The Right to Quality Food in the Capitalocene Era

Food quality policy is declined between safety standards, environmental protection policies and intellectual property rights. As it is, food quality access is understood at the crossroads between the necessity to guarantee human health, the acknowledgement that the environment can no longer bear to be unruly exploited and the need to protect the consumer choice and the industry profit. Furthermore, as climate change and environmental pollution challenge our ability to anticipate risks on food production, food security is increasingly put at stake. The study of food production system history and its crises through the lens of Capitalocene shows the necessity to rethink the food production system and regulation between the local and the global, to guarantee a real right to food. This paper aims to propose a theoretical perspective on the right to access food quality as deeply embedded with social class, climate change, and environmental rights, urging the need to harmonize international treaties with social and economic practices. It is argued that regulation should go beyond techno-bureaucratic expertocracy, by acknowledging how the only mitigation of climate and environmental risks results at the same time in the proliferation of laws but in the reduction of social rights.