The overwhelmingly normative nature of the study of Economic, Social, and Cultural (ESC) human rights enables ESC rights to function in their default settings as taken for granted norms and principles, originating in international agreements. This paper, instead, probes the social and historical “thingness” of ESC human rights themselves. It analyses the emergence of the Human Right to Food (HRF), and proposes a sociological model, political imaginary, as an explanatory tool to identify the historical socio‐discursive conditions of the emergence of the HRF. It uses this model to understand FoodFirst Internal Action Network (FIAN)'s contributions to the development of the HRF.