Care lies at the heart of human flourishing and is essential for sustainable environmental and socio-economic systems, yet it remains systematically unrecognized, undervalued and unequally distributed. This Comment examines the human right to care as a potential catalyst for transformative development policies through its capacity to confront and redress persistent inequalities while reinforcing connections between communities and the environment. By exploring feminist agroecology as one pathway for implementing the right to care and specifically "food care" in the context of developing capabilities, we argue that care is both instrumental to achieving other human rights and capabilities and intrinsically valuable for human flourishing.