No soup for you.

Last Sunday, two climate activists, one of them wearing a shirt that read “food response,” hurled pumpkin soup onto the bulletproof casing protecting the Mona Lisa.

“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” they said in French before museum security guards intervened and escorted them out. “Our agricultural system is sick.” They called for “the integration of food into the general social security system.”

The “Mona Lisa” has a history of being used as a tool and the target of protests over the years, from a woman throwing a ceramic cup in 2009 to a man dressed as an elderly woman smearing it with “cake-like cream” to the most recent flinging of pumpkin soup.

The pair of climate activists belonged to the A22 Movement, a coalition of similar organizations, including Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. There have been many protests in and around the French capital against rising fuel costs and unsustainable food production; the most recent one is the ongoing farmers’ protest —another manifestation of a global food crisis worsened by Russia’s nearly two-year war in Ukraine.  

In October 2022, protestors with Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup onto Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London. “What is worth more—art or life?” shouted one of the activists. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” 

“Economic growth itself is what is destroying the very basis of what humans need to thrive,” Kohei Saito writes in his new book, “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” As much as art may be one of the single most important aspects of the human experience, the food we put in our bodies and our cost of living must come first. It is unsettling that these protests occur at art museums, however, but, even more perturbing is that they cause no more than an hour and a half of disruption.

About an hour and a half after the protest and after the evacuation and cleaning, the wing with the Mona Lisa reopened, and visitors were allowed back to continue viewing the “Mona Lisa.” Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece wasn’t harmed.