Inspired by her father’s love for animals, when Riana Topan was a little girl, she decided to eat less meat. “I knew at age six I would want to become a vegetarian eventually,” she said.
But, it wasn’t until she moved away for school at 18, that she felt empowered to make more significant changes to her diet, and stopped eating meat altogether. “It took two years to just become vegetarian, and once I was vegetarian I started to learn more about the benefits of veganism,” she recalls.
Similarly, Topan’s partner, Alan Wong, decided to shift to a plant-based diet two years ago, a move that would close the gap between his day-to-day choices and his growing concern for animal welfare. “I started by significantly reducing my consumption of meat,” they say, noting that at first they’d only have meat when eating out with friends. “But after about a year I realized how terrible [meat production] is, and then I decided to make the full transition.”
While protecting animals and the environment are top of mind for the Ottawa couple, they are aware of the limitations of our food system. “I don’t want to cause unnecessary harm to animals,” Topan says. “But our food system has so many issues in it, [including] the way that workers are treated.”
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For this reason, they always try to purchase products that aren’t only vegan, but also locally produced. “Whenever we get the chance, we’d rather buy from a farmers’ market to meet the person who grew it, and make sure they’re getting paid properly,” Topan says. But doing this isn’t always possible. “It would be nice to be able to get everything that checks all our boxes,” she says. “There’s always a list of things to look for, and we just try to do our best.”
Like Topan and Wong, a growing number of ethically minded Canadians is adopting a plant-based diet. But in a country whose nourishment depends on an inequitable system, even more environmentally friendly alternatives involve exploitative practices that disproportionately affect people in the Global South.
From production to storage, packaging and distribution, Canada’s food system is heavily dependent on “Big Food,” says Belinda Li, director of innovation at Simon Fraser University’s Food Systems Lab, a research and innovation hub she helped co-found. This means that a handful of companies have more power than Canadian consumers, small-scale producers and agricultural workers.
“Food needs to be treated as a human right instead of a commodity,” Li says. “But this is tricky because of the power imbalance that exists. There is a very strong lobby from the corporate agriculture and food sectors, so they have a huge influence on policies.”
As a result, she finds it hard to believe that Canadian consumers can have the impact required to create a more equitable food system by simply embracing a plant-based diet.
“We’ve seen a lot of different organizations really pushing for plant-based [diets], which is great, but there are some other implications,” Li says. “You’re not going from really bad to good alternatives. You’re going from really, really bad ones to less bad [options] — but we have room to make it good.”
To sustain a balanced plant-based diet, many Canadians depend on staples such as beans, lentils and avocados, as well as processed foods like tofu, nut butters and soy milk. For many immigrants, these foods are also more culturally appropriate, as few diets are as animal-product-heavy as the Western diet.
However, although the environmental impacts of these foods are significantly lower than the impact of animal products, the issues caused by intensive agriculture such as deforestation, land degradation, and worker exploitation remain unaddressed.
When it comes to assessing the ethics of choosing plant-based foods grown in Canada, labour is a significant problem, as migrant farm workers from the Global South are consistently exploited by the large corporations running the food system.
In September, Tomoya Obokata, the UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, described the immigration programs that bring seasonal farm workers to Canada as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”
Temporary foreign workers represent about a quarter of all agriculture workers in Canada, and two thirds of these workers are racialized individuals from Mexico and Guatemala. The high number of farm workers from the Global South, Obokata writes, “attest[s] to deep-rooted racism and xenophobia entrenched in Canada’s immigration system.”
According to Chris Ramsaroop, an organizer with Justice For Migrant Workers and an assistant professor at the New College of the University of Toronto, migrant farm workers are consistently excluded from the national discourse. “Whether it’s the environmental lens, or people who are concerned about organic or local produce, or people who have a vegan diet, there seems to be this erasure of working conditions,” he says, emphasizing the role race and racial subordination continues to play in Canada’s food system.
