This panel presents food as an evolving and crucial issue for health, economic development, and environmental justice debates in the U.S. Activists, local communities, and policymakers often view access to food as a new civil right, with law quenching or boiling tensions. Access to food include trends such as: recent popularity in food and taco trucks; obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in minority groups communities; food insecurity with limited supermarkets in rural and urban contexts; agro-business subsidies with lobbying power, international trade regimes, and intellectual property protections; environmental effects of oil spills, slaughterhouses, and processing plants; limited protections for agriculture labor often representing migrants and populations of color; and culinary traditions serving cultural identity’s apex for diverse racial, migrant, religious and regional communities.
The panel’s goal is two-fold to illustrate how: 1) law serves an underappreciated role in these food debates and 2) how New Orleans provides an immediate example of these debates. With a varied and large menu of options, law can protect this access and exclusion. Relevant doctrine and legal instruments include land use regulations; healthcare and insurance policies; education law in the form of school cafeteria menus and vending; local economic development; agro-industry subsidies; trade law disputes and treaty protections in WTO, NAFTA, and bilateral regimes; environmental law to litigate, prevent or remedy these harms; labor and immigration law; and FDA health and labeling regulations. With food directly feeding our bodies and cultural identity, law may be the main utensil to cool or heat debates. (Next, New Orleans and Louisiana serve large local plates exemplifying these trends, far beyond explaining what is Cajun, Creole, or Southern food.) The region illustrates trends in urban farming, oil spills destroying fisheries and oyster farming often owned by Southeast Asian and African-American communities, FDA bans on serving local oysters that have not been irradiating (argued to ruin their flavor and kill bacteria), taco trucks serving migrant workers; and local economic development choices affecting small businesses and service industry workers after the Katrina storm and BP Gulf Spill. In sum, examining New Orleans locally and legal doctrines generally, the panel suggests how law may promote food as a new civil right while also facilitating recent developments in access to food.