This interview was conducted in advance of a May 8, 2025, conversation on the right to food led by Dr. Josh Lohnes. Here is a Q&A with Lohnes on the right to food and how faith communities can be involved.
CTTT: Can you explain the central tenets of the right to food and tell us where the U.S. stands in terms of the right to food?
JL: The Right to Food (RtF) is a part of the broader effort to institute a Universal System of Global Human Rights after the Second World War. Conversations about human rights began in the United States on the heels of WWI, the Great Depression, western colonial expansion, the Dust Bowl, and its New Deal responses. By 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was leading an effort to enshrine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights charter. In 1948, it was adopted by the general assembly of the United Nations with 48 member countries in favor, none against, eight abstentions, and two who did not vote. As more and more countries gained independence from European, American, Japanese, and Russian colonial powers, they came into the United Nations system and were given the opportunity to sign on to this declaration. Many treaties and legal instruments have since made commitments to advance, among other interconnected rights, the movement toward RtF.
The central tenets of RtF are that states have an obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill the Right to Food. They must make every effort to progressively realize a future in which food is fully available, accessible, adequate, and sustainable. Another critical part of realizing RtF is ensuring that rights holders have agency to participate economically and politically in the decisions made about their foodways, their food environments, and their food provisioning strategies.
Rights are only so strong as they are exercised and demanded by people in specific jurisdictions. States in turn must respect, protect, and fulfill human rights and support the creation of public institutions that govern them. The 80-year effort to develop an international legal framework toward the RtF has taken time. Its first legal expression arrived in 1966 with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Building upon the Universal Declaration, this document explicitly articulates Rights related to the material and spiritual well-being of people around the world.
ICESCR declares that “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”
While Civil Rights were progressing in the United States and in many other parts of the world, with the enfranchisement of women and people of color, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of ideological divides between a world that wanted to guarantee economic rights, and one that thought it only necessary to slowly enfranchise people with (oft limited) political and civic rights. The United States fell into the second camp.
Though Jimmy Carter signed the ICESCR and presented it to the U.S. Senate for ratification in 1976, the U.S has yet to adopt this treaty that, among other interconnected human rights, enshrines the Right to Food.
Article 11 of the ICESCR specifically refers to the RtF. It reads:
1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international co-operation based on free consent.
2. The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:
(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources;
(b) Taking into account the problems of both food-importing and food-exporting countries, to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need.
The United States Constitution makes no mention of food, nourishment, or freedom from hunger and the United States government regularly stands as one of the only votes against resolutions affirming the Right to Food in international fora. However, a Right to Food movement has taken root in this country, Maine adopted a constitutional amendment, and other states are following suit. Counties and Municipalities are also beginning to implement Right to Food ordinances and build institutions that might realize those goals. Engaging with these initiatives at the local level is the best way to get involved!
CTTT: What implications does the right to food framework have on our current U.S. food system (in particular food banks and/or SNAP/WIC access)?
JL: Although the United States does not explicitly recognize the Right to Food, its government plays a huge role in regulating food and nutrition policy through the Farm Bill and other large pieces of legislation such as the Older American’s Act. There are over 15 different nutrition assistance programs investing hundreds of billions of federal funds into food access programs. SNAP, WIC School meals, Summer Feeding and Emergency Food Assistance shape the built food environments that our communities inhabit every day. It’s important to note that every single one of these programs is rights-based. They are food entitlements that have been demanded and fought for, for nearly a century. While many of them have stringent means tests and other requirements based on age, ability and gender they are nonetheless food rights that our society has secured. There is legal recourse to challenge the denial of a SNAP case for example, so long as legal aid is available. It is usually difficult for those already living on the economic and political margins to claim their rights.
Unfortunately, the Right to Food has yet to be adequately socialized in the United States. It has instead been stigmatized through false narratives of shame and enduring legacies of disciplining people in poverty to work in low-wage jobs. Most people who benefit from SNAP in the United States work, they simply do not earn sufficient wages to get out of poverty. By linking food entitlements to poverty, and an explicit and highly out-of-date poverty line at that, the United States maintains the idea that the dominant way in which to realize our collective right to food is through the marketplace, exchanging our wages for food at the supermarket. Many of us enjoy our Right to Food that way, but too many of us do not.
The monopolies operating in the U.S. food retail sector, and indeed throughout the U.S. food industry, have concentrated power and created conditions whereby the largest food corporations are reaping the benefits of billions of dollars in nutrition entitlement programs such as SNAP and WIC that are largely redeemed in their stores. These same companies do not pay high enough wages for their employees to live without federal food assistance, a form of wage theft that was recently decried by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights.
