Eating an Island

Talk about lived experience: Our household was food insecure for a time – thankfully, the grocery delivery arrived and I could finish cooking dinner. 

I start with snark as I’m tired from lack of sleep (would a joke about “sleep insecurity” be heavy-handed?), but also tired – as in, of the bullshit. Specifically, after reading about the Canadian government’s planned “food affordability measures”, recently announced. You see, the cost of living has increased dramatically in recent years and, consequently, more people live in poverty and precarity. In neoliberal culture, of course, “poverty” and “precarity” are verba non grata; if you’re poor, you’re not poor, you’re insecure of employment, housing, or food. These are not moral issues, visceral in their textures; they are technical matters, like formulas in a spreadsheet.

Two years ago, I wrote two essays exploring the idea of food in/security: In sum, it is an almost meaningless¹ concept, emblematic of the neoliberal era, which we made up to avoid doing anything to help anyone (“technologies of mystification”) while making ourselves feel good in the process (“moves to innocence”).

Fittingly, then, Canada’s response to the non-thing of food in/security is nothing: 65 bucks a month for a family of four, or an extra 34 for an individual.² Means-tested, of course, which means we’ve tested your income and, one dollar too many, no soup for you. Moreover, a few years down the road, when the tide of precarity rises (why wouldn’t it), and you arrive again at the can we’ve kicked, well … I don’t know, sign up for MAiD or something, sounds like a you-problem to me.

There’s something chef’s-kiss about how neoliberalism will acknowledge an issue – e.g. people can’t afford to eat – and not only not do anything about it, but make a song and dance of not doing anything – the press events at the grocery stores, the annual reports from the NGOs, the presentations at the conferences. I mean, call them what you will, but at least conventional conservatives are honest in replying “I don’t care” to questions of poverty and racism.

Taking a few steps back, this recent announcement feels to me typical of a wider phenomenon, namely how governments in the West function less democratically (e.g. ignoring majority consensus on major issues like Palestine; not responding to acute material concerns like climate and disease) and yet feel more representative. Donald Trump, Benjamin Mileikowsky, Keir Starmer, Doug Ford – each leader, for all the hate and blame, aptly characterizes and concentrates their respective countries and cultures. They are fitting figureheads, all of them.

Canada, as the joke goes, is not a country, but “three mining companies in a trenchcoat”: that is, a colonial project, structured entirely around extraction. In this context, you couldn’t Dr.-Frankenstein a better avatar than the cold-blooded, thin-lippèd banker that is Mark Carney. In my reading, he’s The Last Neoliberal; a functionaire appointed to administer the final cuts, unleash the remaining austerity, and extract the outstanding wealth. And, were I a betting man, my money would be on him doing one term, before disappearing into ether of the elite consulting class from whence he came.

Again, fitting.

1. As I wrote in 2024, “food security” is a useful term on a demographic level, in the context of the availability of food to a population, e.g. food insecurity in Gaza is high due to the genocidal policies of Israel. ↩︎
2. Based on my calculations. From the CBC: “In its first year, the benefit will give low- and modest-income Canadians eligible for the GST rebate a one-time boost that raises the $1,100 a family of four receives annually to $1,890 and increases the $540 an individual gets to $950 […] Starting in 2026/27, and running for the next five years, the GST rebate is being increased by 25 per cent, which means a family of four will get up to $1,400 annually, while an individual will get about $700 a year.” ↩︎