Studying Supper

We are living in a moment of intense gastronomic introspection.

Bestselling American books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals have stirred up feelings of profound unease about what is on our plates and how it got there. Since food production and distribution between our two countries are closely entwined, the anxiety about food seeps across the border.

The innocent era of Julia Child, who persuaded North Americans that food was a simple, unalloyed pleasure, whatever its source, environmental impact or nutritional content, cannot be brought back no matter how hard blogger Julie Powell and film maker Nora Ephron have tried.

It is not surprising, then, that a tasty branch of academic study is rapidly emerging to examine rigorously the history and meaning of our “foodways,” to use the lingo of the new discipline. Foodways have received sustained scholarly attention for the past two decades in the United States, where Warren Belasco, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, served up the first course in this interdisciplinary field with the publication of his study Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, in 1989 (reissued in 2006).

U.S. academics who have followed his lead include Sherrie Inness (Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food), Laura Shapiro (Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century), Harvey Levenstein (Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in America) and Donna Gabaccia of the University of North Carolina (We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans). The University of California Press now issues a series under the rubric “California Studies in Food and Culture” to accommodate the swelling tide of such scholarship. The series has included histories of ice cream in the U.S., of French table service and of medieval cuisine in the Islamic world.

A new essay collection from McGill-Queen’s University Press, What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History, is the first Canadian book to subject our food culture to this type of examination. Edited by Nathalie Cooke of McGill University, it grew out of a 2005 conference titled “The Daily Meal in Canada” at the McCord Museum in Montreal.

The twelve essays range from meaty subjects such as the nutritional status of First Nations people to a cream puff—“Dishing Dad: ‘How to Cook a Husband’ and Other Metaphorical Recipes”— which deals with a tongue-in-cheek set of instructions to wives on how to handle their mates. Here is a sampling: “Make a clear, steady fire out of love, neatness and cheerfulness … Add a little sugar, in the form of what confectioners call kisses, but no vinegar or pepper of any account.”

This “recipe” was reprinted, according to research by Gary Draper, a retired English professor at St. Jerome’s University, in no fewer than 22 Canadian cookbooks in the first half of the 20th century. “‘How to Cook a Husband’,” Draper argues, “both celebrates and subverts the gender roles that operate in the kitchen.” I find the intentions of its unknown author less benign than does Draper. Surely an anti-male rage hovers behind the alarming instruction not to “stick any sharp instruments into him [the husband] to see if he is becoming tender.” When you warn someone not to do something, it is generally because you sense her desire to do it.

Sarah Musgrave, a food journalist and graduate student in media studies at Concordia University, contributes an absorbing and highly original essay titled “Grain Elevated: The Fall and Rise of Red Fife Wheat.”

As Musgrave observes, Red Fife opened the West, laid the foundation for the railroad and helped make Canada a leading grain exporter. A hard spring wheat, it appears to have arrived here accidentally in 1842 from the Ukraine, mixed into a shipment of winter wheat originating in Poland or Germany. The shipment ended up in the hands of David Fife, a farmer in Cobourg, Ontario, who was surprised to see ruddy, robust heads of grain pop up in the early spring. Fife’s wheat made its way to the American midwest, until Manitoba farmers asked for some of it back a few decades later. It turned out to be the first wheat that could push back prairie grasses and thrive in the harsh climate of the prairies.

Yet by 1950, this iconic grain, an authentic Canadian foodstuff, had disappeared, replaced by higher-yield upstarts. Today, even if farmers can obtain enough Red Fife for seeding, they will have difficulty selling it and getting it milled because the Canadian Wheat Board does not recognize it and neither does the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

But the story does not end there. I was thrilled by Musgrave’s account of how a few contrarian farmers in Antigonish in Nova Scotia, Woodstock in New Brunswick, Hastings in Ontario and Cranbrook in British Columbia—“pockets of resistance to encroaching agribusiness,” she calls them—are bringing back Red Fife from near-extinction with the help of agronomist Sharon Rempel and her seed orphanage operated by the Canadian Heritage Wheat Project.

Stone-ground Red Fife wheat has a nutty flavour that has won over the Italian-based slow food movement. Slow food has chosen Red Fife for its “Ark of Taste,” an imaginary rescue ship for the nearly forgotten flavours of the past. Musgrave predicts that the revival of Red Fife has potential economic, political and social implications for the entire country. She does not explain exactly how and why Red Fife was superseded, and I hope she will go on to expand her essay into a book that will tell the full story.

Food links us to the land, which makes the damaged foodways of Canada’s Native population particularly poignant. “Stories of Traditional Aboriginal Food, Territory and Health,” by Margery Fee, traces the changes in the aboriginal diet due to the loss of access to hunting lands and fishing rivers, the disrupted transmission of traditional knowledge about fruits and edible plants, the changes in diet from mostly wild meats and fresh or dried fish, corn, squash and anti-oxidant berries to the starchy, sugary store-bought modern foods that have so devastated the health of First Nations people.

Before the 1940s, diabetes was virtually unknown among First Nations; now among the Mohawk (to name one closely examined group), 75 percent of people over the age of 35 have some type of abnormal glucose tolerance.

Fee, an English professor at the University of British Columbia, quotes Mary John, a woman of the Carrier nation of B.C., whose remarkable story was told by Bridget Moran in the 1988 book Stoney Creek Woman: “I was always hungry,” Mary John said of her time in residential school in the 1920s. “I missed the roast moose, the fish fresh from the frying pan, the warm bread and bannock and berries. Oh how I missed the food I used to have in my own home. At school it was porridge, porridge, porridge.”

Other essays in What’s to Eat? trace the early history of chocolate in Canada, the origins of the elaborate tourtières of the Saguenay region of Quebec; the evolution of Thanksgiving, initially celebrated at the same time as in the U.S., but pushed back to October after World War One when Remembrance Day in November was instituted; and a look at Canadian cookbooks by Mme. Benoit, Sondra Gotlieb, Pierre and Janet Berton, and Elizabeth Baird that attempted to create a national culinary heritage after Expo ’67.

All the pieces are interesting, but it is Margery Fee’s essay on the changes in Native nutrition that proves beyond a doubt that food studies are a powerful new lens through which to view our history and make sense of our world.