program at our college, yet clearly we did not all get the same for our money. In my mind I was already forming a letter of complaint to the college president, but I also assumed that at any moment the situation would be rectified and we at the outer table would receive the real meal just as the center table diners had. But then we were all escorted out of the dining hall and the doors to it and the snack bar locked; we were to go to the auditorium, presumably for an explanation. My friend apologized in his goofy way, laughing the meal off as a joke. I was not laughing.

This experiment at our college was one of the events during Global Awareness Week. In the auditorium we were asked how we felt during the meal. From my point of view, I felt angry. My sense of justice and fairness was violated: I paid the exact amount of money that the center table diners had, therefore I felt I had a right to the same meal.

In the study of philosophy, we learn early on about logical fallacies— simply defined as an intentional or unintentional error or inaccuracy in reasoning that leads to a false belief or conclusion. One logical fallacy (and there are hundreds) is the fallacy of equivocation, using the same word with two different meanings within an argument where the crux of the matter rests on the slippage of that word’s meaning. Here’s an example: “Giving food to a hungry child is the right thing to do, so hungry children have a right to your food.” The equivocation here is the word “right”: the first usage refers to the moral assessment of one’s action, meaning here that giving food to the hungry child is a good thing to do; in the second usage, that same child now has a right or entitlement to your food that trumps your right to do with that food what you will. This equivocation on the word “right” results in an erroneous conclusion, a logical fallacy.

Or does it?

Numerous documents in the twentieth century have set forth basic human rights, including the right to food. The United Nations in 1948 adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that specifies the “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of [a man] and his family, including food, clothing, and shelter”; in 1966, the UN adopted “The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights” that specified everyone’s right to “adequate food”; and in 1989, the UN undertook the “Convention on the Rights of the Child,” reminding us all that there are vulnerable among us who cannot or do not have the power to assert their rights, including the right to food, and rely on someone else to do this for them. What do these documents mean by saying that everyone has a right to food? Did I, in that meal at college, have a right to the same food as the center table diners? If everyone has the right to food, why do so many people (in 2010, 925 million people in the world, over half of them children) go hungry? Adopting a document establishing that everyone has a right to food does not make for food to eat or hunger to be assuaged, so what good is wrought by recognizing the right? And more fundamentally, does such a right even exist?

An answer to these questions may be found in closer examination of three aspects of rights. First, the notion of rights stems from the attempt to delineate what is necessary or essential to living a human life. People use the language of rights to express their vision of the good society, or their conception of what we owe each other. The United States Declaration of Independence references certain “inalienable rights,” as does France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The intent of such documents was to establish a particular kind of society in which legislative activities and social institutions and relationships would seek to elucidate and establish these human rights. This conversation evolved into the categorization of different kinds of rights. So-called first-generation rights are fundamentally civil and political in nature, protecting the individual from excesses of government. These rights include, for example, those found in the U.S. Bill of Rights, such as the right to a fair trial and vote. Next, people realized that certain basic rights needed to be in place in order for people to enjoy the first-generation rights, and so second- generation rights were recognized: rights to things such as housing, food, health care, employment, and so forth as essential to enjoying civil and political rights in life. People don’t care about voting rights if they are homeless, starving, and dying of sepsis due to lack of access to medical care.

This brief treatment of the nature of rights is, admittedly, oversimplified, but addresses a possible objection that people do not have a right to something like food, that food is a fruit of one’s labors. From the perspective of what it means to be human and live a human life, however, the right to food is a recognition of a basic necessity, fundamental to the enjoyment of the other rights we have taken such pains to enumerate, meet and protect. If food rights are subject to the free market game or some other vision of social relations a la Hobbes, capitalism or social Darwinism, then all rights are subject to the same objection, ceasing to be rights at all. If you have to be able to buy your right to freedom of religion, then only those with money or power will have that right—a Machiavellian “might makes right.”

