The Gastronomical Us

Every animal needs to eat, but no human being can, as the Old Testament has it, live on bread alone. We require more than mere calories. We require narrative, meaning, significance. What we eat (not to mention when, where and with whom) is more than fuel for persisting as an organism—it is foundational to who we are.

And who are we, then? According to Lenore Newman, Canada Research Chair in food security and professor of geography at the University of the Fraser Valley, we Canadians are—wait for it—people who learned to eat in a manner that makes it a little less horrible to live in a place where it is cold pretty much all of the time. In Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey, Newman travels across the country to examine how this vast land and its history have influenced our national relationship to the rituals of the meal. Her research leads her to advance a tentative notion of a Canadian cuisine, primarily as a food culture built from “wild...