By: Grace Ingraham
Kelsey Speakman, a Ph.D. candidate at York University, is interested in studying how food is provisioned and marketed. During the 2021 Food Matters and Materialities Conference, she presented her research paper, “Meat-ing in the Middle: Supermarkets, Trust, and the Beef Supply Chain in Canada” in which she explored how trust capital is created between companies and consumers by conducting a case study of the beef supply chain and marketing of Loblaw’s products. After her fascinating presentation, I had the opportunity to interview Kelsey and ask her questions about her work.
Credits: Illustration by Kit Chokly.
Grace Ingraham: To begin, I wondered: what led you to become interested in your field research?
Kelsey Speakman: The research I presented at the conference is part of my doctoral project, which emerged out of lines of thinking that began during my Master of Arts in Performance Studies at New York University. When I was in New York, I was amazed by the diversity of food spaces, from farmers’ markets and food co-ops to 24-hour supermarkets and Trader Joe’s. I was fascinated by the different ways people related with food and began thinking of those relationships as performances.
So, when I moved to Toronto, the Loblaws store at Maple Leaf Gardens had recently opened, and they were using the slogan ‘foods greatest stage’. This was interesting to me because now a supermarket was self consciously thinking about itself as a performance space.
GI: What inspired you to choose Loblaws as your case study over other Canadian grocery store chains?
KS: I selected the chain because I was interested in exploring the experience of shopping in Canadian supermarkets, and Loblaws is Canada’s biggest food retailer. So, a case study of their stores allowed me to observe the kinds of experiences many shoppers in Canada would encounter while still being able to keep my research grounded in empirical details by looking at one as opposed to trying to encompass all grocery stores in Canada.
GI: In your presentation, you used the term ‘trust capital’. Could you explain what it means?
KS: I’m building on Pierre Bourdieu’s extension of Marxist capital to include forms of social and cultural status beyond economic assets. I’m using Bourdieu’s model to define trust capital as the accumulated resources that contribute to the trustworthiness of a person, organization, or business. So basically, all the stuff that makes someone or something trustworthy. When an entity is trustworthy, I think they have more influence over what is seen as ethical.
GI: During your presentation, you discussed whether the supply chain can be trusted to feed Canadian communities. What recommendations would you make to improve broken links in Canada’s beef supply chain?
KS: I don’t think there’s a one size fits all answer, but I particularly liked what one of the keynote speakers for the conference, Dr. Hobart, said about thinking about food systems in terms of melting instead of breakage and repair. Dr. Hobart spoke about how, unlike something breaking and being repaired, something that melts doesn’t become fixed in terms of stability which insists that we need to tend to it continually.
So, with that in mind, a perfect supply chain is one that runs without interruptions, is never broken, and delivers economic growth without human intervention. But as we’ve seen in the pandemic, the illusion of a smooth supply chain is only possible when risks are offloaded to various actors who are responsible for keeping the chain going. So, instead of that approach to maintaining the uninterrupted supply, I think the idea of tending to supply network relationships would create a more even distribution of risk, which I think would decrease risk overall.
To give a more concrete example: In Canada, we have a consolidated beef industry, where a small number of companies and plants control a large amount of the supply. This might seem safer in terms of enforcing top-down health and safety regulations. But as we saw with the closure of meatpacking plants during the pandemic, this kind of consolidated system is actually fragile because it falls apart when something unexpected happens. This breakdown has all kinds of unsafe repercussions for meatpackers, the environment, and the livelihoods of farmers and ranchers.
I think tending to these broken relationships will involve more diversified food networks or food ecologies that are more responsive to contextual regulation. For instance, the National Farmers Union in Canada has been calling for the opening of more provincially regulated or local abattoirs instead of these large federally regulated, consolidated packing plants. This would diversify the supply chain for when unexpected things happen. Lastly, Indigenous communities have been striving for centuries to retain relationships with their traditional territories and foods so that they’re not reliant on foods like beef that come from colonial systems.
GI: Before we wrap up, what do you think might be surprising to readers about your research and results? I was surprised to learn about the various ways beef is marketed towards Canadians.
KS: I think this depends on who you’re talking to what they find surprising. I noticed that Canadian supermarkets and the beef industry rely heavily on the conception that Canada is a nice, trustworthy, and tolerant country in order to present their brands as trustworthy.
Beef is also presented as this natural Canadian product that somehow emerged out of the wild frontier landscape. But it is actually part of ongoing land dispossession because ranching was used to lay claim for agriculture on behalf of the Dominion of Canada in the 19th century. As the beef industry grew, it decimated the bison population, with which Indigenous peoples had essential relationships with. But I don’t think my work would necessarily be surprising for Indigenous people, people of colour, and others whose identities aren’t centered in Canadian patriotism.
GI: Thank you, Kelsey, for taking the time to speak with me and sharing your research. I have certainly gained a new perspective on supply chains and the beef industry in Canada.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.