Canadian Literary Fare 9780228018018

Table of contents :
Cover
CANADIAN LITERARY FARE
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE VIGNETTES: METAPHORS AND FOOD VOICES
1 Iconic Foods
2 Cultural Identity
3 Place and the Land
PART TWO LITERARY FOODWAYS
4 Kraft Dinner: National Staple as Substitute
5 Human Connections in the Literary Marketplace
6 Re/Turning Points: Bison Narratives
Conclusion: Perhaps an Orange with Your Tea?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

C A N A D I A N L I T E R A RY FA R E

CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES

The Carleton Library Series publishes books about Canadian economics, geography, history, politics, public policy, society and culture, and related topics, in the form of leading new scholarship and reprints of classics in these fields. The series is funded by Carleton University, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and is under the guidance of the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board, which consists of faculty members of Carleton University. Suggestions and proposals for manuscripts and new editions of classic works are welcome and may be directed to the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board c/o the Library, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S 5B6, at [email protected], or on the web at www .carleton.ca/cls. cls board members: John Clarke, Ross Eaman, Jennifer Henderson, Paul Litt, Laura Macdonald, Jody Mason, Stanley Winer, Barry Wright 252 Anxious Days and Tearful Nights Canadian War Wives during the Great War Martha Hanna 253 Take a Number How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement Elisabeth Gidengil 254 Mrs Dalgairns’s Kitchen Rediscovering “The Practice of Cookery” Edited by Mary F. Williamson 255 Blacks in Canada A History, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition Robin W. Winks 256 Hall-Dennis and the Road to Utopia Education and Modernity in Ontario Josh Cole 257 University Women A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada Sara Z. MacDonald

258 Canada to Ireland Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism, 1788-1900 Michele Holmgren 259 Harriet’s Legacies Race, Historical Memory, and Futures in Canada Edited by Ronald Cummings and Natalee Caple 260 Regulatory Failure and Renewal The Evolution of the Natural Monopoly Contract, Second Edition John R. Baldwin 261 Trade and Commerce Canada’s Economic Constitution Malcolm Lavoie 262 Eye of the Master Figures of the Québécois Colonial Imaginary Dalie Giroux Translated by Jennifer Henderson 263 Canadian Literary Fare Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd, with Alexia Moyer

C A N A D I A N L I T E R A RY FA R E N AT H A L I E C O O K E A N D S H E L L E Y B O Y D WITH ALEXIA MOYER

CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES 263

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1662-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1663-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-1801-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1802-5 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additional funding was also received from Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L I B R A R Y A N D A R C H I V E S C A N A D A C ATA LO G U I N G I N P U B L I C AT I O N

Title: Canadian literary fare / Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd, with Alexia Moyer. Names: Cooke, Nathalie, author. | Boyd, Shelley, 1974– author. | Moyer, Alexia, author. Series: Carleton library series ; 263. Description: Series statement: Carleton library series ; 263 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230143075 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230143091 ISBN 9780228016625 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228016632 (paper) | ISBN 9780228018025 (ePUB) ISBN 9780228018018 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Canadian literature—20th century—History and criticism. LCSH: Food in literature. | CSH: Canadian literature (English)—20th century— History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PS8101.F66 C66 2023 | DDC C810.9/3564—dc23

CONTENTS

Figures

vii

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 PART O N E V I G N E T T E S : M E TA P H O R S A N D F O O D V O I C E S

2

1

9

Iconic Foods 10

Cultural Identity 30

3 Place and the Land 47 PART T WO L I T E R A R Y FO O DWAY S

5

63

4 Kraft Dinner: National Staple as Substitute 68 Human Connections in the Literary Marketplace 6 Re/Turning Points: Bison Narratives 128

