This World Hunger Day, the theme is resilience. Not as a buzzword or a demand for communities to simply ‘bounce back’, but as a practice of sowing: planting ideas, nurturing movements, and growing change. Over the past few years, we have been working on the right to food, advocating for the legal recognition of this fundamental human right and amplifying the voices of those too often excluded from food justice conversations.
Today
In the UK, over 11.3 million people faced food insecurity in 2022/23, with nearly one in five low-income households reporting they had run out of food and could not afford more (The Food Foundation, 2023). The Trussell Trust also reported that their network distributed close to three million emergency food parcels last year, with over a million going to children (Trussell Trust, 2024). These statistics highlight not an isolated crisis but systemic neglect.
UDHR Legacy
As Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reminds us: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…”. The right to food is not a luxury; it is a human right, and one we must actively protect and promote.
Resilience, then, is not just about enduring injustice. It is about resisting it. It involves creating circumstances in which food security is a collective reality rather than an individual struggle.
In Jewish liturgy, as part of our morning service and recited after meals, we read aloud the words “פּוֹתֵחַ אֶת יָדֶךָ וּמַשְׂבִּיעַ לְכָל חַי רָצוֹן” – “You open Your hand and satisfy the needs of every living being.” In our tradition, this verse serves as both praise and provocation: it praises the work of care and provokes us to emulate that generosity through our own actions and systems.
Yet here in the UK, we still see the right to food framed as charity rather than as an obligation. We view school meals as luxuries up for debate. We hear food bank users described with suspicion, their dignity traded for handouts, and their hunger politicised. However, emergency food provision – largely sustained by grassroots and community organisations – is not a sign of generosity; it signifies failure.
Resilience
The work of resilience asks us to activate our imaginations to conceive of the infrastructures that would need to come together to create the material conditions for the right to food: what would food systems built around dignity look like? What happens when the Right to Food is enshrined? What if no child’s lunch depended on the moral whims of government ministers? As Deb Chacha writes, infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective and require long-term investment.
As we celebrate the upcoming Jewish festival of Shavuot, we remember the giving of knowledge and our understanding of what the Right to Food truly means: a collective endeavour to which we should rise with active imaginations and open hands. We can view resilience as a collective, imaginative practice that will lead us towards robust food systems built around dignity.
This World Hunger Day, let us commit to sowing the seeds of resilience, nurturing the movements that demand justice, wherein the right to food is recognised and upheld for all.
