« Arrêter, une fois pour toutes, de manger de la vache enragée. » Le Groupe Action-Alimentation de Pointe-Saint-Charles et le droit à l’alimentation, 1970–2000

This article tells the story of the Groupe Action-Alimentation, a workshop created by the Carrefour d’éducation populaire of Pointe-Saint-Charles in the 1970s. It describes how, in a neoliberal context, the participants and their main facilitator advocate for the right to food. They expose the experience of hunger, they affirm the skills of low-income women in matters of dietetics, cooking, and consumption, they use the language of law, they denounce the use of charity, and they criticize the state and private companies. This research illustrates how the participants in this workshop perceive, qualify, and interpret their reality, how they manifest their class consciousness and their convictions about their right to health, dignity, and well-being. We observe that this local resistance to social and economic marginalization had an impact on the positions taken by nutrition professionals and, ultimately, on certain Quebec policies aimed at achieving food security, adopted in the early 2000s. This contribution to the history of economic, social, and cultural rights analyzes the words of women who refused to individualize the problem of food among the most deprived and who instead denounced the commodification of essential goods.