Food is a Human Right proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Beyond the different interpretations, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations clearly defines that we refer to “that right that each of us has to feed ourselves with dignity, to have continuous access to the resources that will allow us to produce, earn or be able to buy enough food, and not only to prevent hunger but also to ensure health and well-being” (FAO, 2007).
Since health is considered a universal right, and without adequate food it is unlikely to have good health, it seems logical that it can also acquire this category.
The fundamental question we must consider is why is it important for food to be considered a right in the new Constitution? Incorporating the right to food into our new Constitution will represent support from the State for prioritizing intersectoral public policies that make possible the availability and access to healthy food.
Moreover, paradoxically, in the face of scenarios of price increases and difficulties in the productive and commercial logistics of healthy foods, the most modest families, even knowingly, must choose cheaper foods, which barely meet their nutritional needs. In these scenarios, there is no real freedom of choice, defended by those who try to question concepts entrenched in these fields of study.
To reduce this issue to the lack of education and individual decisions is to fail to understand the impact of the social determinants of health and obesogenic food environments, using as a convenient pretext a false conceptual misunderstanding. Thus, it seems to us entirely inappropriate to treat the word “right” pejoratively as a universal solution to social ills.
Precisely, the Law aspires to the solution of an enormous social evil, namely, the violent resolution of conflicts to the detriment of social peace, so resented lately; in turn, Human Rights are precisely minimum moral aspirations, of universal order, worthy of being considered in any State policy, far from particularist vicissitudes of a government of the day, far from pilgrim intellectual arrogance.
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