The Food System's Willful Ignorance: Why the Most Important Ideas Stay Hidden

There is a particular kind of institutional blindness that is not accidental. It is produced — through the careful management of who gets invited into policy rooms, whose research gets funded, whose discomfort gets treated as useful signal rather than inconvenient noise. In the agri-food sector, this pattern has calcified into something close to doctrine: the people most likely to identify structural failures are the least likely to be consulted about fixing them. The result is not merely a gap in representation. It is a gap in knowledge — and in a sector facing compounding crises of climate, labour, nutrition, and democratic legitimacy, that gap has consequences.

Elaine Power, a food scholar and former dietitian whose career has moved fluidly across nutrition science, feminist political economy, and food systems research, represents exactly the kind of thinker the sector tends to keep at arm's length. Her work does not flatter the dominant model. It names the agro-industrial food system as structurally broken — not underperforming, not in need of optimization, but organized around values that are fundamentally misaligned with human and ecological health. That kind of analysis tends to make institutional actors nervous, which is precisely why it belongs at the centre of any serious policy conversation rather than on its margins.

One of the more clarifying moments in Power's conversation with The Future Herd involves the word "agri-food" itself — a term so normalized in Canadian policy discourse that its ideological freight has become nearly invisible. Host Jesse Hirsh observed that the compound word contains an internal political tension: the "agri" side tends to represent corporate and industrial interests, while the "food" side carries connotations of culture, community, pleasure, and nourishment. Power's response was characteristically careful but pointed. She noted that the corporate dimension of the agri-food system operates by the logic of capitalism, which "turns things of value upside down" — taking cheap inputs and processing them into what she, following food policy scholar Tim Lang's intellectual tradition, calls pseudo-foods: products engineered for profitability rather than nourishment. The naming convention, in other words, performs a kind of ideological laundering. It bundles together interests that are often in direct conflict and presents them as a coherent sector with shared goals. Accepting the frame uncritically means accepting the power arrangement embedded in it.

This matters for policy because language shapes who counts as a legitimate voice. If "agri-food" is understood primarily through its agri dimension — through the priorities of large producers, input suppliers, processors, and retailers — then food scholars, public health researchers, labour advocates, and community food organizations are perpetually guests in someone else's conversation. They are consulted when it is convenient and sidelined when their analysis points toward conclusions that would require redistributing power or profit. Power's observation that the sector consistently fails to include the data, voices, or analytical frameworks necessary to understand itself is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a description of how policy gets made — and why it so often fails to address the problems it claims to be solving.

The question of invisible labour illustrates this failure with particular clarity. Power identifies a continuum of undervalued and unrecognized work that runs through the entire food system: temporary foreign workers performing backbreaking agricultural labour under conditions that disrupt families and foreclose basic rights; supermarket workers briefly celebrated as heroes during the pandemic and promptly returned to minimum wages and broken shift schedules once the acute emergency passed; and domestic cooks — disproportionately women — whose daily work of feeding households has been systematically devalued, first by a culture that treated the kitchen as a site of oppression rather than skill, and then by an agro-industrial complex that was happy to commodify that devaluation through convenience foods. Each of these labour categories is racialized and gendered in overlapping ways. Each is structurally excluded from the policy conversations that determine the conditions under which that labour is performed. And each represents a point at which the food system extracts value while refusing to acknowledge the human cost of doing so.

Power makes a further argument that deserves to be taken seriously in policy terms: that revaluing food — real food, and the labour that produces and prepares it — would be genuinely transformative, not merely at the margins. This is not a sentimental claim about farmers' markets or slow food. It is a structural argument about where value actually resides in the food system and how radically the current arrangement has distorted that accounting. When the labour of a migrant farmworker is priced so low that the produce they harvest appears affordable at the supermarket, what has actually happened is a subsidy — a transfer of human welfare into the price system in a way that benefits processors, retailers, and consumers while externalizing the cost onto workers who have no political voice in the system they sustain. Acknowledging this is not anti-agriculture. It is what a serious analysis of the agriculture sector actually requires.

The challenge for policy is that acknowledging it demands including in the process people who have every incentive to name it clearly and every reason to expect that doing so will be unwelcome. Power's students ask her how she stays hopeful. She watches robins. She photographs crocuses. She continues, nonetheless, to teach and to write and to accept invitations onto podcasts that describe her ideas as potentially dangerous to the status quo. That combination — clear-eyed about structural failure, unwilling to stop working — is precisely the disposition that policy processes need to cultivate, not merely tolerate.

The agri-food sector in Canada is facing a period of genuine uncertainty: trade disruption, climate pressure, shifting consumer expectations, and a labour system built on exploitation that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain or ignore. The instinct, in moments like this, is often to close ranks — to convene the usual experts, consult the established stakeholders, and produce recommendations that are legible to the institutions that commissioned them. That instinct is understandable and almost certainly wrong. The ideas that are most likely to produce durable, equitable, and effective food policy are precisely the ones that have been systematically excluded from the conversation. Including critics is not a gesture toward diversity. It is a condition of being able to think clearly about the problem at hand.