Beef rendang, a Malaysian classic, is one of my favourite dishes to cook. Traditionally served during Ramadan, this hearty, flavourful stew is the perfect meal to soothe souls on a cold, Canadian winter night. A dear friend of mine, Zainon (or auntie Zai), taught me how to prepare this aromatic and spicy dish while I was living in Kuala Lumpur. Before stepping into the kitchen together, we gathered our ingredients from a nearby wet market. It was at this market that I was introduced to an assortment of colourful fruits and vegetables, sharp aromas, and the chatter of people communing over roti canai and teh tarik. As a lover of food, I was in heaven. Auntie Zai and I walked the food stalls for hours, smelling the fresh herbs and sampling the produce. She often stopped to talk to a friend while I absorbed in amazement the selection of different spices available and fragrances wafting through the market. It was only seven in the morning, and our day of food had just begun.

Equipped with everything we needed for beef rendang, we stopped to refuel with nasi lamak and some kopi o before heading home to prepare lunch for her family of six and myself, her adopted Canadian daughter, affectionately called Kasih. Being a rendang expert, she patiently showed me how to grind the curry leaves, press the lemongrass to release its sweet and tangy aroma, and braise the chunks of beef just right. After reducing the coconut milk and preparing the rice, we set the table and enjoyed a long, leisurely lunch together. There was a lot of laughter that day. We moved slowly and talked endlessly with nowhere to be other than in each other’s company. We shared stories of our lives, failed cooking experiments, funny family vacations, cultural traditions, our hopes and dreams, and everything in between. I learned valuable lessons about fresh herbs versus dried spices, and she delighted in the opportunity to pass down her knowledge. Ten years later, it is a day permanently etched in my mind with sincere fondness, gratitude, and so much love. It was a day that would solidify our friendship for decades to come.

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in Malaysia and despite the absence of wet markets in Canada, my love for cooking and building connection over food remains. I’ve met new friends who share similar passions for food, and I’ve practiced cooking all sorts of new dishes. Like many folks, I masqueraded as a master chef during the pandemic and enjoyed slow days centred around food. Post-pandemic, however, the pressure to work more, consume more stuff, and feign unfettered productivity has reasserted itself and, like many people, I find myself struggling to find time.

Since those slow days have ended, it has become increasingly difficult to prioritize basic things like grocery shopping and cooking healthy meals, let alone gathering with friends to break bread. I’ve heard from friends who’ve been experiencing similar time squeezes, many of whom have understandably turned to online food delivery applications to order takeout or get their groceries. Individually-prepped meal kits, for example, take the guesswork out of dinner. But despite sharing feelings of exhaustion and monotony, I’m wary about using food delivery services. I enjoy takeout now and again, and there are nights when I’m so tired that the thought of throwing together a meal that arrived on my doorstep sounds very tempting. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more obvious it has become that it’s not a time constraint, but a societal value constraint. We make time for the things that are valued in a production-driven society, and taking time to cook and eat is not valuable under this framework. Our capitalist society has given rise to a culture where online food delivery services thrive despite being detrimental to our health and wellbeing, our communities, the people who work within and for these food systems, and the environment.

Online food delivery services include meal delivery companies (Uber Eats, DoorDash, Skip the Dishes, Foodora), personal grocery shopping apps (Instacart), and meal prep kits (Hello Fresh, Chefs Plate, Fresh Prep). Many of these companies, especially the big ones, provide more than one type of online food delivery service. While meal prep kits and personal grocery shopping apps cater to different consumer demands than meal delivery companies—the former two apps are marketed as time-saving, healthy alternatives to excessive takeout, and meal prep kits specifically are branded as a no-fuss way to learn how to cook—all three types of online food delivery services arguably cause harm, albeit in different ways. They also collectively illustrate a type of food culture that disrupts our ability to connect with where our food comes from and who is involved in bringing food to our plates. If supermarkets and processed food culture mark the first iteration of disconnection from where our food comes from, the thriving food-on-demand culture normalized by online delivery services has certainly engrained our apathy toward this disconnection. Most people do not understand how Canada’s agriculture and food system functions nor do they have exposure to it. The rise of online food delivery services exacerbates this problem, eroding people’s basic life skills such as shopping for and preparing minimally processed food to nourish our bodies (never mind the decaying ability to grow our own food). More concerningly, this new wave of food culture—propelled by digital platforms—depends on environmental and human exploitation.

