47: The New Grocery Movement: Food, Power, and Policy
Episode 47 · October 19, 2026
Rebecca MacLeod, leader of the New Grocery Movement, argues that food insecurity in Canada is a policy decision — with roughly one in four people food insecure and income inequality as the main driver — and that fixing it requires both legislative change like a basic income and farmer supports, and bottom-up community organizing that rebuilds the local food infrastructure commercial grocery has eroded. She makes the case for public, not-for-profit grocery stores and neighbourhood food hubs as a genuine alternative that treats food less as a consumer transaction and more as a vehicle for community.
Overview
Rebecca MacLeod leads the New Grocery Movement, a national organization working to build alternatives to Canada's commercial grocery system. In this episode she sits down with Jesse Hirsh to make a central claim: food is political, and the way Canadians access it — or fail to — is the product of policy choices, not scarcity. She argues that the movement's ambition isn't to reform the existing grocery system but to construct a different one that centres community, dignity and the basic right to eat well.
MacLeod lays out the mechanics of the problem with stark numbers: roughly one in four people in Canada — about 10 million — are food insecure, even though the country produces enough calories to feed everyone. Because income inequality is the main driver, she argues that poverty, not production, is the issue, and that the barriers stack up long before affordability — whether the nearest grocery store exists, whether the farmers' market is open when you're not working, whether you can get there at all. Making the greenest grocery system imaginable means nothing, she says, if people can't walk through the door.
A second thread runs through the conversation on psychology and convenience. MacLeod pushes back gently on the idea that consumers simply want fast, easy food, pointing out that for many people convenience is the only option given structural constraints — but she also names something harder: community is genuinely inconvenient, requiring time, energy and showing up for people you don't always agree with. She describes food literacy as the lowest-hanging fruit of systems change, where even one tomato grown on a balcony can shift how someone sees a supermarket shelf.
Listeners come away with a concrete picture of what could come next: universal or guaranteed basic income, a just transition for farmers squeezed between consolidated input suppliers and consolidated retailers, and public grocery stores and neighbourhood food hubs that keep prices down, pay workers fairly and give communities space to grow, cook and share food beyond the consumer transaction. In a sector where anger about grocery prices now crosses political lines, MacLeod's argument matters because it reframes that frustration as a shared opening — and insists the change is within reach, not something to leave to the next generation.
Key themes
- Food insecurity
- Food politics
- Public grocery stores
- Food hubs
- Basic income
- Farmer transition