Krista Macaulay is a community researcher and planner working in agriculture and food systems. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Geography at Simon Fraser University supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) – Doctoral Scholarship. Her research positions food as a lens to uncover how market logics organize land, labour, and livelihoods. She is most interested in what food systems reveal about the institutional and ideological dynamics shaping how people understand, negotiate, and enact their daily lives, and the kinds of transformations this makes possible. These interests emerge from over a decade of interdisciplinary practice, including her role as Principal and member-owner of Tapestry Collective Co-op, a worker-owned planning and research firm. Through Tapestry, Krista collaborates with non-profit organizations, Indigenous communities, private partners, and governments on food security, conservation, land use, and community development. This work includes building food policy frameworks, supporting regional food hubs, and navigating the planning and governance spaces where food, land, and livelihoods intersect. Her research and practice are rooted in the communities she is part of and accountable to, grounded in collective imagining where “thinking otherwise” is tested, negotiated, and built into everyday life.
Of Meat and Meaning: Capitalism, care, and the politics of possibility in BC’s cattle country
Food is more than sustenance; it is a mirror of how we live, relate, and imagine the world. This research follows beef in British Columbia to understand how food, land, and labour are reorganized through capitalist markets, and how people, livelihoods, and communities manage the contradictions this produces. Ranching has long anchored regional economies and rural life, yet its future is increasingly precarious. Rising feed and land costs, volatile markets, processor consolidation, and climate-driven drought and fire strain an already fragile sector. At the same time, beef carries a charged cultural weight: for some, it signifies heritage, autonomy, and land-based identity; for others, it symbolizes ecological crisis and overconsumption. These tensions reveal core contradictions of capitalism, where value and virtue are continually redefined through markets and where survival depends on systems that undermine their own socio-ecological foundations.
Beef is therefore not only a commodity but also ideological terrain where people negotiate their relationships to land, labour, and one another. Its meanings shift across urban and rural contexts—from the wellness-driven revival of tallow and “nose-to-tail” eating, to ranching as stewardship and identity, to the political economy of vegetarianism and moral markets. By following cattle through supply chains across the Cariboo-Chilcotin, Thompson, and Fraser Valley regions, this project examines how meanings travel and how risk, care, and cooperation are lived within both global agribusiness and rural imaginaries.
The research has four objectives: map the material flows of cattle and beef across BC to show how local production intersects with global systems; document lived experience through interviews with ranchers, processors, and policymakers; analyze the cultural and moral meanings of beef as both commodity and symbol; and identify leverage points for policy and practice that strengthen regional processing, community resilience, and ecological care.
This project will clarify how global food-system pressures are felt and reworked in rural BC. Through collaborative return of findings—presentations, visual maps, and policy briefs—it will support practical decision-making and strengthen relationships between policymakers and communities. More broadly, the project reframes food as a social and ecological system, offering new ways to envision more equitable and sustainable futures.
