invisible labour, invisible food costs

on moral beauty and invisibility in food systems

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

While the Loblaw’s May 2024 boycott feels an entire world away from the September’s crowded rush of back-to-school grocery hauls, there’s been a steady, if quiet, hum of anger maintained around food costs. Economists and talking head pundits have largely proclaimed any inflation we dealt with as “over” – despite the Bank of Canada’s economic uncertainties connecting with mortgage renewals, population dynamics, international conflicts, and wildfires. The implication in that is the recession, or cost of living struggles should be “over,” too. But for plethora reasons, the surge in food and living costs persist through the 2020s, at higher rates than pre-pandemic.

With this economic background, there’s been interesting and nuanced work unravelling what goes into our food costs. TikToker m4ggs demonstrated that Loblaws grocery company put their prices in flashy weight-per-pound signs, while the checkout costs are measured per kilogram (there’s a big difference!). A recent study by University of Guelph food researchers argues that the very foundation of how we report and consider food costs in Canada is not as scientifically rigorous as it could be. Alongside this, reporters and investigative journalists in the United States and Canada are drawing attention to the moral questions of migrant labour work and their role in the food systems.

@m4ggsWhy do you have to be such a turd burger, Galen? #LoblawsIsOutOfControl #consumerdeception #Canada #Loblaws (It's the closest store to my house. I avoid whenever possible) #loblawsboycott

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Together, these have made me pause in my own understandings of Canada’s food system, and what contributes to food cost. We have an outraged public that is struggling to manage grocery bills or rent, and wages are not matching cost-of-living. But we also have a temporary foreign workers program in Canada that the United Nations has lambasted as form of modern slavery — one that keeps food costs lower due to the neglect (financially, physically, mentally) of these very necessary migrant workers. So what do we really know about food costs, and what are we willing to do about it?

moral ugliness, moral beauty

A critical element across the discussions around labour in food systems is that of the morally ugly actions that transcend through hierarchies – racism, xenophobia, child labour, violence, and unsafe working conditions to glean profits.

In a recent AnthroDish interview with Alice Driver, she speaks on her new book, Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company, noting the important conflicting narratives arising around immigrants’ value in America:

The [meatpacking] labour force is undocumented people, children, and imprisoned people. They’re relying on vulnerable populations. At a time in the United States when we’ve heard rhetoric about the border crisis, and how migrants are pouring across the border – they are here, and they are working for companies like Tyson, and they are upholding our food system… how can we honour these workers who are doing the most dangerous job, how can we offer them a way to work legally, because we clearly are relying on their labour.

Alice situates migrant workers fighting against Tyson as an act of moral beauty. This stems from the concept writer C.E. Morgan put forward in a 2016 interview, where she understands it as

“what is the good and just – terms perhaps defined by their opposite: evil… Evil acts reduce the other to an object, a being to its component parts, and obliterate subjectivity. Evil’s breeding ground is a lack of empathy. So I locate moral beauty in an other-regarding ethic. Or perhaps it’s better to say it’s not located anywhere, because it’s not a static entity. It’s love, and love is not a feeling but an action.”

Food costs, as understood in Driver’s writing, reflect decades of exploitation. Chicken nugget costs can only be maintained if the workers are stripped of their humanity, working at impossible and dangerous speeds under hyper-surveillance.

canada’s temporary foreign workers as modern slavery

These contrasting dualities of needing migrant labour and not valuing or wanting immigration exist in Canada, too, though they are less explicitly drawn together. This summer saw news reports questioning the Liberal government and their lax immigration policy. Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s population grew faster in 2023 than it has any time since 1957, reaching over 40 million as of January 1, 2024.

Population growth by 96.7% is the result of immigration, which unfortunately gets mired by public and racist accusations around immigration’s role in housing affordability. Absent in this is questioning why we think it’s acceptable to let in record-breaking numbers of people when we cannot manage to give them dignified living conditions or food. Why is it acceptable to promise a better life, when a better life is untenable here? We trick them into dreams, when we only promise a part-time job at Tim Hortons. This is the question no politician wants to answer.

