"The Hunger Games: Food as a Right, Not a Privilege" by Camesha F. Little

Alternate Title

The Hunger Games: Food as a Right, Not a Privilege

Camesha F. Little, University of Detroit Mercy School of LawFollow

Abstract

Despite the United Nations' explicit declaration that all humans have a right to food, food insecurity and hunger remain persistent problems in the United States and around the globe. The dystopian landscapes depicted in novels such as The Hunger Games and Parable of the Sower—societies crippled by poverty, oppression, and pervasive starvation—resonate with sobering contemporary realities. This Article examines existing food laws, food rights, and the current protections safeguarding the United States food supply from a humanitarian perspective. Ultimately, this Article argues that the human right to food must expand to encompass a right to healthy or natural food, and that the United States can ensure equitable access to quality food for all its citizens by considering a broader application of rights and duties under the public trust doctrine.

Food is a foundational human need, essential for life, health, and overall well-being. Despite this immense importance, robust legal protections to ensure equitable access to quality food remain insufficient. This Article proposes a more robust legal framework necessary to address the inadequacies of the current system, arguing that the United States can ensure equitable access to quality food for all its citizens by applying the public trust doctrine. As a common law doctrine, the public trust doctrine stipulates that certain natural resources are held by the government in a fiduciary trust for the benefit of current and future generations. This doctrine provides a flexible legal mechanism for safeguarding vital public assets from irrevocable damage or alienation. While traditionally applied to resources such as navigable waterways and coastlines, this Article contends that food in its natural state is similarly a public resource deserving of enhanced protection.

This Article unfolds in two principal arguments. First, it centralizes the position that all human beings have a human right to healthy, quality food because food is a natural resource that should be protected. Second, this Article proposes the application of the public trust doctrine to afford enhanced protection for natural food sources. Part I establishes the factual background of global and national food access, alongside contemporary challenges facing the United States food supply. Part II details the existing international legal framework for food rights and protections, subsequently examining current food safeguards within the United States, including the various regulatory bodies involved. Part III synthesizes scholarly analyses concerning the legal problems and proposed solutions related to food rights and protections.

The second half of this Article proposes the use of the public trust doctrine to protect natural food rights in America. Part IV discusses why the current protections of food in the United States are inadequate to ensure the supply of natural food. Part V describes and defines the public trust doctrine and what resources have been considered natural resources under the doctrine. Part VI proposes why food should be considered a natural resource under the public trust doctrine and explains why and how food should be protected under this framework. By establishing food as a natural resource held in trust by the government for the benefit of all citizens, this approach would impose a fiduciary duty on the state to ensure equitable access to healthy food, offering a more robust and ethically grounded framework for achieving food justice and fulfilling the human right to adequate and healthy food for all Americans.