Canada has consistently failed to uphold basic human rights, including the right to food. This has caused widespread and persistent household food insecurity (HFI), which has become a serious, albeit overlooked, public health concern. Working from a political economic perspective, this article situates HFI within the context of poverty that has been made worse by neoliberal “rollbacks” to the welfare state. The majority of community and policy responses to HFI focus on the increased production or redistribution of foodvia food charity, neglectingthe underlying issue of inadequate income. These responses may even perpetuate food insecurity by offloading safety net functions onto corporations and communities that cannot compensate for adequate welfare programs. In order to meaningfully addressfood insecurityas an issue rooted in poverty, we recommend policy interventionsunder the “right to food” framework, which places primary responsibility on the state. But unlike traditional legal conceptions of the right to food, we emphasize its utility as a tool for mobilizing civil society, which is a powerful yet underutilized source of accountability to state obligations. This approach therefore combines political action with policymaking, and civil society with the state, in the collective realization of the right to food.