The Paradox of Freedom
A person can be a legal citizen, entitled to vote, speak, and receive an education, yet still be unable to exercise any of these rights if hunger has deprived them of the energy, health, and time needed to do so. Nelson Mandela captured this contradiction when he said that "freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs" (Mandela, 1994). What, then, does freedom actually require? By describing a kind of freedom as meaningless, Mandela invites us to think about what meaningful freedom truly requires. To understand their difference, this essay will adopt Isaiah Berlin's framework of negative and positive liberty to analyze the food insecurity issue in the United States, a country that was founded on the principle of freedom, where 50 million of its citizens are facing the challenge of putting food on the table (Gunderson & Ziliak, 2015). I argue that the United States guarantees its citizens negative liberty from interference, but food insecurity prevents them from exercising positive liberty.
Two Concepts of Liberty
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin offered a useful framework for understanding the paradox of having freedom on paper and forfeiting it in practice. He distinguished between positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from interference: the absence of laws, citizens, individuals, or institutions that stop a person from acting. A society that grants negative liberty guarantees, in principle, that no one will stop you from buying food, attending school, or speaking your mind. Positive liberty is the freedom to act. It requires not just the absence of external interference, but concrete materials, resources, or capacity to master oneself and make one’s own choices responsibly. A person is positively free only when they have the capacity to exercise the negative liberty they have been granted.
Berlin's distinction underlies what Mandela meant by "meaningless freedom." For him, meaningless freedom is a formal or legal freedom that exists only on paper, guaranteeing the legitimacy of citizenship and preventing certain external obstacles to realizing freedom; meaningful freedom means exercising those rights through the foundation of food security. The 50 million Americans who are food insecure have not lost their negative liberty, as no law prevents them from buying food. Instead, what they lack is positive liberty: the food security to actually obtain it.
Cost of Hunger
Children are among the most vulnerable groups affected by food insecurity in the U.S., while older adults are another group at particular risk. Food insecurity exacerbates the racial inequality in the U.S., as many oppressed racial groups are more likely to find themselves food insecure. Food insecurity does not merely cause suffering; it systematically erodes the very capacities that enable positive and meaningful freedom.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Economic Research Service report on Household Food Security in 2024 found that 18.4% of households with children experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024—meaning 14.1 million children faced the threat of losing a normal, active, and healthy life in 2024 (Rabitt et al., 2025). Research has consistently found that food insecurity is associated with poor health outcomes in children, including higher rates of asthma, depression, and emergency department use (Thomas et al., 2019).
These are not minor inconveniences, but serious threats to a child's development. Academically, hunger affects a child's concentration and memory, making it hard for them to keep up with the class. Behaviorally, it shows up as difficulty with impulse control. Emotionally, they are more likely to be depressed, withdrawn, and to suffer in silence. (Shankar et al., 2017). Even at marginal levels of food insecurity, uncertainty of access to the next meal can affect a child's ability to learn and behave. In this way, these children’s positive liberty to pursue an education, a career, a relationship, and to become who they want to be is terribly undermined at an early age.
The harm does not end in childhood; it follows people into working-age adulthood, where the gap between legal freedom and lived freedom becomes just as stark. These citizens have full negative liberty, including the freedom to work, to raise families, and to participate in civic life, but hunger still erodes their positive liberty. A nationally representative longitudinal study found that food-insecure adults subsequently had about 47% more emergency-department visits and hospitalizations (Berkowitz et al., 2018), directly interfering with other significant aspects of their lives.
Moreover, from 2001 to the present, the number of older adults in the U.S. experiencing food insecurity has more than doubled (Jackson et al., 2019). Most older adults become food insecure after retirement, when incomes from Social Security programs, pensions, retirement accounts, or public assistance fail to keep up with rising food prices and when health problems make it harder to shop and cook. A retirement budget that seems manageable at first can become a crisis as these pressures accumulate. (Tohit et al., 2025). Older people can fall into a vicious cycle of hunger and physical decline.
