My mother was born in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, on the drought-ravaged Prairies.

Like most families in rural Saskatchewan at the time, my mother’s family lived off the land, whatever it would yield. Other than the crabapples, saskatoon berries and gooseberries that grew on trees and bushes, there was little fruit to be harvested. If it was picked, it was preserved to help get the family through the harsh Prairie winter.

By the time my mother was raising a family of her own, drought was long behind her and there was greater abundance at the Lucky Dollar grocery store. But, for the most part, we lived off the land.

Our garden was the size of a football field. In it, the tomatoes that ripened on the vine were destined for a laborious canning process, with dozens of steaming, sterilized jars waiting to be filled. The peas and beans found their way into one of two deep freezes. The potatoes, carrots, beets and other root vegetables ended up in the root cellar.

The cows that grazed among the hills of our ranch would end up on the market, with one divided among family members. The rainbow trout swimming in our dam would end up in the fish fry.

We knew where our food came from. And the women of the household were tasked with the job of keeping a family of 11—and more at harvest time—fed daily. I’ve been peeling potatoes since I was five years old. I’ve always loved being in the kitchen. It is the heart and soul of the household.

Over time, of course, packaged foods found their way onto our pantry shelves (it was the 1970s, after all) and technology (dishwashers, the microwave!) evolved to make our lives in the kitchen easier.

This story is about food. It’s also a story about history. About agriculture and aquaculture. About the changing nature of food and how we process it. About the changing technologies that allow us to manipulate our food. About the gendered nature of food preparation. 

And it’s a story about income inequality and food insecurity. Because we were a farming family, we were lucky to have an abundance of fresh, quality food. Its presence helped us forget that we struggled to make ends meet.

When we try to imagine the future of food, all of these factors must go into the mix. Including how our governments organize our food and water supply systems. 

Food exposes the complex dynamics between the social, socio-economics, the environment, the nature of work, and politics. And because food is what each and every one of us needs in order to survive, the future of food is something we share in common.

Food is about systems

Think about how central food is to communal gatherings, and what that reveals about our food systems. 

Mom (typically) goes to the grocery store to purchase the fixings and cooks the Thanksgiving turkey, the mashed potatoes, the gravy and stuffing. 

Aunt Karen makes the orange-cranberry sauce—and it’s always better than the canned version.

Aunt Shirley has the family recipe for turnip puff, which, it turns out, traces back to the original Betty Crocker recipe of the 1950s. That’s right: there’s only one turnip puff recipe! 

The gathering is focused on a meal, but the action, and the social value, is what happens in the kitchen. It’s a collective effort, with (mostly) women bustling in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, carrying out tasks that are steeped in tradition. We say food brings us together, but it’s really the people who made the food who should get the credit.

The makers of the food are part of the system. As is the market that we turn to in order to get the food on the table.

Since most Canadians live in cities now, relying on the family farm for provisions isn’t an option. It’s off to the supermarket, owned by mega-corporations like Loblaws, where the primary goal is to squeeze enough profits to please the shareholders. 

That impacts the quality of our food, the price, and food insecurity. There’s a reason why food banks do a hamper drive at Thanksgiving—many people can’t afford the turkey dinner.

In March 2023, there were more than 1.9 million trips to food banks in Canada. Food bank usage increased by 78.5 per cent between March 2019 and March 2023. Canada is one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, but food insecurity is baked into our food system.

Food banks were created in the 1980s as a stop-gap measure. They were never supposed to be permanent. But Canadians have grown complacent; it feels like they are here to stay.

For those who are fortunate enough to host the Thanksgiving feast, the time-worn traditions have become a part of the settler value system, but those traditions—and those values—can also change over time. 

The turkey might still be the star on many Canadians’ dinner tables, but the vegans amongst us are growing in number and influence. Our tables are making room for tofurky, vegan shepherd’s pie, a dairy-free green bean casserole, gluten-free stuffing.

Twenty years ago, it was much harder, and rarer, to be a vegan. But the market has responded to the growing call for a vegan lifestyle, and the aisles in our grocery stores reflect a greater diversity of foods—including international cuisines that reflect the increasing diversity of our population.

Food is social, but food systems are economic in nature, which makes them dynamic, responsive to supply and demand. As consumers, we have the power to shape and reshape the system.

According to Statistics Canada, 7.6 per cent of Canadians were vegetarian and 4.6 per cent were vegan in 2020. Younger Canadians, those aged 18-29, are most likely to be vegetarian or vegan, followed by those who are 30-39. They’re driving market and menu changes.

Between 2017 and 2021, plant-based, ready-made meal sales in Canada grew by 441.8 per cent, on a compound annual basis.

There were 2,233 vegan and vegetarian restaurants in Ontario in 2020—more than any other province, though Victoria had the most vegan restaurants per population.

Since 2016, internet searches for vegan and plant-based options have grown by 113 per cent. This isn’t my mother’s food system. We’ve changed. And we’ll continue to change.

That’s the thing about food: it’s adaptable—and capable of surprise. I mean, who ever thought avocado toast would have its moment? Or cauliflower?

Monster meat?

Food is a basic necessity, but through the years, it’s also been subject to fads.

With the advent of refrigeration, dishes like jello salad with pineapples and maraschino cherries suspended within it became a good hostess staple.

In the 1950s, the backyard barbecue became the star dinner party. During the week, housewives made good use of the new invention of canned creamed soups in their casserole recipes. 

In the 1960s, Julia Child brought the concept of french cooking into American households, thanks to the invention of the TV. That expanded our horizons and elevated home cooks’ expectations.

In the 1970s, dinner parties went glamorous, with flambees and fondues.

