Social Issue: Food As A Human Right

How can we change the routine practices & global culture of daily living to make it truly free?

The Problem

[The Human Right To Food] Is Routinely Voted Against

In 2017, the United States Government was the only member who voted against the United Nations to keep food from being a human right.

The United States Government (USG) voted against food as a human right in 2017 at the United Nations (UN) with [this reasoning]:

Reason 1:

According to the USG, U.S. agricultural companies have the best, safest pesticides (read: [Monsanto]) and the UN would have them hand it over for free, which violates U.S. property rights laws.

Reason 2:

⁠Trade agreements would require U.S. companies to make some of their intellectual property free-use by the UN; according to the USG, the UN has no authority to create trade agreements. This is the end of their lawful reasoning and they offer zero opportunities for compromise.

Representative Scrooge at the 2017 UN Human Rights Vote.

Patent, pesticide and plant rights are a large part of the USG's corporate revenue from the food economy and they are not willing to give up their future profits for the global good; the powers that be would rather people starve to ensure quarterly growth.

[Indeed, the US, supposedly a country of freedom has been built on genocide and slavery; now it only provides freedom to choose your way of consuming…the government has already chosen for you.]

Given the USG's pre-9/11 border security programs like "prevention through deterrence" still in effect (read: [PTD], and [the human rights crisis it's still causing]) this vote against human rights and the reasoning presented is no surprise.

Reason 3:

The USG says that, morally, every nation-state has a duty to take care of their own people, not force others to take care of them. The USG says that the USG supports the right of food for its own citizens, but not the right of our food to other countries' citizens. At the same time, most people do not starve to death in America as a result of lack of access to food, but Americans do have a serious problem with malnutrition which creates a suite of other health and social problems.

With the food economy as vast and inefficient as it is, our own states within the U.S. are failing to care for their own people. The USG can afford to provide adequate nutrition to its own people, but doesn't due to corporate greed; it's no surprise they have zero interest in feeding the world and offer zero compromise towards making food free.

The waste generated from the domestic food economy's inefficiency is enough to feed the those lacking adequate nutrition twice over.

At the end of the day, the United States Government legislatively is turning its back on those who are starving to death internationally, and the states can't get it together logistically or economically to make food free for those who lack nutrition the most.

You might be thinking,

"What about government food assistance programs like food-stamps, SNAP, EBT, etc?"

[In 2013] roughly 48 million Americans received SNAP benefits, costing taxpayers more than $78 billion per year. Yet according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over 18 million American households remain “food insecure.”

Many blogs and blog comments that discuss this issue use moral & historical arguments for their inhumane perspectives while offering no solutions.

If food had be an enforceable human right in history maybe it wouldn't still be a problem; that said, slavery has been outlawed in the U.S. since [1865], yet over 90% of all chocolate containing foods consumed in the U.S. and abroad in 2021 [were produced by overseas slavery].

What are we to do when poor people who are ineligible for broken government welfare systems are being blamed for the situation by the government and their followers that lack critical thinking skills?

It has only gotten worse since 2016.

What can we do when the governments of the world know what has been going on for decades and they still continue to do nothing meaningful about the problem?

This is a diagram of the government backed oligopoly that controls the world's retail food supply chain.

Creative Strategies

Lawful Ways To Make Food Free For All

Brainstorm: No Bad Ideas

Option1: Buy-out Monsanto:

Take a global collection to buy-out the gatekeepers of free food.

Option 2: Peaceful Disruption:

Generate a global culture of not buying corporate/retail food; only buy local co-op food.

Option 3: Hyper-local Food Production:

Create open source technology for community food production & distribution on global scale; invent a logistically efficient food substitute a la [Soylent] for DIY/at-home nutrition supply generation; individuals can then donate their surplus food production to those without the means to produce their own food.

Critical Thinking: Refine the Brainstorm with Logic

Buying out Monsanto is lawful, but improbable; it's like how Tesla isn't really a car company, at its core it is an inter-planetary utility cartel (read: [Tesla's business model]).

Monsanto isn't about to give up their eternal revenue model and their forever food-reliant global consumer base for a lump sum.

Peaceful disruption is hardly ever peaceful and global culture shifts are typically top down corporate marketing plans (read: [K-Pop history]). The cost of grassroots marketing required for global influence of food consumption culture is beyond the capabilities of any human rights organization. In fact, [War On Want] has been fighting this way for over 30 years and [Nestle still exists], so...

... even though it's wild to suggest someone invent a widget that makes food free for all,

why not consider the idea?

Star Trek did it!

How can we make it real?

The Process of Creating Option 3: How To Invent the Free Food Machine

Let's walkthrough the process of creating this free food machine:

1. The way we currently meet our human needs of nutrition are with antiquated & inefficient models, like the grocery store and massive outdoor farms.
   

2. Open-source technology that is free for all could make it so everyone can have access and the means to creating their own adequate supply of nutrition for themselves. While indoor growing (like aquaponic systems) is gaining popularity, the technology is limited in terms of nutritional variety, density, volume and grow time; these existing systems are also expensive to operate and maintain.
   

3. This new technology doesn't exist and must be invented! What does the project management plan for this invention look like? Are there patents or other legal gatekeepers that can lawfully jail or otherwise deter us for trying to solve this problem?
   

4. What does the invention itself look like? What is it made of? How does it work? How can we make it free?
   

5. How do we build and protect the prototype and what does it even look like?
   

6. How well does it really work? What are the downsides? What do the unexpected/unanticipated data points suggest?
   

7. How do we get people to understand and accept this new way of living? Even if we make free food made at home a reality, will it gain mass adoption? Will global culture lean in favor of the food economy status quo even if we aren't targeted for competitive destruction?

We have created a framework to solve the problem!

We just have to be careful with how far this idea goes...

Ever seen [Snowpiercer]?

Unfortunately, I am not a [biomechanical engineer], but I have faith that the competitive capitalist ideals that drives innovation in technology to fix this problem; disrupting the $160 billion dollar a year U.S. food economy is one hell of a white whale and it's a headscratcher as to why big tech hasn't done it yet.

Final Reflection

As you can see, we're left with more questions than answers.

The who, what, where, and why of this social problem are clear, but the world's hungry will continue to starve until the how is sorted.

The heavy burden of creating things for the betterment of the human family is shrugged off by our governments and keyboard warriors, so it's up to us to save ourselves from the social problems we face, we just have to figure out how.

Being creative is a start: doing research, brainstorming, thinking critically, diagrammatic outlines - these all really helped me come up with the idea of innovative technology as a means to solve the problem. It was validating to see so many people invested and working hard to make this conclusion we came to a reality!

-Tony