a box of canadian onions

reflections on trade wars, NAFTA, and free onions

On a snowy Tuesday afternoon in February, I received a knock at the door and a plop of a cardboard box from Fedex—one of Canada's more reliable mailing operators, though definitively not Canadian. The box notably mentioned my name directly related to my content-creating: “Producer/Host of The AnthroDish Podcast.” On opening, I saw a lineup of new diced onion and garlic products, dressed in large Canadian flag stickers. I gawked at the novelty of receiving surprise (and ripe) Canadian onion products, despite being a Canadian working in food media.

My space in the realm of food content is one that has been steeped in free trade ideology, though this has largely been an afterthought for me. While I explore Canadian food issues, I have a predominantly American audience (about 55%). And while the American audience has meant that PR and media opportunities are more American, Canadian content creation regulations and international shipping restrictions have also dictated my access to the American scene, and what I can make through social media apps (nothing, nada, zip).

Physical copies of upcoming cookbooks can’t be shipped, snack samples disappear at the border (peanut butter-to-go, probiotic honey, green juice powders, seed gardens!), and invitations to dine at restaurants go unconsumed. There is so much potential, but it is tangled in border restrictions and an ambivalent home country. These elements have long pulled an artistic (and now influencer) Canadian brain drain toward the assumed greener American pastures.

I’ve never been hellbent on influencing, but under the threats of a trade war, interest in home-grown creators has suddenly become paramount. During the week of the surprise onions, I also received invitations for events in Toronto to cover new brewery launches and cooking partnerships. I had interview pitches from Canadian farmers eager to share their experiences with the public and received PR boxes with loudly Canadian food products. It felt like no coincidence came as our economic trade agreements began to crumble.

This has gotten me thinking more about the uncertainties between our borders, and the legacy of NAFTA/UMSCA. I grew up in its promise, which maintained that stronger Canadian economies and opportunities could be built through the exchange of goods, services, and ideas. NAFTA was not a unilateral success story, but what awaits us with tariff wars feels worse. What does this all mean in terms of shifting scale, value, and meaning of traded foods away from the international?

NAFTA and sleeping with an elephant

In elementary school social studies, we explored NAFTA at length. This free trade agreement meant tariffs were eliminated, more movement of exports and imports, and reduced barriers between the borders. Canadians live in a resource-rich country, one built on the exploitation of oil, gas, minerals, forestry, or fisheries to make ourselves worthy of a global economy. My glittery pink gel pen recorded the pros (lower food costs, more jobs, more opportunities) and cons (fewer jobs, more poverty, increased power to corporations) of its implementation, it’s potential for our country. I didn’t know what half the words meant, but it felt like an agreement for a better future.

Yet as

Mustafa Koc

shares in his newsletter The Politics of Food, NAFTA opponents noted it “would result in an increase in reliance on imported foods, an over-reliance on a single market, and the tailoring of domestic output to continental demands instead of local ones.” These continental demands would see more pressures on small-scale farmers across all three countries (including American farmers). Where there was more opportunity for economic output, foreign investments, and consumer prices, domestic job losses were still noticed across all three countries. Mexico was hit the hardest. Farmers and industrial workers were squeezed out of the system, while multinational corporations thrived within a transition to globalized production systems.

The late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau warned of our relationship with the United States:

“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

Trudeau Senior acknowledged the journalistic doubt of whether Canada was capable of implementing policies, retorting that our policies tend to reflect and account for our proximity to America. This, in part, contributes to a national strategy—if we’re always walking on eggshells around an elephant, it’s more challenging to look at how many eggs we have left at home. In turn, those twitches and grunts have since erupted into the thrashes and screeches of a trade war with significant consequence to food affordability and availability on both sides of the border.

With continental demand as the focus, domestic food system function is difficult. How can it be consistent when it’s always reactive, rather than playing offense? How do we understand our food options with such interruptions and fluctuations around its cost? The idea of a national cuisine, a unified “Canadian food” has always been difficult to pinpoint, and I’m left wondering now if free trade has contributed to its complexities.

tenuous food borders

Our industrialized, free-trade food system has shaped how we understand borders, integration, and mobility—particularly when it comes to food. As food writer Corey Mintz noted for The Walrus in 2017, NAFTA contributed to a deeper shift in available foods, which changes how we understand our food ecosystems. Mintz explores this through the avocado: “a generation ago, we did not spread avocado on our morning toast. That we do now is thanks, in no small measure, to free trade.” Canadian breakfasts changing through NAFTA has also meant that the idea of seasonality in our food consumption has mostly disappeared. Canada’s seasonal tariffs on imported produce were waived, and the incentives to focus on local products largely evaporated.

Admittedly, I am a child of NAFTA. I’ve never known a US-Canadian relationship without it, nor has my grocery cart. What does it look like when our comfort and reliance on hyper-mobile food production are challenged? It tends to be how millennial understandings of the world go: We were promised a future, and 30 years later, it wasn’t set up to thrive.