Digging into the immigration numbers further yields more nuance – many who make up this surge in population are categorized under temporary foreign workers permits. This program is meant to be one of last resort, where employers fill jobs “for which qualified Canadians are not available.” Yet the number of positions approved to be filled by temporary foreign workers nearly doubled between 2016 and 2023. Farm work positions saw a 124% increase, and food counter attendants, kitchen helpers, and related support occupations saw a staggering 4,109% increase from 2016 to 2023, respectfully. 

Those who come to Canada on the temporary foreign worker program get stuck in the unliveable. In a 2023 summer visit to Canada, the UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, voiced deep disturbance about “the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared with him by migrant workers,” as Ghada Alsharif reports. Obokata’s report a year later provides more damning language, noting that “despite their nominally temporary nature, the demand for labour met by the migration programs is permanent, as evinced by the growing numbers of people entering Canada through these programs.”

The UN reports demonstrate the tense nature of finding solutions to this moral ugliness, this ongoing devaluation of human life and labour. While they acknowledge that structural precarity faced by temporary foreign workers could be reduced with explicit pathways towards permanent residency, they also acknowledge that reducing the number of temporary residents does nothing to change the impossible circumstances faced by those who have already been accepted through the program.  

Canada and America are places dependent upon immigration to make food systems “work” — in that they work for next to nothing, in precarious positions, to meet the absurd demands of industrial food production. In turn, food goes to rot in our grocery stores as their CEOs hide as much of their profit extraction as possible.

hidden food costs and political power

Food researchers Drs. Brian Pentz, Phillip Loring, Ryan Katz-Rosene, and their team at University of Guelph point out that in Canada, our public understanding of food cost is rooted in reports known to academics as ‘grey literature.’ These are reports that do not have to undergo clear processes of review, such as StatsCan reports, Northern Food Basket reports, or Canada Food Price reports When there is no accountability for the reporter filing the information, what happens? Rigour lacks, and evidence becomes a “nice to have” for someone trying to meet their billable hours.

Rigour means something across the food system, but not necessarily what constitutes a thing of moral beauty. In Driver’s book, rigour looks like decades of intense, intentional, and harmful politics that transcend party lines and maintain state-wide poverty for racialized communities. Driver identifies the Clintons using prison labour to staff their Little Rock residence through the 1980s and 1990s, with Hillary explaining it as “a longstanding tradition, which kept costs down.” Bill Clinton was known during his time as governor of Arkansas as the ‘chicken man’ – denoting his “close relationship with Donald Tyson, the former head of Tyson Foods who was a driving political force during Clinton’s time in Little Rock.”

Driver explores how Big Agriculture maintains shockingly high political power, with both Democrats (Bill Clinton, Joe Biden) and Republicans (Donald Trump) reducing regulations and inspection requirements while pushing for higher speeds on slaughter lines. This, coupled with pressures for those facing prison to look to alternatives, such as recovery programs that enforce employment at Tyson or other meatpacking plants, “where they are paid little or nothing.” 

Rigour in Canada takes a similarly insidious shape around the cost of food. Reports that focus on external factors, as Pentz and the University of Guelph team identified, do not always have all the factors necessary for a scientifically rigorous argument. This includes lacking evidence (such as how a particular drought directly affected production costs for oats) or failing to connect the dots between a cause and an effect on food prices.

Market factors (like currency and exchange rates, or supply chain demands) are the default explanation for food cost increases in Canada. Short-term trends are emphasized (the war in Ukraine, or COVID-19) year-to-year, with little to no evidence. Vague weather events and climate change glitter the reports, but  no clear explanations are offered that explicitly identify how climate change or federal carbon tax policies will affect food costs (and do).