Second, recognizing a right necessitates the attendant recognition of a counterpart obligation: if someone has a right to something, someone else has an obligation to meet or protect that right. These obligations might not be delineated by legislation, but they are duties or obligations nonetheless from an ethical standpoint. The philosopher Immanuel Kant referred to this as perfect vs. imperfect obligations where imperfect obligations are ethical requirements that stretch beyond the fully delineated duties (which he called ‘perfect obligations’). So while throwing half your dinner in the trash is not illegal, you are ethically obligated to attend to the right other people have to what you see as your food to waste if you please. You have the means to meet the right to food that other people have; because the right exists, you are ethically obligated.

Finally, recognizing the ethical status of rights and not just those that have legal status provides motivation for constructive efforts and activities beyond—though perhaps leading to—the legislative realm. Important social awareness is gained through a watchdog agency like Human Rights Watch or by the existence of a political document like the “Convention on the Rights of the Child.” For example, while we don’t like to acknowledge this, food is often used as a weapon to achieve political gain. Whether used as a carrot or stick, a grain embargo between nations in order to pressure a leader on an issue results not in the hunger of the leader but rather the further suffering and starvation of the most vulnerable of that nation, especially children. While an embargo might be a legal tool in the political realm, special philosophical gymnastics are required to make us feel better about the violations of ethical implications that have us uncomfortably wiggling on the proverbial hook.

And as uncomfortable as it is, we need to be on that hook and recognize our obligations. Chances are, if you are reading this magazine, you are among the “food secure” in the world: you have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life (definition according to the World Health Organization). Hunger and starvation just aren’t a part of your daily life; you have food and plenty of it. For the food secure, the hungry are easy to forget and world hunger is easy to dismiss as “too big a problem for little old me.” While paralysis in the face of such a huge problem is one side of complacency, the other rests in leaving our obligations in the hands of the state or other institutions, rather than seeing world hunger as a matter involving our individual obligation to meet the rights of others. An awakening on this order might be found in an exercise of moral imagination, such as the one I was given after that meal back in college. During that subsequent conversation in the auditorium—while I was in a huff about the violation of my rights, one of the center table diners made the comment, “The whole meal would have been better if our table had been in a different room so we wouldn’t have had to see the other students.”

That is the statement that sticks with me to this day, some 20 years later. As a single person, I used to believe I ate my meals primarily alone. Now I know that isn’t ever the case. Every time I eat, I eat in the midst of a world full of people. The obligation to meet everyone’s right to food does not go away just because I close myself off in a private room of my own making. I speak here of invoking the moral imagination: imagining there in the room with me, the hungry whose meal consists of rice—or nothing at all—while I feast on anything I well please. Invoking this imagination is the beginning of taking up my ethical obligations in the form of constructive action: Am I eating more than my fair share? How does my food budget reflect these obligations to others? Do I busy myself to learn about the institutions, corporations, and organizations whose environmental, labor, processing, and marketing practices involve themselves in my meals? Can I be mindful enough to imagine a circle of the hungry and their needs as part of my own meal practices?

The twentieth-century documents I mentioned earlier express the right to “adequate” food. When we speak of rights as our vision of a particular kind of society, the context of one’s dinner table is a good place to start. As a host of a meal, you wouldn’t serve your guests a dollop of rice and then serve yourself a three-course feast. Nor, if the tables were turned, would your idea of your right to food be satisfied by a spoonful of grain. We should not satisfy our sense of obligation here by calls for more food, export more grain, increasing growth and supply. World hunger has little to do with supply. Food insecurity has to do with availability, access, and utilization more so than supply. People can’t eat what is rotting in a locked warehouse because political will is lacking in distributing that food. Similarly, cartons of macaroni are useless to those who do not know what it is, how to cook it, or whose bodies, due to prolonged hunger and sickness, are unable to absorb the nutrients in such food. People cannot eat when other people in well-off countries use—and often waste—more than their fair share of the food. Think of how a television show like Iron Chef America would play before an audience of people who are food insecure.

When we begin to look at the complexity of hunger issues and the right to food, we can easily see that the answer is not to just grow more food as quickly as possible. We will each need to be more involved in meeting our individual obligations. We each need recognize our obligations to the hungry one dinner plate at a time, making changes to our own individual use, understanding of and relationship to food, acknowledging that we don’t just have individual rights, we have individual obligations as well. We each need to realize that every meal we eat happens in a room—no, a world—full of people who have a right to food.