defining canadian cuisine

unravelling the colonial legacy that shapes a lack of self-consciousness in canadian culinary identities

A content note: This essay contains discussion and reference to violence against Indigenous Peoples and the residential school system in Canada.

When asked to define “Canadian cuisine,” it is a common reflex to make a quick joke about poutine or Nanaimo bars and move right along. It is a question that has remained unsatisfactorily answered across cookbooks, blogs, and classrooms. Yet there is a reason for that, I think, in how we came to be a nation-state, and the role that food played to fracture relationships between land, people, and history.

While defining a national cuisine is complicated, it is also powerful: it is created, maintained, or disrupted based on sociopolitical dynamics. Those who hold power can shape foodways based on their politics and preferences, while those who have been stripped of power must fight to maintain their cultural legacies and knowledges through food. Sidney Mintz in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, outlines that cuisines can be related to the ongoing foodways of a region, where food is shaped into coherent narratives that only emerge from a sense of self-consciousness. In the Canadian context, food writer Dr. Sarah Elton has questioned whether we actually have that self-consciousness needed to define the particularities of our national cuisine.  

This month and next are important in our discussions of nation-state identities and food in Canada: June is National Indigenous History Month, June 21^st is National Indigenous People’s Day, and July 1^st is Canada Day. With that, I wanted to unpack these disconnected identity politics and jokes that shape our collective discussions around “Canadian foods.” I’m most focused today on what colonial legacies and policies have allowed for a fractured national identity to be maintained in contemporary foodscapes in complex ways.

Photo by Bryce olsen on Unsplash

geographic and culinary diversity

By area, Canada is the second largest country in the world at 9,984,670 kilometres squared, inclusive of land and waters (or 3,855,101 miles squared for my American friends). Part of the challenge in maintaining a national culinary identity is this vastness of land and its accompanying ecosystem diversity. We have arctic tundra, mountain ranges, rainforests, prairie and sand dunes, the Canadian Shield (granite rockiness), bogs and swamps, forest plateaus, maritime highlands, deep river canyons, and steep coastal cliffs. Across these landscapes, available foods are augmented by regionality, seasonality, and climate change.

FEAST cookbook authors Lindsay Anderson and Dana Vanveller travelled across all ten provinces and three territories to unpack the complexities of Canadian cuisine, noting that:

“It’s true that no one dish represents every last part of Canada, but how could it, and why would we want it to? Canada is huge! There are simply too many cultures and kilometres to find one convenient answer, and that’s okay – it’s a complicated country. But there is such a thing as Canadian food, and it’s broad, and diverse, and so, so compelling.”

Compelling is the right word to define how fractured our national identity is. When painting a fulsome picture (or as fulsome as you can in a short essay, I suppose!), it’s important to look at how history, present, and future weave together. During the formation of Canada, settlers were positioned to specific regions for farmland, which coincided with areas that Indigenous Peoples were forcibly removed from. Governmental efforts committed cultural genocide in support of a “national mosaic,” a term we learn in history class to define us against America’s “melting pot.” These inform how we see our geographies today, too.

To crudely summarize the complexity of regional food styles is perhaps a fool’s errand, though I’ve tried to show just a fraction of it. The Maritimes serve visions of buttery lobsters, crabs, seafood chowders, berries and cream, and spiced rum. Quebec is smoked meat sandwiches, Montreal-style bagels, sugar pies, maple syrup, croissants, and poutine. Ontario is fried perch, sweet corn, peaches, regional wines from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Chinese ginger beef, roti and Jamaican patties, and beavertails (the dessert, not actual beaver). The prairies are mustard and sunflower seeds, canola oil, Red Fife flour, pierogi, and ice bars. Alberta (while still in the prairies) is all meat and oil (I’m sorry, Canadian-Texas!). The west coast is Nanaimo bars, coho and chinook salmon, green juices, sea asparagus, huckleberries and salmonberries. And if you’re lucky enough to make it to the arctic, there are fireweed jellies and birch syrups, Gold Rush-vestiges of sourdough loaves, arctic char, boreal barbecues, and incredible Ethiopian food (in Yellowknife, if you’re wondering).

Food researcher Dr. Lenore Newman explores the complexities of Canadian cuisine definitions in Speaking in Cod Tongues, arguing that Canadian cuisine is heavily regional and dominated by a focus on ingredients-first, as well as what she frames as “wild foods.” With this unique focus in framing a national cuisine based on ingredient rather than the narrative of particular dishes or terroir, Newman understands this as a reflection of our dedication to the land. She notes that it is “perhaps our short tenure as a nation” that “contributes to our limited cannon of truly Canadian recipes.” While there are reconciliation efforts attempting to make sense of this hefty range in food and culinary tradition, the complexity can be overwhelming to pinpoint quickly. And from that there are fractures, which sometimes mean that we shift our focus to easier commodities that speak to brand-name nationalism.

neoliberalism and processed foods

Celebrities provide a good frame of reference during interviews for what surface level foods are deemed uniquely Canadian: they mention Caesars (the drink), ketchup or all-dressed chips, poutine, Kraft Dinner (mac and cheese), and the Tim Hortons double-double (that’s a coffee with two creams and two sugars). What always strikes me in these hokey responses is how processed and industrial these examples are. Sure, they are shared national experiences, but they are devoid of recipe-crafting. One need not call their grandparent to ensure they get the ingredient ratios to make KD when you can pluck a box from a store with ease.