Our foods are now embroiled in international production, with around 67% of Canadian vegetables and 36% of Canadian fruit supply imported from America. Canada Food Flows documents the flow of produce in global supply chains, visually showcasing the impact of a highly interconnected food supply system. Canadian-made produce hops between countries for various production phases, which andrea bennett traces for an essay in Hearty, “the majority of what sustains most of us in the winter in Canada comes from elsewhere,” such as drought-ridden California feeding B.C. through conventional and large-scale agricultural productions.

As Canadian winter hits, food gets imported from varying countries in line with their geographic production seasons for produce like salad greens, blueberries, or cranberries. In a Globe and Mail op-ed, food scholars Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser argue it feels a bit naïve in retrospect to have put all our domestic eggs in one basket: “The original free-trade agreement with the U.S., and its descendants NAFTA and USMCA, look more like a Faustian bargain in which we traded our country’s independence for the promise of a fresh, cheap cornucopia.”

The trade war places two very heavy stressors on our already compromised domestic food system: tariffs on our exports (beef, wheat, oil and gas, canola, aluminum, and other critical metals and minerals), and retaliatory tariffs risk skyrocketing food prices and reducing fresh produce in winter months. Bennett sees this as borrowing from the future without consideration of the “necessarily heavy consequences looming.” Those consequences of the future feel present now.

the crisis of political memory

The crumbling of NAFTA and UMSCA demands considerations that may feel like novel inconveniences for white North Americans. I have asked before why we feel owed eternal summers at the grocery store and have only more recently appreciated (through reading Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite) how the advent of refrigeration altered how we think about, access, and interact with foods.

That my grandmother remembers a time without refrigeration felt strange to me. How much we’ve forgotten with the advents of technologies. Tao Leigh Goffe looks at political memory as part of our current climate crisis in Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis:

“The cycle of forgetting is dangerous. It is easy to lose everything community-led struggles have fought for if we don’t study what it means to organize politically. Amnesia and hubris lead to reinventing movements that already exist. Once we view the struggle as intergenerational, there is hope because past blueprints of resistance show us the problems are not new.”

This political forgetting helps excavate a form of flattened nationalism that worries me. Calls to Canadian patriotism are on the rise with tariff threats: cafes changing their Americanos to “Canadianos” (which defeats the joke, no?), Mike Myers coming out of Shrek retirement for “elbows up” on SNL, Joe Canada returning with a similarly patriotic “I am Canadian” speech against Trump, adult entertainment clubs highlighting tariff-free Canadian lap dances, and Canadian cheese strings taking up advertising space at Yonge-Dundas to highlight “0% American cheese.” Absurdities! And yet.

Through this, there is a conflation of Canadian food economies as a form of food sovereignty, dismissing the long and clear history of food sovereignty as a global Indigenous movement. I am not one to display my nationalism while grocery (if anything, my frustrations around Canadian grocer price-fixing schemes are more visible). My heart doesn’t swell when I see a Canadian maple leaf biscuit. I think it is too simple to locate an identity on proud Canadianism when we have spent the last decade reconciling with the atrocities of Indigenous genocide on stolen land. To be proud means to shirk away from colonial oppositions of land relationships, to sidestep how we eroded Indigenous culture for resource exploitations.

In an upcoming AnthroDish interview with chefs Norma Listman and Saqib Keval of Masala y Maíz, Saqib noted how white supremacy is enmeshed in how we think about food agreements and access:

“White supremacy banks off of this idea of the other as always more exotic, and this idea that white Americans or Canadians don’t have their own culture, that the land they’re occupying didn’t have a culture before they colonized it. This idea of eating local is only a European concept, or to have an exotic meal, you need to buy specialty ingredients from somewhere in the Global South—that was the whole spice trade! And the fact that we’re still stuck in the same conversation is really troubling, isn’t it?”

Norma and Saqib’s work deeply focuses on decolonizing food—in the politics of a workspace, how ingredients are sourced, and how they appear on a plate. They discuss the relationship between Mexico and its northern neighbours, noting that the Global North always wants to consume and steal without meaningfully contributing to the culture or society or caring for its producers.

leaning into local

Returning to NAFTA, I am much less enamoured by its promises as an adult. The negative consequences are far-reaching for small-scale farmers, labourers, and the public in a free-trade agreement between three distinct countries. What troubles me most is the seemingly silly or light component I mentioned earlier: a lack of integrated internal support networks back home. It used to be funny that I could interview more Brooklyn-based chefs than Torontonians, but now it is a striking example of a foiled promise. As Fraser and Newman suggest, we’ve “painted our food system into a corner,” and returning to an integrated North American food system seems tenuous at best.

As Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, acknowledged, there are barriers between the provinces and territories which have made for difficult domestic exchanges. I see that as a clear first step to shift back toward more regional and local economies—not for a sense of dutiful patriotism, but rather to acknowledge the failures of free trade, the limitations of produce movement in climate crisis, and the importance of seasonality for flavour, knowledge, and community.

I do not imply that what happens next will be good for anyone—it will be hard and likely feel impossible for many. But the trade war has at least revealed the need to pursue more local and regional solutions to create sustainable food futures. It has also, in some ways, afforded us an opportunity to unpack the legacy of free trade, disentangle its tendrils of consequences, and how they unfurl across our food system.

At any rate, I’m glad for the free onions during a trade war.

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