Convenience for some means exploitation of others

The meal delivery market has a projected market value of just under $5 billion USD for 2025, and the total number of users tapping into these services is expected to grow to 22.1 million by 2029. Revenue from the grocery delivery market is expected to show an annual growth rate of nearly nine percent between 2025 and 2029, resulting in a projected market volume of just under $2 billion by 2029. Similar patterns are taking shape in the meal kit market with an annual revenue growth rate of nearly 11 percent and market volume projections reaching $3 billion USD by 2029. With more and more people turning to online food delivery services, we need to interrogate the consequences of increasingly convenient food.

For starters, the upward trend of meal delivery companies such as Uber Eats correlates with a rise in nutritional issues for consumers and wellbeing concerns for food delivery workers. A study looking at the nutritional value of food delivered by online apps like Uber Eats in Australia and New Zealand found that 37.6 percent of popular outlets on the apps were classified as “fast-food franchise” stores. Nearly 96 percent of the foods provided by these fast food chains were identified as “discretionary foods,” which are high in saturated fats, sodium, and sugar. These foods are incredibly energy dense but nutrient poor and detrimental to building a healthy diet. Highly inflammatory foods made with refined grains and sugars, as well as heavily processed meats, are known to cause or contribute to heart disease, stroke, cancer, obesity, type two diabetes, and hypertension—just to name a few. A Canadian study analyzing the impacts of food delivery apps on health predictably found low nutritional scores from 10 fast food chains in the Greater Toronto Area including McDonald’s, Lazeez Shawarma, Little Ceasars, A&W, Hero Certified Burgers, Quick Chik, Pizza Pizza, Edo Japan, and Milestones. Residents living in some densely populated cities in Southern Ontario can choose from up to 472 retailers, and Uber Eats and DoorDash have partnerships with some of the biggest fast food chains in Canada, including Domino’s, McDonald’s, Chipotle, Starbucks, and Little Ceasars. Endless choice and partnerships between fast food chains and meal delivery applications—the latter which adopt a posture of advocacy for healthy eating—appear to contribute significantly to the pervasiveness of poor nutrition in our diets.

It is in the area of working conditions, however, that an indisputable case can be made for the deleterious character of the food delivery industry. The workers delivering food for meal and grocery apps are not fairly compensated or protected. While delivery jobs are glorified as an opportunity to be one’s own boss, the gig economy delivers low-wage compensation, job instability, no benefits or paid sick leave, lack of union support, and algorithmic management leading to long work hours. In 2023, Statistics Canada determined that 277,600 people worked for an online delivery application that controlled key dimensions of their work, such as their schedule, the organization of their work, and their pay. Another study found that four in ten online food delivery workers between the ages of 18 and 64 work on multiple platforms, and 57 percent of workers reported relying on delivery work as their primary source of income. Statistics Canada data from 2022 also found that men (73 percent) and newcomers to the country (55.7 percent) represented the majority of rideshare and delivery drivers during that period, and a significant portion of these workers (38.8 percent) had a bachelor’s degree or higher. These percentages include more than online food delivery drivers but provide a demographic snapshot of the workers servicing the sector. In Metro Vancouver, the average pay range in the online food delivery sector can be anywhere from $10-$30 an hour, but most delivery workers have experienced a decrease in take-home pay since COVID-19 because of market saturation.

In British Columbia, gig workers for online food delivery app companies are excluded from the British Columbia Employment Standards Act (BC ESA) because employees are classified by companies like Uber Eats as “independent contractors,” allowing them to skirt their responsibilities legislated by employment standards and health and safety regulations. Unsurprisingly, large food delivery corporations have made it virtually impossible for their employees to pursue arbitration. In 2020, Uber required a food delivery worker in Canada to resolve a dispute through mediation and arbitration in the Netherlands. To work for Uber, drivers must agree to a contract that they do not have any bargaining power to negotiate. The contract for this driver stipulated that any legal disputes had to be resolved by the International Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands, which includes upfront administrative costs of $14,500 USD, plus legal fees and costs of travel. This substantial fee represented most of the worker’s annual income; he earned between $400 and $600 CDN weekly, before taxes and expenses. The case went to the Supreme Court, where the arbitration clause was dismissed as “unconscionable” and the court ruled that a class action suit could be filed in Ontario.