A recent Thread went viral asking why Canadians are so glued to Tim Hortons when it is now owned by a Brazilian company. I reasoned that it’s due to the entanglement of small-town Canadian mythologies around hockey and coffee: Tim Horton was a hockey player, who went on to start a restaurant with Ron Joyce in the 1970s that sold donuts and coffee. It was Canadian, and anyone that grew up in smaller or rural areas knows that it was one of very few places you could get fast coffees, bagels, and donuts at 5 in the morning for a long time across Canada (and always under $10).

While it’s not Canadian-owned anymore, it represents a general attitude around Canadian cultural foods: something that perhaps was once relating to our land, cultural activities, and northern climate and now is so far removed that we can only cling to the stories that surround the item itself. Memories of popping back timbits after sledding on a snow day shape a nostalgia I have for a Canadian idyll, yet they don’t speak to any story about the land and its wealth of resources.

This is what makes the fracturing feel so intentional: in setting up nation-state-shop on unceded Indigenous lands, efforts were made to remove the relationship between people and nature. Federal policies maintain this, through the Indian Act and subsequent policy vacuums that maintain a water crisis for First Nations communities and dilute the fiduciary responsibilities of the government. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) controls who gets to fish and when with fishing windows, rebuking the fishing practices of Indigenous Peoples since time immemorial. These windows enforce when Indigenous Peoples are “allowed” to fish for food, social, and ceremonial purposes, but only if they are federally recognized reserve or Nation. The same goes for hunting and trapping practices, maintaining firearm restrictions while ignoring alternative traditional ways to hunt or trap waterfowl.

where bison do or don’t roam

When people are removed from their land, culture, language, knowledge, and identity are taken from a community as well. Canada is only 157 years old this year (though settler-colonialism began long before that with the colonization of “New France” in the 1500s). Within this, attempts to decimate Indigenous Knowledge were enacted through policy and environmental dispossession, where Indigenous Peoples were forcibly placed onto reserve systems and children removed from their families to go to Indian Residential Schools.

For a settler that moved to Canada on the promise of farming free available land, how can one know when to watch for fiddleheads, or which indicator species to use to affirm that the land is healthy? Those that have acquired that knowledge were forced away from it, rupturing the balance of land, people, and health. Instead of knowledge sharing, the land was and continues to be extracted for resourcing and profit.

Take the example of prairie grass and canola oil:

The crop is a derivative of rapeseed, grown by Polish immigrants in the Canadian prairies during the 1930s. After World War 2, a global demand for oil pushed the development of Canola oil. Today’s canola production in Canada is valued at around $29.9 billion (in terms of economic activity per year) and highlighted as an important national industry for sustainable jobs across multiple industries.

Canola oil grows across central and mid-west Canada, a place where tall-grass prairies and savanna are now some of the most endangered ecosystems. Bison, or buffalo, were critical species needed to maintain the prairie tall-grass ecosystem, with their populations across Canadian prairies estimated to be around 5 to 6 million in the early 19^th century. But the species has been on the verge of ecological extinction since the late 1800s, with two thirds of the total population had been decimated by the 1860s due to high colonial demand for pemmican (dried bison meat), maintained through the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company (today known as The Bay department store).

Bison help to create habitats for hundreds of prairie species to develop strong, healthy, diverse prairie ecosystems. Heavy agricultural use of prairie lands in the late 1800s onward has meant that about 80 percent of mixed grass prairie has disappeared. With that, the quality and health of soil in the land (needed for our current staple crops, like canola) is reduced drastically. Indigenous bison rehabilitation efforts note the importance of bison being able to move freely across the land, as this allows them to reintroduce nutrients and spread seeds as they essentially… eat and shit across the tall grass. In Manitoba, Sioux Valley Dakota Nation has recently cancelled some of their agricultural leases to purposefully reclaim grassland and prairie ecosystems:

“We should be protecting our land. We should be very conscious of the footprint and the things we're leaving behind and the things we're creating.”

