Work We Eat — Inconvenient Truisms is Gavin Sewell’s 2024 project for Convention Collective Agreement (CAA) an artists group working at the intersection of art and labour. The membership consists of artists of various disciplinary backgrounds working on labor related themes through their individual practices. Current members including Selena PB and Corie Waugh are working on a collaborative project focusing on the theme of food.
Critical to human survival, food remains a subject of deep mystification in the capitalist economy. Less than 2% of working people in Quebec are employed in food production and very few of us spend substantial time at farms or food processing facilities. Food we eat — or don’t eat — at supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants and food banks appears there as if by magic, decoupled from the human labour that produced, refined, packaged, stored, shipped, and distributed it. This disconnection between work and consumption becomes particularly problematic as food becomes less accessible.
In 2023 the inflation rate for food in Canada reached 10.4 percent, its highest level in nearly forty years, forcing many to choose between food and other basic necessities. Fourteen percent of Quebec households live in food insecurity — the condition of not having access to sufficient food, or food of an adequate quality, to meet one's basic needs — while Canada wide the food insecurity rate is nearly 23%. According to a Food Banks Quebec report published last October, the organisation had an unprecedented average of 2.6 million requests for food each month in 2023. The number of food baskets donated each month also doubled in four years, from 345,000 in 2019 to 682,000 in 2023. Last year 71% of the food banks the organisation supplies ran out of food. In a society as wealthy as Canada this raises the intersectional labour question — why are people not getting enough to eat?
On the production side, the Quebec agricultural sector averaged 55,900 jobs over the period 2020-2022, accounting for only 1.3% of total employment in Quebec.
While the sector is predicted to grow in the coming years, wages are low and many of the workers are highly vulnerable, difficult to unionise foreign temporary workers, the numbers of whom rose sharply in 2022 and are predicted to increase. Despite de facto food shortages in Quebec, the province exports over $8 billion of agricultural products every year, with more than 69% going to the United States.
The economic situation at supermarkets is revealing: Profits in the Canadian grocery sector exceeded $6 billion in 2023, setting a new record as they rose eight per cent in one year. Food retailers are now earning more than twice as much profit as they did pre-pandemic. Although grocery industry real wages grew substantially from 2018-2020, inflation has since negated those gains, regressing wages back to 2018 levels. The decline in real wages has correlated strongly with the increase in corporate grocery retailer profits. This dynamic between price increases, wage decline, and profit growth are consistent with what economists call, ‘seller’s inflation’ — sometimes called ‘greedflation’ — as prices and profits grow alongside declining wages.
At this troubling intersection of food and labour, Convention Collective Agreement aims to deepen the public conversation about these issues through creative artwork. By exploring these questions we hope to reduce the mystification around a system of production, distribution, and consumption that is failing to meet basic human needs. We wish to encourage both reflection and action on the part of audiences and creatively advance the day when our whole society can — without hypocrisy — wish each other, ‘Bon appetit!’
thank you qpirg concordia
For their generous financial and logistical support for this project.