Although it’s been an uphill battle, collective action to secure employment rights has been effective in some jurisdictions. In 2019, two lawsuits in Amsterdam brought against food delivery company Deliveroo by the FNV, a trade union in the Netherlands, won recognition of couriers’ status as employees, not self-employed contractors. The court found that Deliveroo’s elimination of employment contracts did not alter the fundamental relationship of authority and dependence between the company and its drivers. A similar case, also in the Netherlands, played out in 2021, this time against Uber: drivers were classified as employees, which entitled them to workers’ rights under labour laws. Unsurprisingly, Uber promptly appealed this decision.

Legislation protecting “gig” workers, including online food delivery workers, is under development at the EU level, too. And New Zealand’s courts recently dismissed an appeal by Uber to classify four employees as contractors, which would have effectively quashed employee rights to statutory benefits including the right to join a union and to four weeks’ paid annual holiday. Ironically, Uber claims to offer time off, but what employees are entitled to depends on their location, which is PR-speak for “labour laws tell us we have to give you paid time off if you live in one of a handful of countries”—not including Canada.

Tech tyranny or community building?

Instacart claims to believe that “everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together.”

Marketing hype notwithstanding, the company controls the time and activities of workers more stringently than other platforms, a practice researchers have described as “algorithmic despotism.” Instacart requires workers to sign up for shifts a week in advance and demands greater time commitments by rewarding workers who work longer hours and have a higher rating with the first pick of shifts. The company also forces workers to wait four minutes before denying an order. Instacart employees in the US believe the algorithm “learns” the lowest fee it can successfully offer for an order within a particular region at a particular time and day of the week and then only offers that fee. Workers who consecutively accept $10 orders, for example, are restricted to these types of orders. If a worker’s rating (the ranking provided by customers following a delivery) dips below a certain threshold, drivers can lose access to more profitable deliveries or be dropped from the platform altogether.

This policy of allocating high-value deliveries to top-rated workers is used widely by other online food delivery apps, too. And both meal and grocery delivery applications tend to stack multiple orders, which may result in late deliveries and poor ratings. Meaning, the vaunted advantages of independent contract work—making your own hours, setting your own rate, picking your own projects, being your own boss—just don’t apply to the world of online food delivery or, for the most part, to the gig economy in general.

Food delivery workers and end users assume that tips will compensate for the low hourly wage and non-existent benefits; major food delivery app companies, however, have found ways to divert these earnings, too. In 2016, Instacart altered the platform so that customers were unable to tip shoppers and simultaneously added a 10 percent “service fee” that went directly to the company. The company stated that the optional service fee was used for activities related to running the company such as background checks, customer support, and insurance. After facing backlash from their clients, Instacart reduced the service fee in 2018 to five percent but made it mandatory. They included a five percent default tip on the end user’s bill, which may be increased or decreased. In late 2018, the company incorporated tips into workers’ wages, effectively siphoning base pay as tip totals increased. This policy has since been reversed: Instacart now claims that 100 percent of the user’s tips go directly to the delivery worker.

DoorDash has used a similar policy of reducing the base pay after tips, and they have also had to change their approach following negative media attention. Despite changes in tipping policies, meal and grocery delivery app companies continue to mistreat and cheat workers. During the pandemic, when food delivery workers were being touted as unsung frontline workers, US comedian John Oliver alluded to the fact that praising food delivery workers for their bravery isn’t a substitute for adequate health care: “I am not saying you shouldn’t use delivery apps. A lot of people rely on them from working parents to disabled people […] but the fact is, it is just too easy to use these apps while completely forgetting the actual human beings behind them whose fates you control by just pressing a button.”

Marketing tactics used by online food delivery apps glamorize nefarious employment standards and create, rather than address, consumer demands. Instacart describes a job with their organization as “career-defining” and refers to itself as “building community,” language reminiscent of any corporate cog on the receiving end of an annual pizza party instead of a percentage of shareholder earnings. Online reviews of Instacart by employees provide an alternate perspective with one reviewer writing, “Work long hours and make less than minimum wage. Use your own vehicle, creating additional expenses for fuel, insurance and vehicle maintenance.”