Rehabilitation efforts come at a time where Canada has been (somewhat) reckoning with the idea of reconciliation. The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Committee put forward concrete, tangible actions for anyone living in Canada to access and apply across our daily lives and industries. The 94 calls to action have been clumsily implemented, but align with a shift in how settler-Canadians have been identifying their sense of cultural foods as well.

wild foods in a vacuum  

It seems interesting timing that as we have more national conversations about the history and continued harmful actions of Canada against Indigenous Peoples, we are collectively reconfiguring what it means to be Canadian through the foods we write and romanticize about.

What I mean is this: Indigenous Peoples have been forced through the residential school system, during which time scientists conducted unthinkable nutritional experimentation on Indigenous youth. This experimentation has been heavily researched by Dr. Ian Mosby. The federal government saw the pervasive hunger and malnutrition experience by Indigenous Peoples living on reserves in the 1940s and 1950s as an opportunity to test scientific theories around recommended intakes for vitamins and minerals. Led by Lionel Pett, these unethical practices, with no informed consent, serve as the foundation for modern nutritional science in Canada.

These were part of a broader federal social experiment on Indigenous diets, where government aimed at transforming Indigenous diets to align with racist understandings of superior nutrition. The important through line that Mosby identified was that Pett was not only the leader of these horrific experiments, but also the primary author of Canada’s first food guide, Canada’s Official Food Rules.

Mosby identified these connections as shaping the questions we still ask of Canada’s food guide today:

"Pett used the opportunity of hungry kids in residential schools … who had no choice in what they were going to eat and whose parents had no choice in what they were going to eat … You can draw a direct line between the types of experiments that were being done in residential schools and these larger debates about how they should structure the food guide." 

With more recent revamps of Canada’s food guide, there is a soft focus on culturally appropriate foods for diverse immigrant and newcomer communities, and an Indigenous-specific food guide. But rather than tackling the atrocities and settler complicity within modern food guide discussions directly, there has been a shift to focus instead on the idea of “wild” foods as central to all Canadian identities.

Through cookbooks and academic literature, wild foods are identified as central to the shaping of Canadian cuisine, but in a way that allows for feigned ignorance of history. I don’t mean to imply that these efforts are entirely wasted, but this framing presents traditional Indigenous foods as foods in a landscape devoid of violence. They remove the diverse Indigenous names for their traditional foods, and how these words speak to their relationship to land, waters, plants, and animals. Instead, we are presenting them as wild, untouched in a perfectly preserved natural environment. It’s as though we as a nation did not spend centuries enacting cultural genocide, and these foods are magically available and without storied history.  

Academics and settler-foragers alike have taken renewed interest in foods like wild rice, a food grown traditionally in lakes. Around my hometown of Peterborough, there is now an annual Mnoominkewin gathering to celebrate wild rice and Indigenous food sovereignty efforts at Curve Lake First Nation. Mnoomin is the Anishinaabemowin word for wild rice, which has begun to be restored thanks to efforts by people like James Whetung of Curve Lake. Whetung has been planting and harvesting mnoomin in and around the many lakes of the Kawarthas for nearly 40 years, such as Buckhorn, Pigeon, and Chemong. These rice beds run through the Trent-Severn Water system and have helped to support the local ecosystems and remove pollutants from the water.

In turn, cottagers of the Kawarthas have been complaining about these restoration efforts for just as long, trying to remove mnoomin on claims of it being an eyesore. These efforts are purely aesthetic, to maintain pristine waterfront homes and swimming areas, which feels trite in comparison to the efforts to resiliently maintain sacred food sources that have fed and served the livelihoods for Anishnaabemowin Peoples for thousands of years. The original removal of mnoomin represents the larger fracture of Canadian cuisines, in that it prioritizes settler use of land as a place of aesthetics and leisure rather than as foodway, culture, and knowledge.

When placed together, it feels disingenuous to play service to the Canadian cuisine without the painful history acknowledged all at once. And perhaps that could be written off as human nature, skirting the pain, grief, and intergenerational trauma caused. But that is what I think maintains this lack of self-consciousness throughout our discussions of national cuisine, an unwillingness to acknowledge why regionalities and ingredients have been disaggregated in the first place.

---

Thank you for reading! You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out AnthroDish podcast on iTunes and Spotify.

Paid Subscriber News

This month’s paid subscriber interview is out on July 14th. It will be a transcript from a conversation with Dr. Jo Weaver on the theme of sugar and tension, and her research with women in New Delhi negotiate type 2 diabetes diagnoses with the many demands of their families, communities, and gendered daily experiences.

Newsletter Updates

In case you missed some of the recent essays, here’s a snapshot of some of what I’ve been exploring and thinking about the last few weeks:

• What’s in a Boycott? On the Loblaws Canada boycott, monopolies, and long-term food future accountability.

• Pregnancy in the Time of Healthism Abundance: How pregnancy fitness influencers, algorithms, and trad-wives almost broke me this pregnancy.

• The Cultural Consequences of Oatzempic: How a TikTok food trend situates appetite, body, and cultural food values.