Aleisha Pannozzo

When designing food systems, we tend to focus on outcomes: reduced costs, tonnes of food delivered, or shifts in food insecurity rates. These metrics are important, but they can obscure a more fundamental question—why those problems exist in the first place. Food is not simply an economic good; it is tied to geography, culture, and survival. Yet over time, its provision has been increasingly outsourced to complex networks of government programs and private intermediaries.

I am grateful for Mercy For Animals’ work in highlighting the unacceptable lack of progress in cage-free hens in Canada, as outlined in their new report, Beyond the Commitment: Evaluating Cage-Free Progress Across the Canadian Retail Sector. As the report demonstrates, Canada’s percentage of cage-free hens (20%) lags behind global standards, including those of the US (45%), Australia (62%), and the EU (82%).

When we think about animal agriculture and its relationship with climate change, we think about its direct impacts on land use, on water usage, and maybe even on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. But in order to fully understand the severity of the current situation, we need to look at the impacts in a more holistic way.