Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp, eds., Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M.

Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp, eds.. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2012)

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-century 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 of hegemonic struggle. Catherine Gidney describes white student protests within University of Toronto dining halls of the first half of the 20th century, while Julie Mehta recounts her experiences using South Asian food to discuss cultural difference in present-day classrooms at the same institution. These two essays, in particular, will interest students who read this volume as a textbook in the growing ranks of Canadian university food history classes. Franca Iacovetta uncovers an early moment in Canadian multiculturalism, when middleclass Anglo women of the International Institute of Toronto sought to promote ethnic food as a non-threatening way of incorporating mid-century immigrants and refugees into the nation. By contrast, Julie Guard shows how radical women built a successful consumer protest movement during the Great Depression around that most iconic Anglo food, milk.

In a volume so deeply concerned with questions of labour and hegemony, the minor role given to corporate control of the Canadian food system is noteworthy. Nathalie Cooke analyses media debates over margarine to explain just how food processing corporations disappeared from both public and scholarly discourse, as the powerful dairy lobby sought to portray an idyllic rural landscape. And whereas scholars elsewhere in the Global North have revealed the connections between private firms, affluent consumer demands, and environmental degradation in former colonies, James Murton explains how the British Empire Marketing Board facilitated Canadian commodity exports. Although the chapter ends with World War II, it is particularly valuable in showing Commonwealth initiatives to be successful alternatives to privatized quality standards that are coming to dominate the global food system. An exception to this corporate invisibility is Cheryl Krasnick Warsh's photo-essay on advertisements for children's food in the early 20th century; she concludes that while promotional messages varied, a persistent theme was maternal guilt. Nevertheless, by the end of the century, mothers seemed to be disappearing, as advertisers targeted children directly as consumers.

The editors have done a splendid job of putting the chapters into conversation with one another, although the lack of an index makes it hard for readers to pursue these connections further. As an interdisciplinary field, food studies is often dominated by social sciences, anthropology in particular, and it is refreshing to see such historically grounded work. While the subtitle modestly points "towards a Canadian food history," this volume more properly celebrates the field's coming of age.

JEFFREY M. PILCHER

University of Minnesota