When the pandemic took hold of the country in 2020, migrant farm workers in Canada experienced unemployment, isolation and death. Although the precarious conditions of racialized workers in meat processing plants quickly made the headlines, as the virus spread relentlessly in these workplaces, only 15 per cent of migrant workers are employed in activities related to animal production.
Temporary foreign workers not only lack the protections the rest of Canadians enjoy, such as employment insurance, the right to unionize, or the freedom to move anywhere in the country. They also live and work in inadequate conditions. As summers in Canada become hotter and smokier, farm workers are forced to breathe the harmful fumes of a planet on fire, while also living in cramped quarters with poor ventilation. Sometimes, in the absence of proper housing, workers sleep on the floor of decommissioned grain silos or chicken coops, as the Tyee reported in September.
Earlier this year, Ramsaroop wrote about the “vicious feedback loop” Canada’s agricultural industry creates for migrant workers. “The climate crisis and imperialism have made life in many countries in the Global South untenable. Migrants must come to Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to find work, and that work is often in sectors like agriculture, where industry practices contribute to the climate crisis that migrants are fleeing.”
In other words, the impact of the ethical choices vegans make to protect the well-being of animals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions are weakened by the conditions in which our food continues to be produced, processed and distributed.
“Vegans, or people who want to eat ethically, need to deal [with the fact] that whatever food they consider to be healthy, is not ethical from the conditions that exist in our agricultural industry,” Ramsaroop says. “We’ve got to be very careful about the construction of whiteness when it comes to food.”
The erasure of racialized folks in the food system isn’t limited to labour conditions. What happens in the countries of origin of farm workers is often disregarded as a necessary evil, bolstered by the uptake of plant-based diets in the Global North.
Due to Canada’s climate conditions, and the dynamics of a global food system, staples favoured by vegans such as nuts and fresh fruits, including cashews, pineapples and avocados, are imported from the Global South. But increased demand for these products is causing significant damage to the local ecosystems where they’re grown.
Avocado production in Mexico transforms over 20,000 hectares of forest into agricultural use each year (that’s approximately the size of Fundy National Park in New Brunswick), putting at risk the diversity of local plants and animals. If this trend continues, the environmental consequences could be catastrophic — as the wildfires in Maui evidence.
For Li, the food system needs to become gentler with both the environment and workers, but the dietary shifts of Canadians are unlikely to effect equitable change. “There are often messages about individuals taking action on their dietary choices, ‘voting with your dollars,’” she says. “[But] that puts way too much responsibility on the consumer. The foods that are more sustainable generally cost more. So for the people who can afford it, they should definitely do that. But for everyone else, it’s not a fair assumption.”
There is no question that if more people adopt a plant-based diet, the environmental impacts of industrialized farming would be reduced, but our reliance on an inequitable food system means it will continue to produce unequal results. “If people are more well-off, they have the capacity and the ability to work on sustainable choices,” Li says. “If you have no ability to do anything, you’re just going to have to pick whatever is cheapest, which might be the most environmentally damaging.”
Although switching to a plant-based diet does little to address the exploitative practices of a powerful industry, some argue that vegans could have a greater impact on the food system if they saw themselves as more than consumers.
“We need to think of ourselves as a democracy, and think of ourselves as residents, not as consumers,” Ramsaroop says. “Our relationship to food and workers shouldn’t be about an exchange, but about building a community.”
For the dietary choices of Canadians to become truly ethical and influence systemic change, taking action beyond voting with one’s fork is essential. A shift from a lifestyle to a political movement could potentially expand the influence of vegan activists beyond animal welfare. To do this, food justice groups of different stripes must come together and organize in support of a common cause: a more equitable food system.
“The idea of a global food system should be challenged and named here,” Ramsaroop says, pointing at the need to envision a new system that’s not based on profit motives. “Whether it’s environmentalism or veganism, we have to go beyond premises that support middle-class values, and address the issues and challenges working class communities are facing.”
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