Another former employee wrote, “Instacart is for people who have no other options. […] Trust me, it’s only for desperate times.” On a Reddit thread, someone explained that the only way to make $1,000 USD a week was to shop from 7 am until 8 pm, seven days a week. This amount does not account for daily gas costs, vehicle maintenance costs, or taxes. The community Instacart is building looks a lot more like a community of shareholders than workers. Uber’s fairytale of altruistic values such as “building with heart” or “standing for safety” just don’t stand up against employee accounts of working long hours for little pay. Uber claims to actively support its teammates, especially when they “hit the inevitable bumps in the road”; and yet they also admit they do “what’s best for Uber, not the individual or team.”

The strict surveillance and tight control of employees recalls Harry Braverman’s deskilling theory (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974), which suggests a means of preventing workers from gaining control over their labour is to dissociate intellectual and manual labour. In other words, to simplify the labour to such a degree that the tasks performed become routine, require no specialization, and therefore, can be paid very little to perform. “Workers in this system do not only lose their ability to make decisions about the labour process, but are also placed under the control of a strongly hierarchical administrative structure.” And as was illustrated by the corporate marketing campaigns referenced above, modern deskilling is pitched by the corporations controlling the labour as innovative, flexible, and dynamic self-agency over one’s labour. Undoubtably, Braverman’s 1974 thesis holds true in today’s context, as online food delivery workers, like many workers, are taught to think their own failure or success is a result of individual cleverness or competence.

This individualization through deskilling restricts collective resistance against exploitation and leaves online food delivery personnel to fight a rigged system on their own. Indeed, researchers studying gig economies tend to agree that the lack of transparency in the algorithmic scheme, the tight control of employees, low-wage pay, and the limited or negligible employment rights and benefits of delivery personnel working for these food delivery companies replicate features of labour exploitation and control from the turn of the 20th century.

Meal-prep kits offer a band-aid solution to a larger problem

The problems created by meal-prep kits are different than those associated with meal and grocery delivery apps, although these types of services also typically use independent contractors to deliver food to our doors, which results in many of the same issues regarding employment rights and protections and low-wage pay. While these services offer healthier alternatives than traditional fast-food options, meal-prep kits, like personal grocery shopping apps, cater to a wealthier clientele who can afford to outsource time-consuming tasks like learning how to shop for and prepare seasonal and nutritionally-balanced meals.

Let’s calculate what a Fresh Prep subscription would cost a typical meal-prep delivery driver. They make on average $24.61 an hour. For an eight-hour day, that’s just under $200. Assuming a delivery driver works a five-day week, workers make roughly $985 per week. This amount does not include the costs of gas, car maintenance, general living expenses, or taxes. And bear in mind that as independent contractors, meal-prep delivery drivers don’t get benefits, paid sick time, or vacation pay. Without any discounts, a standard Fresh Prep subscription is $128 per week for five dinners. Without considering additional costs associated with eating breakfast and lunch every day or eating three meals on Saturdays and Sundays, a Fresh Prep subscription would cost one of its drivers 13 percent of their weekly wages. These numbers also assume delivery personnel are working full-time hours, yet most of the job postings I found online were for part-time hours. It’s clear that people in precarious employment situations are servicing people with stable, high-income jobs, and those in high-income jobs can afford such services because employment standards for those providing the service are economically exploitative.

Meal-prep kits are sometimes touted as better for the environment, but scrutiny of such claims suggests they are largely green-washing. An NPR article claimed that meal-prep kits like those delivered by Fresh Prep and Blue Apron have a smaller carbon footprint than grocery shopping. And while it’s plausible that the plastic waste produced by these meal kit companies pales in comparison to the food waste generated by grocery stores and uneaten food at the household level, there are serious questions to be raised about the alleged problem these kits purport to solve. Food waste has major ecological consequences, of course, but we cannot address the challenges created by industrialized agriculture by siphoning off a sector of the market and labelling it as portion control for a small percentage of affluent users. Rather, examining and reconfiguring the food system is imperative for our survival on this planet.

