30: AgriFood Names the Tension Between Capital and Care with Elaine Power

Summary:Elaine Power, a food scholar at Queen's University, argues that the word "AgriFood" itself encodes a fundamental contradiction: the agri side serves corporate capital while the food side is rooted in care, community, and life. In this conversation with Jesse Hirsh, Power traces how invisible and undervalued labour—from racialized farmworkers to domestic cooks—holds the food system together while extracting the least reward from it. Her analysis connects feminist political economy, the ultra-processed food industry, and ecological crisis into a single, unflinching diagnosis of what is broken and why.Show notes:Elaine Power is a food scholar at Queen's University whose career has moved fluidly across dietetics, feminist political economy, and food systems research. In this episode, she joins Jesse Hirsh to explore a tension embedded in the very language we use to describe the sector: that "AgriFood" quietly names two opposing logics—one oriented toward capital accumulation, the other toward nourishment, care, and sustaining life. That friction, Power argues, is not incidental. It is the organizing contradiction of the modern food system, and almost everything that is broken about that system flows from it.Power's first major insight is about the systematic invisibility of labour across the entire food chain. From temporary foreign workers doing backbreaking fieldwork in Canadian agriculture, to grocery clerks briefly celebrated as heroes during the pandemic before being returned to minimum wage and precarious shifts, to the uncompensated domestic labour that happens in every kitchen—Power argues that the people who actually feed us are consistently rendered invisible and undervalued. She connects this pattern explicitly to race and gender: agricultural labour in North America has historically been and remains largely racialized, while domestic food labour has been feminized and therefore dismissed. The feminist movement's fraught relationship with the kitchen, she notes, was a rational response to that devaluation—but it created an opening that corporate food manufacturers eagerly filled with ultra-processed products that monetized the very work society refused to honour.A second tension Power surfaces is convenience. The agro-industrial food system did not simply respond to a demand for convenience—it manufactured and deepened that demand, replacing the social and nutritional value of cooking with cheap ingredients repackaged as food-like products. Power draws on Tony Winson's concept of "pseudo-foods" to argue that the profit logic of large food multinationals is structurally opposed to genuine nourishment. Meanwhile, the ecological costs of industrial agriculture—she cites hydrogen sulphide poisoning from seaweed blooms caused by fertilizer runoff off the coast of France as a vivid, lethal example—are externalized onto communities and ecosystems that have no seat at the table. Revaluing real food and the labour that produces it, she suggests, would require confronting capitalism's tendency to invert what actually matters.Listeners will come away from this conversation with a sharper vocabulary for naming what feels wrong about the food system and a clearer sense of why reforming it demands more than consumer choice or technological fixes. For anyone working in or thinking about Canada's agri-food sector, Power's analysis is a necessary provocation: the sector cannot build a legitimate future without honestly accounting for whose labour it depends on, whose health it sacrifices, and whose voices it continues to exclude. In a moment when food security, trade disruption, and climate pressure are converging, this episode makes the case that the most radical thing the sector could do is take care seriously.Topics: Labour Invisibility, Feminist Food Politics, Ultra-Processed Food, Corporate Agri-Food, Convenience Culture, Racialized Farm Labour, Food System Values, Ecological Crisis