Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History ed. by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, Marlene Epp (review)

The cultural politics of food has recently become an international focus of both popular discussion and historical research, and this collection puts Canada at the centre of this trend. The volume began with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded workshop at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, in 2008. (In the interest of full disclosure, I gave a keynote address at that conference.) The editors have organized the essays according to eight themes: cross-cultural exchange, regional identities, ethnic and racial communities, gender and family, commodities and markets, food politics, national identities, and nutritional health. I can think of no comparable work in any national historiography comprising such a broad range of cutting-edge research in the field of food studies.

Two topics that recur throughout the volume and may be of particular interest to readers of this journal are labour and hegemony. The early chapters on European settlement and regional cuisines examine histories of farming and food production, and particularly efforts to impose European standards of civilization on native landscapes. Alison Norman, Julia Roberts, and Megan J. Davies show how English notions of genteel dining, including native game and imported wine, depended on gendered and racialized labour. By contrast, Maura Hanrahan examines the intensive demands of the Newfoundland fisheries and the “boil-up” that became an expression of a working-class regional identity. Contributors also emphasize the importance of recognizing the value of labour. For example, Marlene Epp shows how Mennonite community cookbooks served as public testimonials of the domestic labour of women, who were excluded from other forms of church and community participation such as sermons. Sonia Cancian offers a feminist analysis of generational expectations for domestic labour within immigrant families. Younger Italian-Canadian women sought accomplishment outside the home but nevertheless internalized traditional gender roles of feeding their families. As Molly Pulvar Ungar shows, Canadian hotel chefs likewise sought public recognition for the haute cuisine they served to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during the Royal Tour of 1939. Overall, the contributors to this volume provide nuanced accounts of the cultural politics of domestic and restaurant kitchens, but there is relatively little discussion of the industrial labour that has increasingly come to define food production over the 20th century.

A second basic theme appearing repeatedly in this volume is the contested nature of Anglo culinary hegemony, for the editors are careful to disclaim any notion of a Canadian national cuisine. Cultural struggles began already with the European settlers’ simultaneous dependence on Indigenous cooks and foods and their attempts to transform those people and foods. Canadian food identities have continued to change over time with immigrant arrivals and political transitions. Caroline Durand, for example, uses rural home economics textbooks to examine mid-20th-centur y tensions within Catholic-French-Canadian nationalism. Andrea Eidinger likewise reveals how a popular Jewish cookbook, A Treasure for My Daughter (1950), sought to normalize a particular version of middle-class Jewish-Israeli-Canadian identity. Stacey Zembrzycki and S. Holyck Hunchuk separately discuss food memories in Ukrainian-Canadian consciousness. Michel Desjardins and Ellen Desjardins chart the changing patterns of food and religiosity within Canadian Christian communities. Catherine Carstairs reconstructs the culinary education of Canada’s counterculture movement. Finally, Valerie Korinek examines struggles over culinary and sexual hegemony when country singer, k.d. lang, born in the Alberta cattle country, came out of the closet, first as a vegetarian and then as a lesbian.

In addition to the personal politics of culinary identity, the contributors also examine more institutional struggles over Canadian food habits. Ian Mosby and Krista Walters contribute to the emerging field of critical nutrition studies by showing how scientific efforts to impose dietary norms – Canada’s Food Rules promulgated in the 1940s and an Aboriginal nutrition survey of the 1960s and 1970s, respectively – sought to control working-class and minority populations. Universities also appear as important locations...