Climate crisis, capitalism, and the role of online food delivery apps

In addition to abysmal employment standards, poor nutrition, and pseudo-community building, online food delivery apps are driving climate change. Contrary to greenwashing claims, a rise in the use of food delivery apps directly contributes to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and single-use plastic waste from things like containers, utensils, etc. A 2024 study based on Jakarta’s online food delivery sector found that the amount of CO2 emissions attributable to online food delivery apps is substantially higher than the total emissions caused by people travelling to purchase their own food. Filling about 203 meal orders via online food delivery apps releases approximately 116kg of CO2, compared to grocery shopping and cooking at home for the same number of meals, which emits roughly 3.4kg of CO2. In China, the total amount of packaging waste from food delivery apps surged from 0.2 million metric tons in 2015 to 1.5 million metric tons in 2017. During the COVID-19 lockdown in Wuhan, China, the use of grocery delivery services increased, prompting a surge in single-use plastic bag consumption; the total area of plastic packaging used exceeded 3.648 million square metres, or the equivalent of 51 football fields.

It is also worth noting the indirect environmental and ecological impacts that result from an uptick in online food app use. Higher rates of ultra-processed food production require increased energy consumption, which directly fuels the climate crisis. Citing one example, production of energy-dense meat products in factory farms releases significant levels of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide, and CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) depend on the use of alarming rates of antibiotics that are stimulating antibiotic resistance in humans. Moreover, to create more farmland to meet a higher demand for meat products, large swaths of ecosystems are destroyed, which decreases the amount of land available to naturally capture carbon and thus mitigate the earth’s rising temperatures.

Some may cry hypocrisy given that I eat meat while I simultaneously criticize industrialized meat production. My problem, however, is not with eating meat, but with eating excessive amounts of meat from an ecologically unsustainable and exploitative system that harms animals and humans to make meat cheaper and more convenient. Eating meat every day throughout the year was rarely an option before industrialized agriculture. Now, however, it makes financial sense for restaurants and folks on a budget to purchase industrialized meat products that are kept artificially low in price for consumers to eat meat regularly. The price of industrialized meat products is kept artificially low by a handful or corporations that control significant portions of the food system.

This dynamic may seem counterintuitive, but in a capitalist economy it makes perfect profit-making sense: drive up consumer demand for cheaply made, energy-intensive, highly processed foods and suppress the true environmental and human costs associated with producing these goods. It’s true, alternatives are available—e.g., meat products from small-scale, regenerative farmers—but the costs associated with these types of products put them out of reach for most consumers. And more to the point, the resource-intensive capitalist economy in which our society is embedded requires stark class divides to keep it running—i.e., industrialized meat is cheap in part because labour within the sector is exploited. Put another way, those working in factory farms or abattoirs or driving cattle transports are typically not commuting to rural communities to buy happy chickens from small-scale farmers practicing regenerative agriculture.

Indeed, perusing an urban farmers’ market during the week to buy in-season vegetables or purchasing high-quality beef from an independent butcher are luxuries that are mostly inaccessible to families on a budget, such as single mothers working multiple jobs in the service sector. The suggestion here is not to say that only rich people should be able to afford meat, but it is to say that mass-scale access to cheap meat is ecologically unsustainable, and the effects of environmental degradation from industrialized meat production disproportionately impact people from socio-economically disadvantaged communities. It is paramount, therefore, to acknowledge that a progressive change in the food system—which includes a reduction in meat consumption generally and an assurance that people across class divides will have access to a healthy variety of proteins (animal or otherwise) that are culturally appropriate—requires a fundamental restructuring of our capitalist economy from one of intense resource extraction at the cost of humans, animals, and the planet to one that is grounded in ecological balance and redistribution of wealth.

It’s true that our food cultures have been radically altered over the past 50 years by a variety of factors: technological advancements in the agriculture sector; regulation and subsidies that favour the production of specific crops and animals; the increased availability of meat products and highly processed foods, colonialism; global supply chains that exploit low-income countries and benefit high-income countries, the introduction of supermarkets, and marketing efforts that, in addition to endlessly stimulating demand and shaping consumer tastes and expectations, make all these changes seem normal, healthy, and the preferred approach for future generations. It is also true that online food delivery apps further distort this relationship by promoting cheap food on demand.