Important here, too, is the large variation in Canada’s grocery giants (Metro, Sobeys/Empire, Loblaws, Walmart, and Costco) financial accountability, despite recent pressing from the Canadian Bureau of Competition. Public disclosures of food-specific profits are not disclosed by many of the major grocers in Canada. Instead, they sit on claims of their profits being more from an extension of beauty and pharmaceutical products (an interesting convenience). Despite grocer CEOs providing federal testimonies last fall, the Canadian Bureau of Competition makes an important note of what was (and wasn’t) discussed:

“The Bureau can say that the level of cooperation varied significantly [among grocers] and was not fulsome. In many instances, the Bureau was not able to obtain complete and precise financial data, despite its repeated requests.”  

While Canada’s grocery giants’ profits are described as “modest but meaningful,” the Bureau contextualizes that with a reminder that modest profits still add up: “a one percentage point increase in gross margins at grocery stores could add over $1 billion to Canadians’ food bills each year.” Food cost reports have opaque understandings of the costs affecting the growth, production, distribution, commodification, and profits relating to food in Canada, yet known corruption schemes are historically overlooked.  A 2018 Canada Food Price Report by Charlebois dismissed the idea of grocers participating in price fixing schemes, noting:

To suggest that food prices are inflated in Canada is somewhat farfetched, especially the idea, as some believe, that Canadian consumers are paying too much for bread due to price-fixing schemes. The evidence for this claim is simply not apparent. At the centre of this investigation is a much deeper problem that lies in the food supply chain.

Pentz and his team identify that the Canada Food Price Reports in 2019 and 2020 “did acknowledge the scandal” but not their own previous dismissal – or their prior emphasis on supply chain dynamics despite insufficient evidence on this. Subsequent reports maintain the status quo, showing no increased attention to corporate malpractice driving costs.

what do we know of food cost and labour?

To say “oops” is to put it mildly – these are glaring oversights by the powers that be when it comes to the food system and costs. We’re made to feel as though it is all our fault for not being able to afford food, inciting heated debates about whether we should shop at a particular grocery store. This pits people against each other: urban against rural, citizen against foreign worker, shopper again farmer,  southern Canadian against northern, remote, fly-in Indigenous communities that have little choice and skyrocketing food costs.

This is moral ugliness – an evil that strips the humanity and subjectivity of those growing food and those trying to access it. The lack of empathy seen by the federal, agri-business, and grocery giants amidst this is shortsighted. Extraction of resources purely for commodification, without resilient, dynamic approaches to adapt our food growing and production for the instability that climate change brings is only going to further the exploitation of migrant workers.

While I don’t have any answers about how to lower food costs to make them affordable for average households, bringing these elements together adds important considerations for me about what I understand as “affordable.” When we think of food cost, what are we willing to give up? If the food reports that drive our understanding of cost hide profiteering and climate change, surely, we can push for ways to expose this and subsidize local farming efforts, or make more dignified conditions for temporary foreign workers. How do we arrive somewhere where those who tend to the land and grow the food are valued in full?

Thank you for reading! You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out AnthroDish podcast on iTunes and Spotify. If you enjoyed this and would like to support my work, please consider becoming a subscriber:

This newsletter covers issues around food, health, identity, and environment, with topics like making sense of girl dinner, if groceries should be considered a splurge, and how Mormon mommies have dominated the health space on Instagram. It is updated biweekly, and includes two additional posts for paid subscribers (a monthly interview transcript from popular podcast episodes, and a recommendation round-up of shows, books, and podcasts).

AnthroDish News:

I was interviewed by Harness Magazine on the time in my twenties where I was single parenting my daughter and pursuing my PhD, which you can read here.

Season 9 of the podcast is officially out! The first interview is with Alice Driver (mentioned throughout this essay), and new episodes come out on Tuesdays. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — or YouTube, stay tuned! That’s a weird thing to say. I’m particularly proud of this forthcoming season and how the conversations all connect despite being far-ranging in topic.

Paid Subscriber News:

This month’s paid subscriber interview is with Roman archaeologist Farrell Monaco, who uses experimental methods to recreate the breads and cheeses of ancient Rome! Out on September 15th.