Eat My Idealism

Anyone who advocates for elements of a better future, whether real (in the present, somewhere) or as yet only imagined, risks being called utopian, idealistic, new agey, not to mention pitifully deluded. Holding hands and singing Kumbayah seems to be the insult of the age. But in fact advocating for a better future is utterly pragmatic. If we don't make civilization better, if we don't get better ourselves, civilization is doomed, and soon.

Not everyone accepts this premise, and frankly, a lot of people don't care. They're so disenchanted with things as they are (even if they repress that despair by adopting "survival-of-the-greediest and most violent" views that would scandalize Social Darwinists) that they'd probably welcome the end of civilization. Given the decadent state of things, many of us have those kinds of feelings. But a few minutes contemplation of all the innocent suffering that might entail, and all the needless waste of the sacrifices made, should bring us back to trying our best.

What is additionally interesting is that some of the most "idealistic" attempts to make things better come from people who've endured more than most hardnosed pragmatic critics, in parts of the world where suffering is far worse and more widespread than nearly anywhere in North America, at least for now.

So when a real, large-scale effort to make healthy food a right, and to make that right real, comes from Brazil, it doesn't require a Vangelis soundtrack. Six years ago, activists in the fourth largest city in Brazil declared that right, and now it is becoming a widespread reality.

Their innovations, coordinated by a new city office of food security, range from twenty-five fair-price produce stands supplied by local farmers to open-air restaurants serving 12,000 subsidized meals daily to city-sponsored radio broadcasts leading shoppers to the lowest-priced essentials.

These and many more city-led initiatives to end hunger consume only 1 percent of Belo's budget, but they're working. Hard evidence is the city's infant death rate, a widely accepted measure of hunger, which fell an astonishing 56 percent over the first decade of these efforts. Belo's approach has inspired multiple right-to-food initiatives nationwide as part of President Lula's Zero Hunger Program.

As author Francis Moore Lappe reminds us, the UN Declaration of Human Rights made access to food a human right in 1948. International efforts to make it real in the 90s and so far in this century have resulted in, among other things, 187 nations signing on to voluntary plans and "twenty-two countries have enshrined the right to food in their constitutions, either for all citizens or specifically for children."

The nasty, brutish secret is that it's long been possible to feed the world, to eradicate poverty, end the diseases that kill and maim the most people in the world, and to do so with little inconvenience, let alone sacrifice, by the comparatively rich, and with less ecological destruction than is now visited upon the planet. Safe drinking water for all is also possible, if somewhat more difficult, and with some lead time and a lot of organization, so is adequate energy. But food, water and minimal preventive health care plus a few inexpensive medicines are supremely possible, and would make a vast difference.

The rest of Lappe's piece is about the real politik realization of these universal rights, which involves political power. Hunger strikes for food may be necessary, but that doesn't make them any less absurd. There is no point in arguing about whether we can get better, only whether we should. And if we should, then we try to figure out how to proceed. And proceed.