Additionally, food insecurity is disproportionately high among non-white households. In 2024, an estimated 24.4% of Black, non-Hispanic households, 20.2% of Hispanic households, and 30.9% of American Indian and Alaska Native households were food insecure, compared with 10.1% of White, non-Hispanic households—meaning Black and Indigenous households are more than twice as likely to be food insecure as White households (McConnell & Nuñez, 2026). Among households with children, the gap is sharper: food insecurity among Black households with children rose from 27.5% to 31% in a single year (Children’s HealthWatch, 2026). Sociological research treats racism as a "fundamental cause" of food insecurity: it operates by producing racial gaps in income and wealth, and directly through discrimination (Bowen et al., 2021). A national study of SNAP, the US’s largest food assistance program, found that the disparity in food access exists because of unequal access to the assistance: among low-income households not enrolled in SNAP, Black households were significantly more likely to be food insecure than White households—but this racial gap disappeared among households that did receive SNAP benefits (Kwon et al., 2026). A Black or Hispanic adult’s negative liberty is the same as anyone else’s on paper: no law bars them from working, saving, or building wealth. However, structural racism drains the foundational resources for them. Without food, energy, and health, their rights are formal and illusory, and they have no positive liberty to convert equal legal rights into equal life outcomes.
Building a Foundation
Therefore, health is the precondition for having positive liberty. The question then becomes: what would it take for the United States to secure food for its citizens? It requires action on three fronts: economic support, legal accountability, and citizen participation.
The U.S.’s most effective economic support for securing food for its citizens is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), its food assistance program for low-income families established in 1964 and renamed SNAP in 2008. In FY 2024, the program served an average of 41.7 million people per month (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service [USDA ERS], 2026). A series of instrumental variable models with selection into the program indicates that SNAP receipt decreases the probability of food insecurity by about 30% and of severe food insecurity by about 20% (Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010). However, the program's effectiveness is now under threat. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" of July 2025 cut SNAP funding by $187 billion through 2034. The law expanded work requirements, eliminated exemptions for veterans and homeless individuals, and shifted more costs to states. As Harvard nutrition expert Cindy Leung warned, these cuts are likely to increase food insecurity and worsen chronic disease in low-income populations (Datz, 2025). Without adequate funding and accessible pathways to assistance, SNAP's ability to serve as a reliable foundation for food security is being systematically undermined.
Economic support alone, however, is not enough. The United States also lags behind other constitutional democracies that have at least attempted to close the positive-liberty gap through law, such as South Africa and India, countries with urgent food security issues. South Africa's Constitution clearly guarantees the right to food. Under Section 27, "everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water,” and “the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights” (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, § 27). In 2001, India saw a landmark right-to-food case, People’s Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India, in which the Supreme Court acknowledged the crucial primacy of food security in human rights protection. The Court then ordered the government to establish public food distribution, school food distribution, and fair price shops, with a series of interim orders and commissioners to oversee them (Durojaye & Chilemba, 2018). These orders were not merely symbolic; they became legal entitlements, transforming 9 existing nutrition-related schemes from government programs into enforceable rights (Hassan, 2011).
In contrast, neither the United States Constitution nor its courts acknowledged the priority of guaranteeing food security for its citizens. The country signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1977, which obligated any State that signed it to realize the rights it listed for its citizens. Article 11 of the Covenant recognizes “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food”. It affirms “the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger” (ICESCR, 1966, art. 11). However, the U.S. has signed but not ratified the Covenant (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, n.d.). Additionally, no U.S. government entity has a Department of Food, which makes it ineffective at addressing these food-related issues (North American Food Policy Council, 2016).
To address this problem, the U.S. should not only perfect its legal and governmental system on food issues, but also create channels through which citizens can shape food policy directly. Food Policy Councils (FPCs) are an experimental version of this, and over 100 councils nationwide consist of local groups of residents, farmers, and advocates that push for improved access to healthy food. Research shows that municipalities with FPCs have higher odds (27.6%) of developing healthy food access policies than municipalities without FPCs. They support access to food retail stores, farmers' markets, transportation supports, and objectives in community planning documents (Oza-Frank et al., 2025). However, studies also show that regional FPCs lack connections with government because they must navigate “the dynamics of multiple political bodies,” “undermining the regional FPC’s ability to maintain alliances across governmental partners” (Irish et al., 2024). Therefore, the regional governments should encourage their employees to participate in the board and actively accept advice from their regional councils. If regional FPCs become more recognized and accepted by their regional governments, they mayform direct relationships with governments and exercise greater influence in improving food access.
The United States was founded on the promise of freedom. However, for millions of its citizens, that promise remains unrealized, not because they are denied rights by law, but because hunger has stripped away the health, time, and energy needed to exercise them. This is the gap between freedom on paper and freedom in practice. If the U.S. is to fulfill its founding ideal, it must treat food security not as charity, but as a foundation of citizenship, and build the institutions necessary to make that foundation real. Freedom that cannot be lived is not freedom at all.
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