Each year, the Canadian Association for Food Studies presents awards for excellence: for outstanding student paper(s), and an award that rotates every year through one of the following:

Graduate Student Award Recipient

Margaret DeCoste grew up in Saskatchewan and received her BA in English and Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario. She is currently pursuing her MA in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Alberta, with Dr Helen Vallianatos as her supervisor. Her thesis focuses on Ukrainian-Canadian cooking and recipe sharing practices as means of identity creation in Saskatchewan.

Graduate Student Award Runner-up

Eric Schofield (he/him) is a white settler who lives with his partner and two daughters on the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking Songhees and Esquimalt nations. He is a culinary arts educator at Stelly’s secondary on the W̱SÁNEĆ territory, where he integrates food skilling education with sustainability, food rescue, Indigenous food sovereignty, and systems thinking. He is currently working on his Master’s thesis at Lakehead University, focusing on the opportunities that food skilling has for putting climate education into practice. When not cooking or doing research, Eric can be found paddling with his family, biking through farms on the peninsula, or hiking in the rainforest with his dog Maple.

Undergraduate Student Award 

Bavan Pushpalingam is an Eelam Tamil-Canadian scholar-activist and emerging researcher at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he studies Public Policy with minors in Food Studies and Urban Governance. His research focuses on food security, food sovereignty, and fair trade policies, with a particular emphasis on tea farmers in Sri Lanka and India, women-led agricultural movements in northern Ghana, and racialized youth in Scarborough.

Bavan’s work is grounded in bridging theory and practice, utilizing interdisciplinary methodologies and a community-centred approach to examine structural inequities in food systems. He has conducted field research in Sri Lanka, Ghana, Mexico, and India, exploring the intersections of governance, grassroots mobilization, and sustainable food policy. His work reflects a decolonial, justice-oriented approach to food systems, advocating for policy frameworks that center the agency and lived experiences of racialized and marginalized communities.

His research contributions have been recognized through multiple awards, including the University of Toronto Excellence Award, the Insights through Asia Research Scholarship, the Laidlaw Leadership and Research Scholarship, the Flight PS752 Commemorative Scholarship, the SDGs@UofT Student Research Award, and the Shastri Student Research Fellowship. As the Founder and President of the Scarborough Hub for Innovation and Public Policy (SHIPP), a think-and-do tank, Bavan is committed to fostering student-led policy research and civic engagement in his community.

He is an aspiring food studies scholar dedicated to advancing equity-driven research and policy solutions that challenge systemic barriers and create just, sustainable, and community-led food systems.

Award for Public Service & Activism

Rebecca MacLeod began her career as a policy analyst focused on climate change mitigation with Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada, while also working in the nonprofit sector researching the connections between community, belonging, and systemic change. Experiencing the growing need for change in a grocery sector emblematic of our food system’s biggest problems, she founded New Grocery Movement (NGM), a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to shifting power in the grocery sector back to the local level. Over the past five years, she has led NGM as Executive Director, growing the organization from a small group of passionate individuals into a strong team of young women helping to reimagine groceries across the country. When she is not working to localize the food system, you can find her on a dancefloor, or baking a pie for her small bakeware company, Pie Girl.