Can healthy eating at school be considered a human right?

Abstract

The increasing focus on unhealthy eating and the growing interest in providing a foodservice at school have fuelled a debate on its normativity. Should children enjoy the right to a nutritious meal, should they be protected against offers that might be harmful to their health or threaten their possibilities of enjoying a balanced diet? Could this potential right be compared to the well established basic right to enjoying education? This paper explores whether the broad framework of human rights can be invoked to ensure healthy eating in school. It gives a brief account on provisions of food and health from an international human rights framework and discusses the opportunities they offer for taking action to improve eating at school. In addition, the paper presents a short overview of provisions on healthy eating at school that can be found in intergovernmental policy documents. The paper concludes that there is broad support in both intergovernmental policy documents and provisions in the broad framework of human rights on the necessity for providing opportunities for healthy eating at school. It concludes that since children should enjoy, according to human rights framework, the right to adequate nutritious food and the highest attainable standards of health and reach their full physical potential, this framework should be invoked and translated into concrete strategies, policies and regulation at national, regional, local and school levels. The paper provides recommendations on how this could be set about to secure healthy school food environments.