This marks the second installment in an ongoing curated series that asks contributors to imagine the perils and possibilities that will ground our collective response to or emergence from the COVID-19 crisis. The second edition is about food, with contributions from Tabitha Robin (Martens), Tony Weis, Lauren Kepkiewicz, and Elaine Power.

As undercover investigations have shown, cruelty is rampant on Manitoba pig farms. As former animal cruelty investigators, we have documented routine abuses in the pig industry, including the confining of pregnant pigs in barren crates so small they are unable to turn around, the mutilation of piglets without any pain relief, and the complete lack of medical attention for sick and suffering pigs.

Cooking attracts passionate and skillful workers, but the discrepancy in pay between kitchen jobs and other skilled trades is staggering. According to Statistics Canada, certified entry-level tradespeople earn an average hourly wage of more than $22, six per cent higher than other occupations. Cooks work like labourers, yet earn an artist’s wages. A typical full-time salary barely tops $35,000 a year.

We have only a few years left, at best, to make radical changes to save ourselves from ecological meltdown. A person who is vegan will save 1,100 gallons of water, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, 30 square feet of forested land, 45 pounds of grain, and one sentient animal’s life every day. We do not, given what lies ahead of us, have any other option.

Land occupations in Andalusia, the Fast Food Forward Thessaloniki, and restaurant strikes at steakhouses across Germany have created new fault lines in the fight over who is to pay the price of the crisis, writes activist Mark Bergfeld.

Here in Canada, Industry Minister James Moore made it clear last month that he feels no responsibility to feed hungry children. Andrea Levy outlines some of the key challenges and prospects the Left faces with respect to food production, distribution and consumption.

In Attenborough’s view, Ethiopians are starving simply because there are too many of them. Since they haven’t voluntarily reduced their numbers, the natural world is doing so, by the “natural” method of mass starvation.

The need for a dietary revolution is incontrovertible. But if the moral appeal falls on deaf hearts, the ecological argument should clinch the case.

The solutions to the food crisis are thus deeply intertwined with solutions to the climate crisis and the larger question of global poverty. The steps to get there are not so complex: genuine agrarian reform, local markets, biodiversity, a decentralization of decision-making, all things that social movements have been demanding for decades. There are no technical hurdles standing in the way, only political ones.

We might have hoped that by the 21st century hunger would be a scourge of the past. But the problem is actually worse now than it was a decade ago.