so we get free food, right?

The other week I attended a lecture on food for a global studies course (and I haven't written about it yet? Yeah. I know. Shoot me.) and the hippie lady who spoke focused on food as a right. As in a government is obliged to provide sustenance for its citizens. Simultaneously, I'm reading about how feudal lords and aristocrats from China to France stored surpluses for distribution to the poor during famines way, way back in the day when "lord" didn't necessarily signify Jesus and peasants clapped coconut halves together for lack of horses or other viable transportation.

So what about now, in an age where the term "McDonaldization" is taught in college classes? Is food a right or a commodity? Should it be one or the other?

All this talk about the right to food came into context when I read an article called Tent City, in which a journalist lived amongst homeless people in an encampment of tents to try to gain a better understanding of them, their lifestyles, how they came into this situation, etc. While exploring the site, he came across what appeared to be the nucleus of this "city", something called Poverello House (or "the Pov"):

Free meals were available here, no questions asked. [...] At times the existence of the Pov seemed like a kind of miracle of clear-sighted, unconditional generosity. At other times, it seemed like a gigantic enabling machine: The free food supplied by the Pov seemed to be the main reason for the existence of the [tent city].

This brings up a lot of complex welfare-related questions that I (and everyone else, it seems) can't answer. But I do want to address it in reference to this concept of food as a right, and what this might do to people's will and drive to satiate hunger: If we don't have to buy or work for food because it is provided for us by the government, what does this do to our view of it? What does it become? Does it lose its value, in the way that cheap, instantaneous bagged meals handed from a hole in a wall have often replaced Sunday pot roast family dinners? If we're not working to provide for ourselves in a basic sense, but don't have the means (whether economic, social, mental, what have you) to strive for what some sociologists say is the next step: abstract self-fulfillment-- what are we working for?

I don't know, but something tells me it might be drugs. Which makes me think we (the big-wigs, the little man; everyone) should reevaluate our priorities. But, there are cases in which egalitarian distribution of food has not had detrimental consequences. Take, for example, the !Kung San (better known as the Bushmen, or to me, prior to taking an anthropology class, as the clicky tongue people), a hunter-gatherer tribe from Africa that still exists today (although in a slightly Westernized sense). These people survive(d) on roots, plants, and precious few game that they could kill with bows and arrows, and distributed their food equally amongst all members of the tribe.

So, in a way, to them food was a right, as in no one should be excluded from partaking in a feast just because they weren't directly responsible for killing or digging the main course. But, all members (except children) contributed in some sense to the cycle of these peoples' society, so it didn't matter; they did their part somewhere else.

Now, I'm aware that our society is vastly different from that of the !Kung, but my point is this: handing out food isn't teaching anyone the value of it. So in that sense I don't think food should be a right. But if some kind of exchange takes place--not necessarily monetary, because I understand, in the limited sense that someone ingrained in the the middle-class only can, that a capitalist society doesn't always make room for everyone--but if they have to do something for that food--wash their dishes afterward, serve it to someone else, anything!--wouldn't that make them see it as something worth fighting for?

Maybe I'm being too harsh; I mean, these people have been through enough, let 'em have a free meal! Or maybe I'm being naive by assuming all people can or will fight for something they really want (or in this case, need). But it just seems to me that if one country has an obesity epidemic and another (or like half the world) has to deal with starvation and malnutrition, something is fundamentally wrong.