Working with Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the purpose of this paper is to argue that food advertisements and packaging work to further obfuscate the social, economic, and environmental relations behind the animal products and by-products consumed in Canada and the United States. The paper discusses the socio-ecological implications of the animal-industrial complex and employs a critical discourse analysis to examine how advertisements for animal products and by-products function as sites of public pedagogy to obscure these adverse effects. Finally, this paper outlines a vision of critical food pedagogies that both ‘removes the veil’ (Hudson & Hudson, 2003) and addresses the underlying generative framework that drives our relationship with an industrial food system

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Winter, E., (2025), "Obscuring the Veil: Food Advertising as Public Pedagogy", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v7i1.377)

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1. advertising
2. animal-industrial complex
3. Commodity fetishism
4. Critical Food Pedagogies
5. public pedagogy

Original publication: Winter, Ellyse. "Obscuring the Veil: Food Advertising as Public Pedagogy." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 126-153. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v7i1.377. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.