A New Look at the Left Wing

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To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

services include: three large people’s restaurants that indiscriminately serve fifty-cent, high-quality meals, developing public spaces for subsidized and intelligently regulated local and fresh food markets, extensive school lunch programs, food and nutrition education, community gardens, consumer protection databases and leaflets, etc.

the cost: about $10 million annually, less than 2% of the city’s budget representing about a penny per day per belo residents.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”