Feeding the Margins: Disability and Food Sovereignty in the Majority World

Abstract

This chapter argues that the right to food is meaningless without the capability to eat, and that this capability is structurally denied to persons with disabilities in the Majority World. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capability approach, Frantz Fanon's analysis of coloniality, and de Sousa Santos's account of epistemicide, swallowing disability is reframed not as a clinical anomaly but as a political-economic outcome shaped by colonial spatial planning, structural adjustment, food-system deregulation, and neocolonial workforce distribution. In KwaZulu-Natal, 91% of disabled people live in food-insecure households; in Aotearoa New Zealand, similar patterns mark Māori and Pacific populations as Majority-World citizens within a settler-colonial Minority-World state. These are not separate clinical problems — they are the same political problem made visible across Majority World contexts.

The chapter introduces THRIVE (Tackling Hunger with Research and Innovation in Vulnerable Environments), a decolonial praxis framework developed in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. THRIVE rests on four pillars. Pillar 1 (Food Production) operationalises indigenised, dysphagia-safe food through One Home One Garden initiatives and pharmacy farms. Pillar 2 (Food Preparation) applies molecular gastronomy to community kitchens — the Robin Hood Strategy. Pillar 3 (Con-Texture) contextualises the IDDSI classification system for indigenous foods, validated through embodied, sensory knowledge held by community health workers. Pillar 4 (Primary Care Risk Management) relocates choking prevention and aspiration response training from the urban hospital to the household, school, and clinic.

THRIVE is not a service-improvement model. It is an onto-epistemological intervention: epistemic relocation from the credentialed expert to the family caregiver, from the clinic to the kitchen. Its guiding ethos is Decolonising Deliciousness; the insistence that safety, pleasure, and political sovereignty are inseparable. Safe eating, in this frame, is a political act: the right to food becomes coherent only when the capability to eat is collectively defended as both clinical and political work.

The swallow is never just a swallow. It is where food sovereignty, disability justice, and environmental injustice converge. A framework, called THRIVE; which stands for Tackling Hunger with Research and Innovation in Vulnerable Environments; positions food insecurity as politicised: a question of who reaches food, and who possesses the capability to benefit from it. In this chapter, the argument is straightforward: the right to food means nothing without the capability to eat, and that capability is structurally denied to persons with disabilities in the Majority World (Alam, 2008). This term, Majority World, reframes the “developing world” as home to the majority of the world’s population, challenging the marginality implied by terms like Third World or Global South. Crucially, the Majority World includes indigenous and marginalised populations within the Global North (Pillay & Kathard, 2018). The Global North/South binary originates in the Brandt Commission's North–South: A Programme for Survival (1980) as an economic classification of high- and low-income economies, displacing the politically loaded First/Second/Third World schema. Its limitations are well documented: the binary obscures stratification within both regions, and an income-based frame inadequately captures the epistemic, political, and historical dimensions of global inequality. This chapter therefore adopts Majority World (Alam, 2008) foregrounding population share over income, and Minority World as its counterpart, while retaining Global North/South only where directly cited.