“Leave no one behind”: social bonding and the right to food in FAO’s World Food Day promotional videos 2018-2025

This paper presents a critical multimodal investigation of a corpus of fifteen videos (long and short versions, except for the 2018 campaign) launched by FAO on World Food Day (WFD, October 16th), in the 2018-2025 period, to promote global awareness of hunger and the need for healthy diets. Recent WFD themes, supporting SDG2 of achieving zero hunger by 2030, are typically reflected in the campaign titles and/or baselines – e.g. “Our actions are our future” (2018, 2020, and 2021) and “Leave no one behind” (2022, 2023, and 2024) –, as well as in many of the videos’ initial catchphrases – e.g. “sustainability starts with equal opportunity” (2022) and “for each and every one of us food tells a story” (2021). In line with two of the present volume's main foci, this paper investigates the themes of “social bonding” and “right to food” in terms of the ITFs (Lemke 1988, 2008) guiding the multimodal exploration of the highly compressed visual-verbal strategies used in these videos to promote FAO’s impactful and memorable social responsibility message. More specifically, by reframing its social responsibility message as a ‘story’ ultimately functioning as a demand to implement socially and environmentally responsible actions, FAO underscores the common ownership of natural resources and the need to redress the power asymmetries which separate different communities.