In the 1980s, everyone gathered around the microwave to ‘nuke’ dinner in minutes, creating a market for ready-made meals that saved “nine-to-five” working women time in the kitchen. At the same time, there was a wholesome food movement. Think: granola, whole wheat bread instead of white, margarine instead of butter (“I can’t believe it’s not butter”).

In the 1990s, magazines like Gourmet and Bon Appetit encouraged home cooks to create restaurant-worthy creations for their dinner parties. Guests expected elevated dishes and the pressure for home cooks was on—it’s not a coincidence that food processors were a hot commodity in the 1990s. Suddenly home cooks could puree a spanish gazpacho within seconds.

With each new technological innovation came a new ease of cooking coupled with heightened expectations of the quality of food on the dining table. Food had to be delicious, nutritious, and so appealing that every guest would want the recipe.

The 2000s have ushered in smoothies for breakfast, largely thanks to the popularity of the Vitamix. YouTube videos readily show you how to make pizza from scratch, homemade bread, Indian food. There’s the 100-mile diet and the farm-to-fork movement. 

Fast forward to 2025, and we’re not exactly living the Jetsons lifestyle, but food is starting to feel futuristic. Enter a new menu item: “cultivated” meats produced from animal cells.

The Good Food Institute describes cultivated meats as meat that is “made of the same cell types that can be arranged in the same or similar structure as animal tissues, thus replicating the sensory and nutritional profiles of conventional meat.

“The manufacturing process begins with acquiring and banking stem cells from an animal. These cells are then grown in bioreactors (known colloquially as cultivators) at high densities and volumes. Similar to what happens inside an animal’s body, the cells are fed an oxygen-rich cell culture medium made up of basic nutrients such as amino acids, glucose, vitamins, and inorganic salts, and supplemented with growth factors and other proteins.” 

The hope is that widespread use of cultivated meat will help limit greenhouse gas emissions and land use for meat production. The promise is that resolute meat eaters who eschew tofu burgers will be more likely to shift their diet if the fake meat looks and tastes like real meat.

In essence, science has facilitated new technology that is being touted as one of the tools in the climate change adaptation toolkit. Whether there’s a market for it remains to be seen, but other questions remain, among them: how will governments regulate this new food industry, will it alleviate animal suffering and exploitation, and will the market be financially accessible or simply the domain of the rich while the rest of us eat beans (which are delicious, by the way)?

Food is about systems, and how we structure the system of the future matters.

From agrarian society to …?

Canada—Saskatchewan, in particular—was once considered the “breadbasket to the world”. The province’s grain production fed the global market in the age of imperialism and rising capitalism. Globalization and deregulation helped to mute that dominance. 

The 1980s drought didn’t help. Many family farms, including my own, buckled under the pressure. I was a young reporter at the now-defunct Moose Jaw Times Herald in the late 1980s, reporting on the impact that the drought had on farming, on farmers’ family life, and on the communities that depended on that market.

The drought was so bad that alkaline salt from dried-up lake beds caused fires along power lines and children suffered terrible nose bleeds and allergic reactions due to the mix of salt and dust. 

It feels like a lifetime ago, but the memory of those parched fields—which a colleague at the Times Herald once described as “like living on the surface of the moon”—remains imprinted in my mind; especially as I read The Tyee’s important essay, “Alberta’s brutal water reckoning”, which reminds readers that two scientists, in particular, warned 20 years ago that the region would suffer from 20- to 30-year droughts due to its limited water reservoirs. 

Imagine that: 20- to 30-year droughts.

As Andrew Nikiforuk wrote in The Tyee in February 2024: “Alberta’s water reckoning has begun in earnest. Snowpack accumulations in the Oldman River basin, the Bow River basin and the North Saskatchewan River basin range from 33 to 62 per cent below normal. A reduced snowpack means less summer water for the fish and all water drinkers.”

Water is something we take for granted, to our detriment. By now we know the short-term drill. Massive wildfires, air thick with smoke, communities displaced and ravaged by fire. This likely isn’t temporary.

As Nikiforuk writes, Alberta’s St. Mary Reservoir is usually 40-70 per cent full but is only at 11 per cent capacity; the Spray Lakes Reservoir is only at 34 per cent capacity; Lake Diefenbaker received only 28 per cent normal inflow in 2022. That’s the lake that provides 60 per cent of Saskatchewan with drinking water.

The future of food depends on reliable water sources. Climate change reckoning is real, and it will impact our food supply. Climate change is not only about the survival of the planet and every living being that inhabits it. It’s economic—with scarcity, food won’t be cheap. And it’s political—a hungry populace is an angry electorate.

The politics of food

In Canada, we remain in political denial about the impact of climate change on our future. Even the most benign policy intervention—the carbon tax—has become a political hot potato. (Benign because we get most of it back in tax credits).

We also stick our heads in the sand about the exploitation of the migrant workers we bring into Canada to pick produce, to package meat, to work at food processing plants. They say the past predicts the future. If the future food system replicates the exploitative conditions of work for food workers, we will have learned nothing. 

Hopefully, Canadians just won’t tolerate such exploitative systems anymore. There is still time for humility, fairness, and ethical approaches. Time for equality. 

The clock on climate catastrophe, however, is winding down faster than the most optimistic scientists feared. Coral reefs are disappearing. In 2023, officials declared 21 species extinct. 

Yet in Canada, we have right-wing politicians railing against climate change mitigations. Even left-leaning governments’ actions have been tepid. When it comes to food, there will always be innovations and scientific advances—but without water, the future of food is not only bleak, it could fuel social unrest. Eat the rich, anyone?