A few years ago, Maine became the first state in the nation to write a “right to food” into its constitution. Since then, the experiment has been reshaping fights about how people can grow, hunt, and fish for what they eat. We’ll trace how the amendment arose from local food‑sovereignty campaigns and explain its broad and open‑ended language, before diving into the latest lawsuit that tests what this constitutional right means in practice (here’s a hint: it involves fly-fishing).
How Maine Got a Right to Food
Maine’s right‑to‑food amendment emerged from years of grassroots organizing around food sovereignty and “food freedom,” led by small farmers and local‑control advocates. They were frustrated by what they saw as burdensome state and federal regulations that made direct producer‑to‑consumer food exchanges harder. Their efforts had already helped secure several statutory reforms, including the Maine Food Sovereignty Act and local ordinances that protected traditional foodways.
But the activists felt these statutes didn’t go far enough. They believed core interests were still exposed, such as a person’s ability to grow food of their choosing, obtain food from preferred sources, and control seeds, land, and water. They also feared that future regulatory changes or corporate influence could erode these gains.
Against this backdrop, supporters pushed to entrench a broad “right to food” in the state constitution so that individual self‑provisioning would have a higher level of protection than ordinary statutes could provide. After clearing the required supermajority thresholds in both chambers, the amendment appeared as a statewide ballot question in November 2021, and a majority of Maine voters approved it, creating Article I, section 25—the “Right to Food”—in the Maine Constitution.
What the Amendment Actually Says
The amendment provides that “[a]ll individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well‑being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.”
The amendment drew an immediate and mixed response. Critics, including some regulators and legal scholars, worried about the breadth of the language and asked how far the new right might extend into areas such as public health regulation, animal welfare, and long‑standing wildlife management rules. Even some voters who supported the idea of food autonomy expressed uncertainty about how courts would apply terms like “harvest” and “poaching” in concrete disputes.
The amendment did not immediately strike down any existing regulatory programs. Instead, it changed how people argued about them. From then on, whenever a rule about food production or access was challenged, agencies and lawyers had to ask if Article I, section 25 applied and, if it did, how to fit that constitutional right together with the rest of Maine’s statutes.
From Paper Right to Everyday Fights
For many Mainers, the biggest visible change has been how people talk about food issues. Debates about zoning for backyard animals, raw milk sales, seed sharing, and gathering wild foods now point to a constitutional “right to food,” not just to state laws or local ordinances. The amendment has also become a basis for lawsuits, as people bring test cases asking courts to clarify what the new right covers and where it stops.
One early case was Parker v. Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, where a couple challenged Maine’s long‑standing Sunday hunting ban under Article I, section 25. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court decided that “harvest” in the amendment includes hunting and therefore recognizes a limited right to hunt for food, but it also held that this right does not include illegal hunting because of the “poaching” language, so the Sunday hunting ban remained valid.
More recently, a new lawsuit has pressed the amendment into the realm of fishing. In Legendre v. Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, several Mainers challenge the Commissioner’s decision to designate 226 lakes and ponds as “fly‑fishing only” waters.
Reel Talk: ‘Harvesting’ or ‘Poaching’?
The plaintiffs in Legendre are everyday Mainers who fish to put food on the table and who do not fly‑fish. They live near, and have long relied on, waters that the Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife has designated as “fly‑fishing only,” which means they cannot legally use the spin‑casting gear they own and know how to use on those lakes and ponds.
Many of these 226 waters are publicly accessible and stocked or managed by the State, yet non‑fly‑anglers like the Legendre plaintiffs are barred from harvesting fish there for their families’ sustenance. The plaintiffs say they cannot afford to travel to distant waters where spin‑casting is allowed or to invest time and money in new fly‑fishing equipment and skills, so the gear‑based restrictions effectively exclude them from using nearby public fisheries to obtain food.
In their complaint, the Legendre plaintiffs argue that Maine’s right‑to‑food amendment gives them a constitutional right to catch fish with lawful gear on public waters in order to feed themselves. They rely on ordinary and legal definitions of “harvest” to claim that this term includes catching wild fish, just as the state supreme court in Parker held that it includes hunting.
They contend that the “poaching” limitation in Article I, section 25 excludes only conduct that is already independently unlawful (like trespassing on private land or taking fish out of season), but not the simple use of spin‑casting gear on waters that the State has chosen to reserve for fly‑fishers. Based on this view, a rule that keeps non‑fly‑fishers off 226 public lakes and ponds does more than manage wildlife: it clashes with their clear right “to…harvest…food of their own choosing,” and so is unconstitutional when applied to Mainers who want to fish those waters to feed themselves and their families.
As Legendre moves forward, Maine’s courts will have to say more about what the right to food actually guarantees and where it stops. Their rulings will not only determine whether non‑fly‑fishers can use nearby public waters to feed their families; they will also signal how much force Article I, section 25 has when it collides with long‑standing regulatory choices in other areas of the food system.
Related Resources:
- It’s a Beef With Kiefer as Actor Is Arrested After Incident With Ride-Share Driver (FindLaw's Legally Weird)
- Fishing Laws by State (FindLaw's State Laws)
- Lawsuit Against McDonald’s McRib Sandwich Looks To Get to the Meat of the Matter (FindLaw's Law and Daily Life