These companies also enjoy significant tax write-offs for donating their waste to food access organizations such as food banks. In so doing, they also claim the benefits of “good corporate citizenship” for revaluing their trash through charitable food infrastructures. Food charity in the United States was built and remains heavily dependent on the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), a federal food entitlement that distributes surplus U.S. farm commodities to states for distribution to charity. The federal government has subsidized this network to the tune of billions of dollars since the 1980s and has played a key role in the expansion of food banking networks since then. Yet the state remains an “invisible partner” in this endeavor, while large food corporations and affiliated national non-profit organizations such as Feeding America claim material and social credit for “feeding the hungry”.
Charity cannot fulfill the Right to Food because the food distributed there is a gift, not an entitlement. By centering food charity as a solution to hunger and food waste, we reinforce the stigmatization of the Right to Food in the United States. That said, local charities distributing food do have an important role to play in resocializing and elevating the core RtF principles. To do so, they must create conditions for those whom they serve to engage in a political process that demands that our government, at different jurisdictions (from local municipalities, to counties, states, and the federal government), has an obligation to progressively realize the Right to Food. The care work must thus go far beyond food, toward deep engagement with community life.
CTTT: How can faith leaders integrate the concept of the right to food into their congregational work and outreach programs, and what practical steps can they take to create a more equitable food system?
JL: Faith leaders have a pivotal role to play in the progressive realization of RtF in the United States. All faiths center food prominently in their practices and traditions, from feasting to fasting, and from liturgy to community life. Recognizing alignments between the normative legal principles undergirding the RtF framework and the spiritual principles undergirding our faith is essential to advancing the movement to progressively realize RtF in the United States and in maintaining the hope and perseverance necessary to overcome difficult obstacles on the way.
It’s important to recognize that, in many ways, a large majority of us in this country are enjoying our RtF. We have agency to decide where to shop and what to eat. Some of us have access to land and the capacity to garden or hunt. A few of us have time to participate in shaping debates about the future food environments we want to live in. Churches certainly have institutional weight in their communities. To shape these debates, how is that weight being leveraged at city council and county commission meetings and collectively at the statehouse to communicate what we value? How are churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship organizing across difference to find common ground in and through food systems?
Those of us that are seemingly enjoying our Right to Food, have the greatest responsibility to enter the lived realities of those struggling with poverty, food insecurity and hunger even if it is uncomfortable to do so. This will take some deep reflection on traditional ways of addressing the problem of hunger through food distributions, particularly if those fail to bring people on the giving and receiving ends in meaningful and mutual relationships with one another.
No one truly has the right to food until everyone has the right to food. If it can be denied or eroded in one community it can also be in another. Any actions that ensure that the nutrition programs in place are protected and reformed toward more universal access and that engages faith communities in imagining new kinds of food futures in a world that is rapidly changing is thus critical.
In closing, I suggest these practical recommendations from a fellow West Virginia Episcopalian and Economic Justice Director for the American Friends Service Committee, Rick Wilson. These would certainly apply to any faith community that might be interested in advancing their Right to Food work together.
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1. Learn more about the industrial food system and its impact on workers, consumers, health, water, animals, and climate. It’s pretty scary. There are tons of documents and documentaries, but some of the old standbys are still worth a look, including books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet Barbara Kingsolver et al’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, and films such as Food Inc., King Corn, We Feed the World and Fed Up.
2. Adjust your sources if you can. There’s no place of purity in today’s economy, but we can all make some choices in the foods we choose to consume. Factors might include fair trade, local and/or small-scale production, transportation costs, relatively humane treatment of animals, consumer supported agriculture, boycotts, labor rights, farmers markets (many have policies that boost purchasing power for low-income people, seniors, and kids), cooperatives, etc. you can consider when shopping. And if you have to go big box, at least go union or local when you can.
3. Try growing, raising, and sharing some of your own food. While this is obviously not a total solution to world hunger, having some kind of direct personal connection to food production, from egg to garlic, can change the way we think about and relate to food. It might be good for our health as well. Just don’t force too many unwanted zucchinis on your neighbors.
4. Support food charities as you feel led, but don’t neglect the struggle for food as a human right. It’s also good to learn about the underside of food as charity, especially as it functions to allow major corporations to manage waste, access tax benefits, gain legitimacy, uphold declining wages and safety nets, and normalize the charity approach. When possible, encourage food banks and other charities to advocate for more just food access policies—they’re already overstretched and often rely on stressed-out volunteer labor.
5. Enter the fray. Join the struggle to protect and ultimately expand public policies that reduce food insecurity. The field is wide open; it can include living wage campaigns, labor organizing, advocacy for programs that promote food security, and more. Connect with existing community food security initiatives in your region, learn and listen to figure out how best to support and act, hopefully by elevating the voices and experiences of those struggling to access nutritious foods. Policy advocacy can include protection and enhancement of programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps), WIC (food assistance for low-income women, infants and children), free school meals, summer food programs and benefit cards, all of which are under attack these days. Connect with AFSC or the National Right to Food Community of Practice to learn about opportunities to engage.