‘To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of hunger and deprivation is to dehumanise them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country,” Nelson Mandela told a joint US Congress sitting on 26 June 1990, just a few months after being released from prison.

Yet South Africa’s food system is broken, resulting in rampant disease and the indignity of hunger, with statistics showing that stunting in children is at 27% – more than double the global average – because not only are they not accessing adequate nutrition from birth, such as breastmilk, but because mothers themselves are starved and unable to breastfeed.

But it seems we and particularly our government are unmoved by this. The food justice battle is about fighting to access sufficient and nutritious food, to not be locked into cycles of bad nutritional choices as manipulated by the big food industry for profit, along with the debilitating effects of diseases that result from inadequate nutrition. Not to mention the impact on the country’s economic productivity.

Protest

On Monday, the Healthy Living Alliance and partners including the Treatment Action Campaign marched to the Department of Health and handed over a memorandum demanding that government regulations be more transparent regarding the impact that certain foods are likely to have on people, such as increased risk of diabetes, hypertension and cancer. 

Read in Daily Maverick: “A strong food justice coalition is needed to fight effectively for the health of all South Africans”

The organisation was “calling on the government to utilise all tools at its disposal, including front-of-pack warning labels, to create a healthier food environment and fix the food system [of] all South African citizens”. It pointed out that it is untenable that 4.58 million South Africans are living with diabetes as a result of ultraprocessed and high-in-sugar foods being pushed onto supermarket shelves by the food industry for profit. The resultant disease burden costs the health system R33-billion a year, or 15% of government healthcare expenditure. 

The Healthy Living Alliance and the Treatment Action Campaign march to the Department of Health, calling on government to create a healthier food environment and fix the food system. (Photo: Healthy Living Alliance)

The organisation added: “The Ministry of Health should take bold steps to protect us against the harms of unhealthy food by introducing and strengthening policies that give everyone an opportunity to access healthy and affordable food.”

Hunger and performance

Last week I attended a discussion about the impact of food insecurity, what has contributed to the breakdown of our food systems and how to build resilience for the future. It soon became clear that food is an intimate and integral part of how our community and society are organised, but that people are vulnerable to the disruption of access because they are unable to grow their own food owing to urbanisation or because of the climate crisis, loss of income or exorbitant food prices. 

This disruption of access was also highlighted as generational when I met a group of young poets who have joined the battle for food by collating an anthology that describes the complex and often frustrating relationship with food, personally and in their communities. 

The works, which track the generational impact of insufficient food and hunger, should move one to consider the notion of having to perform one’s hunger, and the indignity that comes with that. As a society it seems we have become so desensitised to the problem that it is not enough for one to simply say they are hungry – creative, performative ways are now needed to attract much-needed attention. As I reflected on the young people’s expression and experiences of hunger, I questioned why it is that they had to perform their hunger to try to bring greater urgency to our food crisis – from the description of hunger pangs and the embarrassment of not being able to carry lunch to school, to the anger of having to beg for this basic necessity?

In a short but powerful poem, Jerome Coetzee illustrates the violence of not having enough to eat: 

Hunger strikes not as a number but as organs folding into each other
Intestines removing spaces
Hugging each other
Acknowledging that I survive
with my neighbour
You speak of hunger
We talk about feeling, embracing, surviving, overcoming hunger

And yet our Constitution says the right to food is intimately linked to the right to life and dignity. How then do we operationalise and make this a reality so that young people do not have to engage in the macabre performance of hunger and poverty not of their making? 

If section 27 (1) (b) of our Constitution states that “Everyone has the right to have access to: sufficient food and water” and section 28 (1) (c) gives an unqualified right to food for children when it notes that “Every child has the right to basic nutrition”, why then do we still have 6.5 million South Africans going without food? Of what value are the rights enshrined in the Constitution if not enacted?

Healthy Living Alliance programmes manager Nzama Mbalati hands over the memorandum. (Photo: Healthy Living Alliance)

While so much food is wasted millions of South Africans are in perpetual hunger. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Nic Bothma)

We are failing our children and they know it. If anything the shame should be felt not by them for not having food, but by those who, according to the Constitution and oath of office, are obligated to “take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights”. 

Hunger is dehumanising, as pointed out by Mandela. It manifests not only on emaciated bodies but also withers away the mind because food is a dual fuel. Can we afford to continue to sacrifice our children at its rapacious altar? DM/MC