The cards feel stacked against diet recalibration, particularly in high-income countries like Canada where excessive consumption of highly processed, unhealthy foods is an issue that was created by the prevailing economic system that relies on the exploitation of gig economy workers domestically (e.g., online food delivery drivers or seasonal farmers from abroad) and global food chains that disproportionately squeeze (both financially and ecologically) farmers in low-income countries (think palm sugar from Southeast Asia or cocoa from African and South American countries) to stimulate excessive demand. A systematic regulatory and communications approach, coupled with domestic and global economic reform, is required to alter sociocultural norms around food. No easy feat, to say the least. But there are plenty of policy measures that can move us in a more sustainable direction. A few examples include creating clear and concise messaging around the impact of the food we eat on ecosystems; launching public health campaigns regarding the benefits of more sustainable and localized diets; implementing price controls on healthy, nutritional, non-animal proteins such as legumes; providing subsidies to encourage farmers to transition away from monocropping and factory farming to agroecology models that function within ecosystems; taxing food waste; passing laws to protect precarious workers in the food industry; and placing controls on supplier and grocery profits to disincentivize consumer price gouging.

Demanding these types of policies from our elected officials will not be easy because corporations with tight control over our food system have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and deep pockets to lobby governments. But understanding how convenience food culture operates within a global agricultural and capitalist system to further distort our relationship with food and numb a fraction of the population to the abuses inflicted along food supply chains on people, animals, and ecologies is the first step toward building multi-disciplinary, intersectional coalitions and generating political pressure. At the same time, citizens and consumers, especially those with the privilege of economic security and time, have a responsibility to think critically about our current societal structure and the food choices we are presented with or excluded from.

What are we really doing with our extra time?

The collective “we” referenced throughout this article reflects class differences—the impacts of which are compounded by the intersectionality of race, gender, sexual orientation, and physical and cognitive abilities—that are entrenched by the prevailing economic system. On the one hand, exploitation of precarious workers in the online food delivery economy, and along the food supply chain more broadly, suppresses the real cost of the service provided and makes it more accessible to a greater number of people and increases profits to corporate shareholders. At the same time, many of the people working for these apps can rarely afford to use them, if at all, on the wages they earn from the delivery services they provide. Like many dynamics that play out in the service sector, those providing the service do not have access to its benefits. It is through this lens that I am advocating for thoughtful consideration by those who are in a position to think about their food choices and make purchases that are less exploitative along the food supply chain, and have the luxury of reflecting on their consumption habits within a capitalist culture that evangelizes buying more for less and endless production as the routes to happiness.

In our fast-paced, consumer culture, it may seem like ordering lunch and dinner several times a week, paying a premium for a personal grocery shopper, or having a meal-prep kit delivered to our doors is a savvy, efficient way to make room for tasks deemed more important. But whom do these more important tasks benefit? The collective “we” that makes up an entire society, or the “we” that benefits from the exploitation of the online food delivery economy? The use of these services, as they are currently structured, harm the workers that depend on the suppressed wages generated through an exploitative economic system that relies on precarious labour and environmental degradation.

The “we” that benefits from the system is losing, too, though. Lost are opportunities for connection that come from calling a friend or family member to inquire about a recipe, cooking technique, or a substitute for an ingredient. Moments of creative spice blending and learning through the failure of a burnt roast chicken are thwarted by step-by-step meal-prep kits that foster passive home cooking. The sensory experience of appreciating food and understanding where it comes from and who produces it—like the ritual of going to a farmers’ market or supermarket to pick out fresh vegetables or seeing what’s in stock at your local butcher—is numbed by an expectation that groceries will appear at your doorstep. Indeed, capitalist ideology leaves little space to question why some feel too busy to shop for food and cook a meal to nourish their bodies, too exhausted to meal plan or gather with friends to break bread, and too desensitized to condemn the reprehensible treatment of low-wage workers in the online food delivery sector and throughout the agricultural sector broadly. As I reflect on my time spent connecting over food with Zai in Malaysia, and all the wonderful culinary experiences I’ve been lucky to experience since then, I realize the question isn’t, “How can we who benefit disproportionately from the service economy gain more time throughout the day by negating things like grocery shopping and cooking?” Rather, the question is, “Why do we feel guilty for slowing down and prioritizing food?” And a follow-up question is, “Why doesn’t everyone have the privilege of slowing down to prioritize food?”

Cassandra Jeffery holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Global Affairs from the University of British Columbia and is the recipient of a Simons Award in Nuclear Disarmament and Global Security for research into the political economy of nuclear energy.