254: The Hidden Architecture of Food Security
Designing Food Power — Part II
Labour, Logistics, and Coordination
If food is infrastructure, then labour, logistics, and coordination are its load-bearing beams. Food systems do not fail because we lack food. They fail because we cannot hold, move, staff, and redirect food reliably.
We currently produce abundance, then design systems that make that abundance unusable. We throw food away because the system can’t hold it!
Canada wastes an extraordinary amount of food. Nearly 60 percent of all food produced in Canada is lost or wasted each year, amounting to roughly 35 million tons annually.
This is not because Canadians are uniquely careless. It is because the system has nowhere stable to put food that falls outside narrow commercial windows.
Food is discarded because:
processing capacity is centralized and inflexible
storage is private, expensive, and optimized for throughput rather than resilience
coordination between surplus and need is weak or absent
When demand shifts or logistics stall, food rots.
A domestic food system designed as infrastructure would treat storage, processing, and redistribution as public capacity, not optional overhead. Waste at this scale is a logistical failure disguised as inevitability.
Nowhere is the logistics failure clearer than on the Canadian Prairies.
Prairie farmers routinely produce strong harvests and then discover that rail access is the binding constraint. Grain sits on farms because rail service is unreliable, unpredictable, and outside farmers’ control. When rail falters, local prices collapse even as global demand persists.
This has happened repeatedly: the 2013–14 grain backlog, recurring service shortfalls, and the exposure of fragile national corridors during the 2021 British Columbia floods.
Farmers are told this is a market problem when instead it is a coordination failure in critical infrastructure.
Railways are optimized for shareholder returns, not food security. They move what is most profitable, not what is most urgent. Domestic food has no guaranteed priority because no institution exists to assign it one.
A food system that treats logistics as infrastructure would:
guarantee baseline transport access for domestic food
diversify routes and modes instead of relying on single corridors
treat storage and movement as public resilience assets
Food spoils because the system is brittle.
We Need More Farmers
Canada has a capacity problem.
The average farmer is approaching retirement. Entry barriers like land prices, capital costs, and income volatility make farming inaccessible to most people who might otherwise do the work. As a consequence, consolidation continues.
The result is fewer farmers managing larger operations under greater stress.
A resilient domestic food system would move in the opposite direction:
more farmers, not fewer
geographically distributed production
diversified operations that reduce single-point failures
This kind of systems engineering recognizes that redundancy is strength.
But people do not enter professions defined by precarity. You cannot ask farmers to shoulder climate risk, market risk, and moral responsibility simultaneously and expect the system to replenish itself.
Similarly Canada’s dependence on migrant agricultural labour reveals the labour contradiction at the heart of the system.
Tens of thousands of workers arrive each year to harvest, process, and pack food. Their labour is essential. Their legal and economic position is precarious by design: tied to employers, exposed to unsafe conditions, and excluded from long-term security.
This system exists because food labour is expected to be cheap, even when that cheapness is achieved through vulnerability rather than wages.
The contradiction is stark:
food work is essential
food workers are treated as disposable
A domestic food system designed as infrastructure would reverse this logic. It would:
guarantee baseline wages for domestic food production
stabilize employment so work is predictable and dignified
reduce dependence on precarity as a labour strategy
Migrant labour is a symptom of a larger problem: we dangerously undervalue how our food is produced and who produces it.
Coordination Is the Missing Institution
Each of these failures, whether waste, rail bottlenecks, or labour shortages, shares a common root.
No one is responsible for the system as a system.
Retailers optimize shelves. Railways optimize routes. Farms optimize survival. Governments intervene episodically, usually after legitimacy has already been damaged.
Markets coordinate prices. They do not coordinate continuity.
A resilient food system requires institutions whose sole job is to see the whole:
where food is
where it needs to go
where stress is accumulating
where capacity must be reinforced
System stewardship not central planning. Every functioning infrastructure has it.
Food is the anomaly.
At this point, a familiar suspicion often arises. If food is treated as infrastructure, does that mean nationalized farms? Central planning? Bureaucrats deciding what gets grown?
No.
This proposal does not require the state to own farms, direct production, or replace entrepreneurial judgment. Farmers remain independent producers. Entrepreneurs continue to innovate, specialize, and compete—especially in export markets, where those dynamics are essential.
The distinction is simple but critical: supporting capacity is not the same as owning production.
Every essential system already works this way. The state does not eliminate medical entrepreneurship by guaranteeing hospitals stay staffed. It does not suppress innovation by maintaining roads. It absorbs baseline risk so that skilled actors can operate without collapse.
A domestic food system designed as infrastructure does the same. It ensures that:
baseline labour costs are covered so producers are not destroyed by volatility
logistics and storage exist even when margins are thin
coordination mechanisms prevent system-wide failure
Within that foundation, entrepreneurship becomes more viable, not less. When survival is no longer at stake, experimentation becomes possible. When failure is not fatal, innovation accelerates. When continuity is guaranteed, producers can plan beyond the next season.
Rather than replacing markets this represents the precondition for functional ones.
What we have now is not freedom, but forced risk-taking without protection and entrepreneurship with all the downside and little of the upside.
Designing food power means building a system where those who do the essential work of feeding the country are secure enough to be entrepreneurial, rather than precarious enough to be expendable.
This is why food insecurity is not solved by cheaper food. Export competitiveness is not solved by squeezing producers.
Both are solved by designing capacity where systems actually break.
Stabilize labour, and people stay. Build redundant logistics, and food moves. Coordinate flows, and waste shrinks.
Do these things, and free food stops sounding radical. Profitable food stops being extractive. Authority returns, not through coercion, but through competence.
Coming Up in Part III
If labour, logistics, and coordination form the backbone of food security, then knowledge is the nervous system.
In Part III, The Intelligence Layer of Food Power, we will explore how domestic food systems become engines of learning, why agricultural data must be treated as public infrastructure, and how export competitiveness improves when intelligence circulates rather than being enclosed.
The future of food power will not be decided by who grows the most. It will be decided by who learns the fastest, shares their knowledge, and leads through action.
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