This futuristic food cart warns of a world soon to be underwater

On any given day, people stream through Toronto's Union Station, headed to work downtown or home to the suburbs. Some step off the train platform fresh from elsewhere, while others board the airport express, en route halfway around the world.

It wouldn't be unusual here in Canada's busiest transportation hub to find a vendor serving a snack or a souvenir to this bustle of travellers — but visitors passing through the West Wing may notice a scruffy little food cart that appears somehow out of place.

The curious stall offers prepackaged bricks of dehydrated river spinach as well as bagged meals of congee, with the reconstituted greens, fried shallots and fish sauce for seasoning. It also sells 6G SIM cards — as if from some not-so-distant future — belonging to major Asia Pacific telecoms. And its lightboxes advertise a currency exchange for Chinese yuan, Cambodian riel and Lao kip, as well as visa support services for those same countries.

Careful viewers will find the final clue as to what's going on here atop the stall's counter, where a map of Ho Chi Minh City — Vietnam's largest city — is reproduced, with much of its land stained green to indicate encroaching floodwaters. 

The food cart, titled Ration Market Special, is an installation by Toronto-based artist Alvin Luong. It responds to the 2021 leading consensus report and modelling by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which projects that large swathes of Vietnam will be uninhabitable due to rising sea levels by 2050. The artist imagines stalls just like this lining migration routes to serve a forthcoming wave of climate refugees as his friends and family leave Vietnam for safety.

Luong imagines Ration Market Special as a "low-end," potentially black market operation, where you'd stop for some quick sustenance, the gear to keep your phone up and running while crossing borders and "maybe to try your luck getting smuggled out of the country."

Luong began working with the river spinach, also known as morning glory, or rau muống in Vietnamese, as a symbol after a trip to visit family on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. The vegetable, which the artist describes as "delicious" and "crunchy" ("like a lighter watercress"), thrives in Vietnam's wet and humid conditions, growing wild even in urban centres — so much that locals consider it a weed. Luong asked his uncle if he ever picks it, because it's so tasty and also so prevalent. "But he said he doesn't," the artist explains, "because for him, it's actually triggering." In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the government distributed rations of river spinach. "So that's all he ate." 

It's the artist's hunch that because of how much cropland was bombed and sprayed with defoliants, like Agent Orange, the hardy and abundant river spinach became a dietary staple out of necessity. For Luong's uncle, it represents an era of intense scarcity and precariousness in Vietnam. And Luong redeploys the semi-aquatic vegetable, which can quickly invade floodplains, to portend another period of precarity that's fast approaching.

"My grandparents are refugees, my parents are refugees, and I have maybe felt at some point like I might be the first generation who will not be a refugee," Luong says. "For me, the tragedy is that there will probably be a third generation who will also be refugees." 

The artist does not call the work "dystopic," however. Rather, it's "a sober recognition of what's very likely to happen." In the West, he says, we think abstractly of climate change as "mass extinction events," but that misses the picture of everyday people finding the means to survive through an evolving crisis. Ration Market Special is a more "realistic and pragmatic" vision of our future; there will be a life that goes on — "even in the most rickety cart on the most terrible of human-smuggling routes" — and this might be a slice of what it looks like.  

Of course, Toronto is a long way from Ho Chi Minh City, but installed here in the mainest of Canadian transit hubs, Luong wants the artwork to "register in a way where people might think, 'I'm in a train station, and there could be people in a train station halfway across the world who are trying to get here.'" He adds that Toronto has thus far been relatively comfortable when it comes to the first-hand effects of warming, but inevitably, "climate pressure will become more and more of a lived reality" — even here.

Ration Market Special reminds its visitors that within the paradigms of both global ecology and international diasporas, no two places are so far apart as to be disconnected. Open for business at the nexus of our daily travels, the artist's cli-fi food cart suggests that the moves we make here today will impact the movements of others tomorrow. 

Alvin Luong's Ration Market Special is on view in Union Station's West Wing as part of the ArtworxTO exhibition "I am land that speaks" through October 2.