by
Anne Marie Lane Jonah
Parks Canada
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Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, Marlene Epp (eds.), Edible Histories, And Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. University of Toronto Press, 2012, 456 pages. ISBN 978-1-4426-1283-9, $34.95 (paperback)
In this substantial volume of multidisciplinary studies of food in Canada, the editors begin with a thorough and frank introduction outlining the promise and pitfalls of this burgeoning field of research. They address the increasing popularity of food as a subject in popular films, literature, and social media, as well as in scholarly study. Acknowledging at the outset that “Canadian food” is impossible to define, they do not set out to create a “Canadian culinary tradition or history,” but to explore “Canada’s diverse food cultures” from the research perspectives of their large group of contributors. The editors have organized the twenty-three essays into eight categories: contact zones, regional identities, ethnic groups, gender, commodities, politics and protests, national identities, and marketing or prescriptive programs. They also provide the background of the symposium that brought together this diverse group of scholars and their equally diverse works: some longer essays, others shorter case studies.
In their introduction the editors offer an excellent review of important recent Canadian food history publications, including, What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History, edited by Nathalie Cooke for McGill Queens University Press in 2009. Edible Histories can be considered a companion piece to What’s to Eat? as the editors of both works sought to bring Canadian culinary histories into the growing international conversation about food by engaging a group of Canadian scholars in a workshop on food history and then publishing their collected papers. While the 2009 volume contains earlier and perhaps more coastal works, Edible Histories is more central and prairie-driven and strongly 20th century: only two essays are pre-20th century (both 19th century), one essay addresses Atlantic Canada (Newfoundland), one British Columbia, and only two focus on francophone Quebec. Clearly there is much more research to be done in the many regions of Canada. Of course the editors of Edible Histories did not claim or aim to be representative or definitive, but are situating this work in a historiography in its early years, with a long way to go.
The history of foodways in Canada brings attention to sites of encounter, of exchange and adaptation, or of dominance and oppression. Food production, service and consumption are also crucial sites, if not at the centre, of gender history. As Marlene Epp wrote in her essay on Mennonite cookbooks, “For the first generation of immigrants in Canada, regardless of which historical era saw them arrive, foodways were the site at which old and new worlds met” (p. 174). Different essayists explore women’s roles as keepers of their culture and as the central figure in the process of adaptation and survival, instrumental to the well-being of the family. From an examination of Catherine Parr Traill’s experiences in Upper Canada to a study of Quebec school girls in the mid-20th century, we see women either empowered or oppressed by this role. The weight of this responsibility kept Quebec girls in their places, or was meant to, whereas, in discussing the community power of female keepers of (culinary) culture in Toronto’s south-Asian community, Julie Mehta communicates a sense of a positive aspect of this role for immigrant women by citing one student’s revelation, “I understand why my grandmother insists I eat her gheeladen rotis and converse only in Punjabi …” (p. 157). Other authors examine the fight of women’s organizations for fair food prices and safety, and the skill of immigrant and Aboriginal women in making do with little, highlighting the capacity of studies centred on food to valorise women’s agency.
As one reads through the collection, the tensions between second-wave feminism and health food advocates, marketers, and the proponents of traditional cultural expression emerge. Essays on Jewish and Italian families in Montreal in the 1950s to 1970s directly address the conflict between feminism and the role of women in ethnic cultural survival. Sonia Cancian writes that for post second-wave Italian women the “… responsibility for the task of ‘feeding the family’ has become a question of negotiation, rather than an assumption. This is indicative of the profound impact that second-wave feminism has had on the division of labour in Canadian households, immigrant or otherwise” (p. 216-17). Addressing another side of the immigrant experience, Franca Iacovetta looks at the history of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s, a post-war, Anglo-Canadian women’s group, to examine their belief that, in a changing world, food was “a comparatively safe site on which to negotiate Canada’s growing ethnic diversity” (p. 360). Studying the process of adapting foodways to a changing world and changing environment, whether physical or cultural, and the resulting tensions with desires to sustain identity and/ or traditional sociability raises profoundly complex and gendered issues that are crucial to any understanding of our ‘nation of immigrants.’
In some of the essays the focus is on food as a commodity: its production, distribution and sale, and efforts to prescribe or direct food choices. Studies of efforts to create and regulate markets, prescribe (and judge) consumption, and to manipulate consumer behaviour provide insight into the processes and ideologies behind the actions of governments, food-producing businesses and collective organizations, and of scientists and theoreticians in nutrition. The language of class, culture, and gender bias found in government communications, marketing campaigns, nutrition studies, and in the writings of health food advocates reveal the cultural and social forces that shape our relationship with, and understanding of, food. This group of essays touches on the process of new identities being constructed through responses to new food ideas and choices.
The role of food producer, also fundamental to many Canadian identities, is addressed in several essays. I was struck by the powerful juxtaposition of the controversy created in cattle country by k. d. lang’s open vegetarianism (and homosexuality) followed by an examination of the meanings behind the menu of the 1939 royal visit. All of these historical moments of Canada—of encounter, of evolving and growing government, of belief or doubt in the power of science, and of changing gender roles—come together in the history of the Canadian government’s relationship with Aboriginal peoples. The first essays in the collection described settler and First Nations encounters, introducing the disconnect between North American and European foodways. Krista Walters, in her essay on the methods and results of a federal government nutrition survey of the 1970s, addresses how Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, alienated from their traditional food sources and foodways, were measured and judged by the Canadian government.
Food history provides valuable new perspectives on many experiences of the evolving Canadian society. Long a powerful tool for the presenters of history to draw in visitors into historic places, it can be merely nostalgic when focussing on recreating past food experiences without analyzing the cultural significance of the ingredients used, the social and gender importance of the relationships of producing and consuming, and the ecological impact of this consumption. In these essays food history provides an accessible entry, often beginning with personal experience, into complex questions of social, cultural, gender, and environmental history. A collection like this can lend itself to picking and choosing, depending on one’s specialization or question, but I strongly advocate reading the entire work. Although the essays cover a very wide range of subjects, questions unanswered in one essay rise again in another, so that a cumulative discussion of several key questions unfolds. As the papers came from a workshop, the authors speak to each other’s works, strengthening the collective arguments. Creating one coherent work from this wide range of studies, the editors have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the role of food history in Canada and, through it, of Canadian society.
We thank Clara Bachmann for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 22 March 2020
