Canadian Food Sociology Brings a Critical Lens the Agri-Food Sector Rarely Hears From

There is a disciplinary gap running through the Canadian agri-food sector, and it rarely gets named directly. The sector is well-served by agronomists, economists, supply chain specialists, and food scientists. It is less accustomed to hearing from sociologists — people whose training orients them not toward what food is, chemically or economically, but toward what food does socially, politically, and culturally. Alyssa Overend, a health sociologist at MacEwan University in Edmonton, represents exactly that kind of interlocutor, and the perspective she brings to questions about food, media, and power is one the sector would benefit from taking seriously.

What makes Overend's entry into food studies instructive is that she didn't plan it. She began her doctoral research studying people with undefined illness — chronic conditions that resisted medical diagnosis — and she wasn't asking about food at all. But across interview after interview, her subjects kept returning to it, describing in careful detail how they used food to manage conditions that Western medicine had largely failed to address. The evidence redirected the researcher. That kind of responsiveness to emergent data is methodologically significant: it suggests that for people navigating chronic health challenges, food is already doing theoretical work that the formal health system hasn't caught up to. The sociology of food, in this sense, didn't arrive as an academic abstraction. It arrived because people living complicated health realities were already thinking in those terms.

The foundational argument Overend makes — and it's one with real implications for how the agri-food sector understands its own audience — is that the dominant framework through which Canadians are taught to think about food is deeply and narrowly biochemical. Nutrition labels, daily intake percentages, ingredient lists, protein content: these are the instruments through which the food system communicates with consumers, and they operate on an implicit premise that food decisions are essentially rational responses to nutritional information. But as Overend points out, the foods people feel most strongly about are almost never the ones with the best macronutrient profiles. They're the foods tied to childhood, to cultural memory, to family ritual, to seasonal meaning. Food encodes identity — cultural, gendered, classed — in ways that no label can capture and that no price signal alone can explain. The industry assumption that consumers are primarily responding to price and nutritional data is not just incomplete; it may be actively misleading about what drives loyalty, trust, and purchasing behaviour over time.

Nowhere is this gap between the biochemical and the social more visible than in how food is marketed and how retail environments are constructed. Overend's analysis of the grocery store as a curated media environment is worth sitting with carefully, because it reframes something the agri-food sector tends to treat as neutral — retail distribution — as an active site of meaning-making and persuasion. The produce section at the entrance creates a sensory impression of freshness and abundance. Oversized carts encourage volume purchasing. End-of-aisle displays pair complementary indulgences. Products positioned at children's eye level exploit a well-documented dynamic between pester power and parental capitulation. None of this is accidental, and none of it is passive. The grocery store, in Overend's framing, is doing something to the people who move through it — shaping perception, manufacturing desire, and constructing a particular relationship between the shopper and the product before a single conscious choice has been made.

The packaging itself is part of this system. Overend draws attention to the language of health claims on front-of-pack advertising — "made with whole grain oats," "natural," "honey and oats" — and what that language is actually doing. An apple, she observes, never has to announce that it is healthy. The imperative to claim healthfulness is generated precisely by products whose healthfulness is ambiguous or overstated. When a granola bar works hard to signal its virtue, that effort is itself information. But most consumers, moving quickly through a harried grocery trip, are not pausing to decode the semiotics of cereal box typography. The system is designed for speed and for the advantage of the seller. Overend's framing invites a harder question for the agri-food sector: if the retail and marketing environment is systematically constructed to obscure rather than illuminate, what does that mean for the sector's stated commitment to consumer trust and transparency?

The media dimension of this extends well beyond the grocery store. Overend notes the historical arc of advertising regulation — the Nixon-era loosening of restrictions on food advertising to children in the United States, and the considerable cultural overlap between American and Canadian media consumption that means those norms have never been cleanly separated by the border. Canadian audiences absorb a largely American advertising environment, including the fast food and sugary cereal campaigns that dominate the commercial breaks of streaming platforms. That advertising landscape shapes food norms, food desire, and food identity from early childhood in ways that are largely invisible by the time consumers reach adulthood. The agri-food sector tends to encounter the consumer at the point of purchase. Food sociology is interested in everything that happened before that moment — the accumulated media exposure, cultural messaging, and social patterning that determines what a person reaches for and why.

What Overend's work ultimately offers the sector is not a critique from outside looking in, but a more accurate model of the consumer than the one the industry typically operates with. The person in the grocery store is not a rational utility-maximizer selecting inputs based on price and nutritional information. She is a socially embedded subject whose relationship to food has been shaped by family history, cultural identity, media exposure, class position, and a retail environment designed to work on her subconscious before her conscious mind has engaged. Recognising that complexity doesn't weaken the sector's capacity to reach consumers — it sharpens it. It also raises legitimate accountability questions about what the sector owes the people it feeds, particularly as food insecurity rises and as the consolidation of retail and production power concentrates decision-making in fewer and fewer hands.

The disciplinary gap is real, but it is closeable. The agri-food sector has learned to engage seriously with environmental science, with logistics research, with behavioural economics. Food sociology — with its attention to power, identity, media, and the social life of eating — belongs in that conversation. Overend's work is a useful starting point for understanding what that perspective actually looks like in practice: empirically grounded, critically oriented, and trained on questions the sector has largely left unasked.