Gender, Nutrition, and the Human Right to Adequate Food : Toward an Inclusive Framework

This book introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition as evolving concept and identifies two structural "disconnects" fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health. Three conditions arising from these disconnects are discussed: structural violence and discrimination frustrating the realization of women’s human rights, as well as their private and public contributions to food and nutrition security for all; many women’s experience of their and their children’s simultaneously independent and intertwined subjectivities during pregnancy and breastfeeding being poorly understood in human rights law and abused by poorly-regulated food and nutrition industry marketing practices; and the neoliberal economic system’s interference both with the autonomy and self-determination of women and their communities and with the strengthening of sustainable diets based on democratically governed local food systems. The book calls for a social movement-led reconceptualization of the right to adequate food toward incorporating gender, women’s rights, and nutrition, based on the food sovereignty framework.

Anne C. Bellows is professor and graduate program director of the Food Studies Program in the Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition at Syracuse University.

Flavio L.S. Valente is the secretary general of FIAN International, based in Heidelberg.

Stefanie Lemke joined the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK in 2015. From 2013 to 2015, she was acting chair, Department of Gender and Nutrition, University of Hohenheim.

María Daniela Núñez Burbano de Lara is a research associate at the Department of Gender and Nutrition at the University of Hohenheim.