247: Attention, Appetite, and Power

November 22, 2025

A Country That Doesn’t Understand Its Food Has No Future

Food is the material foundation of a society, yet we behave as if it were just another consumer choice, another line item, another sector. We talk endlessly about food prices, grocery cart frustrations, and the cost of living, but we rarely discuss the system that makes food possible in the first place. We have opinions about inflation; we rarely have knowledge about agriculture.

The paradox is almost embarrassing: everyone eats, but almost no one understands the food system that keeps this country alive.

This illiteracy is not benign. It is a strategic vulnerability. When a population doesn’t understand where its food comes from, who produces it, how climate shapes it, how trade sustains it, or how policy can secure it, that population becomes easy to manipulate. It becomes dependent on narratives pushed by retailers, lobbyists, or foreign intermediaries. It becomes reactive rather than participatory.

And in the geopolitical moment we’re entering—with the United States destabilizing, supply chains tightening, and climate extremes accelerating—food literacy is not a hobby. It is a national security imperative.

Food sovereignty is the sovereignty we can actually touch. It is also the one we consistently neglect.

Canada’s leadership frequently invokes sovereignty in the abstract—digital, industrial, cultural—while ignoring the most basic form: the ability to grow, distribute, and eat food without depending on actors who do not share our interests. The vast majority of Canadians have no idea what is grown domestically versus imported, which seasons shape what’s available, or why countries like Chile are essential to our seed supply. Chile’s opposite growing season is the quiet mechanism that allows Canadian agriculture to flourish.

When people don’t know these things, they cannot meaningfully participate in decisions about the future. They cannot assess risk. They cannot imagine alternatives. They become spectators to the systems that feed them.

But the most significant loss is cultural. We have severed the relationship between people and the land, between eaters and growers, between seasons and diets. We imagine food as something that appears on shelves through logistical magic, rather than something alive and contingent. This is why our political debates about food feel inert: they are disconnected from the experience of producing food itself.

If there is one domain where participation matters—not symbolically but structurally—it is food. Gardening, community food co-ops, shared kitchens, fermentation collectives, seed libraries, literacy programs, and local agriculture networks are not lifestyle accessories. They are the beginnings of a different political system. They are the foundation for sovereignty that isn’t rhetorical but embodied.

This is the paradox at the heart of food policy: meaningful participation would transform the system so deeply that it would no longer resemble what we have today. Policy would stop being a conversation for experts and start being a collective practice. The more people engage, the more power shifts away from retailers and intermediaries and toward communities and producers. The food system becomes legible and governable only when it becomes shared.

Food insecurity surrounds us even when we personally feel insulated from it. That is the reality Canadians refuse to internalize. Hunger isn’t a distant problem. It’s a structural feature of a system designed for profit rather than nutrition. And yet there is no physical or economic reason why every person in this country should not have healthy, fresh, and delicious food.

The barrier is political imagination, not agricultural capacity.

A food-literate society is a sovereign society. A population that understands seasons, soils, seeds, climate, and supply chains is not easily captured by corporate narratives or foreign influence. It is not dependent on performative policy debates. It is capable of building resilient systems because it understands how those systems work.

If we wants a future that isn’t defined by vulnerability to external shocks, our food system provides the framework. Not as a policy file, not as a cost crisis, but as a collective practice that rebuilds autonomy from the ground up.

Food is the foundation. Everything else rests on it.