Idread going to the grocery store. It’s not an issue of convenience; in Toronto, I am within walking distance of a variety of the most common modalities of the Canadian grocery-shopping experience. The shiny, gleaming corporate utopias are found in a Loblaws or Farm Boy, where thoughtfully labelled displays offer the path to domestic satiated bliss and individualized self-actualization. In contrast are the dog-eat-dog asylums of the discount chains—No Frills, Food Basics, Walmart—where bright subway-car lighting illuminates grim-faced shoppers picking through stark displays and heaping piles of produce.
No matter which aesthetic of grocery monopolization I choose, the dread will be there. This is, of course, partly due to cost. In January 2023, food inflation reached a high of 11.4 percent. Although that levelled off to 1.4 percent come April, that rate is still on top of the absurd heights of the previous years—which is why while, technically, food inflation is slowing, the prices seem stubbornly stuck at “Are you serious?” levels. Going to the grocery store has become an exercise in scoffing incredulity. Every trip unmoors me from economic realities and common sense. I no longer know what things are even supposed to cost, what a good deal is anymore, or even what the best way to spend money is.
The stakes of cooking at home have never been higher. I’m not a bad cook, but my ambition often outstrips my talent. A few years ago, I attempted to make a red wine beef stew but somehow overcooked the beef while not boiling off the wine, resulting in a sort of dry beef sangria. Recently, I tried Swiss chard gnocchi, which turned into an otherworldly sludge, resembling a bog-derived healing paste the hero of a fantasy movie would rub on an open wound. The difference between the two culinary disasters is that the cost of the beef sangria was more measured in fridge real estate while the cost of sludge was measured in new pairs of jeans.
Thankfully, the dread I feel perusing the grocery store aisle isn’t in the high-frequency pitch of immediate poverty. I have a well-paying job, decent rent, and no kids. Another pot of inedible sludge isn’t going to ruin my finances, just my pride and digestive system. I know that I am very lucky: nearly one in four Canadians reported feeling food insecure so far this year, according to Food Banks Canada. The dread I’m talking about isn’t that; it’s not the knife twist in the gut as you wait to see if there’s more in your chequing account than in your grocery cart. No, the dread is more ambient, more abstract—a feeling that there is something seriously wrong. It’s a kind of dread rooted in powerlessness. Why do we accept it?
It doesn’t matter what cocoon of content, exercise, and good mental health decisions I’ve wrapped myself in. It also doesn’t matter how financially and healthily disciplined I become. Eventually, I have to get groceries—and the act is subject to forces (economic, political, natural) that are wildly and completely out of my control. The grocery shelf is where we interact with the rest of the world, where events the world over have an immediate effect on my wallet. Don’t have the faintest thought or opinion about Ukraine or climate change? Doesn’t matter. The war was part of the reason why past costs skyrocketed. You can try not to read the news, but the grocery shelf is where you are going to feel the news, and the price stickers are a tiny porthole into the great gears of history and politics that grind forward with no concern for how many of us are crushed in between. When I see absurd prices, my mind leaps to cascading climate disasters and corporate monopolization. Someone on the other end of the spectrum might think of the carbon tax and global governance. But on one level, we’re both trying to explain away an encounter with our own insignificance as confirmed by the new price of, say, a can of Campbell’s Chunky soup.
This is not just a personal insignificance but a social one. We are constantly told that the price of food is an issue that is beyond any of us. When our politicians argue over partisan hypotheses like the carbon tax or “greedflation,” overly pedantic talking heads appear on the news to pour cold water on any overheated rhetoric by explaining that food costs escape the reductive power of any one ideology. They tell us there are a myriad of complicated kinks in the omnipotent supply chains that stretch across the earth—war, interest rates, climate events, dollar rates—that no one, not the state and certainly not you, can do anything about. The infinite web of multinational trade organized by ravenous corporations is outside of anyone’s control. Everything is to blame, so no one is to blame. We’ve built a food system that no one can do anything about other than keep making money.
This helplessness is emphasized by the impotent responses of the federal government so far: sending minister of innovation, science, and industry François-Philippe Champagne on a global hunt for competition, like some sort of disgraced royal trying to marry off his impetuous daughter, or begging said grocery overlords to sign on to a code of conduct, which I assume will be about as effective as when I asked my university roommates to sign on to a chore wheel.
If Canadians could reject every monopolized grocer and spend our time and money haggling over wooden baskets of pockmarked cucumbers at farmers’ markets or driving to a food terminal at five in the morning to buy tomatoes in bulk for cheap, we would.
The boycott of Loblaw that began on May 1 is an attempt to shake off the dread. It is an attempt to refute the feeling that we don’t have a choice—the collective unimportance asserted by eight-dollar sticks of butter, by the pocket of air in a bag of chips that is so big it probably has its own weather system, by the too-small shelf I’m forced to pile my groceries on at a self-checkout register. It’s an opportunity to say that we are not insignificant, that we are not frills, that we matter.
Is the boycott working? So far, on a purely economic level, not really. “I actually, in some ways, would like to be proven wrong,” University of Toronto marketing professor David Soberman told CityNews in June. “I’d like to see that Loblaws sales were down 5, 7, 8 percent, because that actually means the consumer has a lot of power. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we are going to see.” But even if the boycott is illustrating the iron-clad entrenchment of our grocery monopolies, I still see a glimmer of something. Maybe not hope, but at least some dread alleviation. In Toronto, independent grocery stores and alternatives like food co-ops reported higher sales in the month of May.
The Reddit board where the boycott started is filled with posts—in between rage screenshots and delusional “we got them on the run now” theories—of people delighted to discover a local grocer nearby or an independent pharmacy. There are people detailing their experience growing their own food and others saying this is the first time they’ve questioned their shopping habits or thought about where their food is coming from. Maybe this is how it starts. A targeted boycott, an online spreadsheet, a backyard garden. Maybe a better grocery trip is possible. We just have to imagine it first.