Conclusion: Perhaps an Orange with Your Tea? 155 Notes 175

Bibliography

Index 215

197

92

FIGURES

1.1 Alice Munro’s recipe for maple mousse, key ingredients, November 2018. Photograph by Alexia Moyer. 18 1.2 974–97 Royal Victoria Cook Book, 88–9. County of Simcoe, 2014, https://www.simcoe.ca/Archives/Pages/Mrs-MacLeods-ButterTarts.aspx. 20 1.3 Butter tarts ready to be baked, April 2022. Photograph by Alexia Moyer. 21 2.1 Ginger beef, August 2019. Photograph by Alexia Moyer. 33 3.1 Roasted and ground dandelion roots, July 2015. Photograph by Alexia Moyer. 50 4.1 Kraft displays at Jenkins’ Groceteria, Calgary, Alberta, circa 1945. Glenbow Archives/Pa-2453-233. 69 4.2 Mammoth cheese made at the Dominion Experimental Dairy Station, Perth, on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893. Library and Archives Canada/Donald C. Beckett Collection/Pa-160538. 73 4.3 Kraft Foods display with Kraft Dinner, Pacific National Exhibition, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1938. Photograph by Dominion Photo Co. City of Vancouver Archives/Cva 180-0751. 75 5.1 Group near Jericho Charlie’s home on Kitsilano Indian Reserve (Snauq), 15 August 1891. Photograph shows May (Yam-schloot), Jericho Charlie (Chin-nal-set), William Green, Peelass George, Jimmy Jimmy, and Jack (Tow-hu-quam-kee). Photograph by Major James Skitt Matthews, Vancouver Archives/P1.1. 97 5.2 Group of butchers and a view of the interior of P. Burns & Co. Limited, circa 1911. Vancouver Archives/Cva 280-2. 99 5.3 Kensington Market, 1957. Photograph by Michel Lambeth, Library and Archives Canada/Michel Lambeth Fonds/ e010962638. 102

FIGURES

5.4 Painting of St Lawrence Market, 1895. City of Toronto Archives/ Fonds 200, series 1465, file 415, item 13. 115 5.5 St Lawrence Market, 1957. Photograph by Michel Lambeth, Library and Archives Canada/Michel Lambeth Fonds/ e010959712. 116 6.1 Buffalo bones ready for loading on a Canadian Pacific Railway boxcar, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, circa 1887–89. Glenbow Archives/Na-4967-10. 130 6.2 Buffalo meat drying, White Horse Plains, Red River/Séchage de la viande de bison, prairie du Cheval Blanc White Horse, rivière Rouge, 1899. Library and Archives Canada/William Armstrong Fonds/e011154543. 142 6.3 Pemmican bag, western Canada, May 1965. Glenbow Archives/ Na-2360-1. 145 C.1 Ladies at tea, oranges and cookies, circa 1900, Eastern Townships, Quebec. Photograph by Sally Eliza Wood. McCord Museum/ mP-1994.32.6: “The oranges sold in Quebec probably came from Florida or California, two American states already famous for their orange groves. In 1900, oranges were an expensive commodity that only a wealthy few could afford to buy regularly. Most people only had them at Christmas or other special occasions.” 156 C.2 Two leaves and a bud: women plucking tea leaves, Varguvarrai Tea Estate (now a Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company), November 2005. Photograph by Nathalie Cooke. 160 C.3 Christmas mandarin oranges being unloaded from the ship SS American Mail, Vancouver, 7 December 1949. Photograph by Artray, Vancouver Public Library/acc. no. 81110. 164 C.4 Japanese orange crate. North Vancouver Museum and Archives. 165

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began with a blog – Canadian Literary Fare – conceived as a lavishly illustrated exploration of ways in which Canadian literature served up food. Alexia Moyer, who provides images for this book, became increasingly skilled at and passionate about food photography, to the benefit of our collaborative blog and this manuscript. With Khadija Coxon of McGill-Queen’s University Press we found an acquisition editor who paired diplomacy with candour. Khadija invited two anonymous peer reviewers who not only proved to be remarkably knowledgeable about the field but who were also both incredibly generous with their time and made clear and helpful suggestions for some significant changes to the manuscript – changes that guided us to transform it from an anthology of blog posts to a book voicing a particular viewpoint and vision. We were also extremely grateful to have the valuable contributions of copyeditor Joanne Richardson, who brought an astute editing eye to the project. Writing a full-length manuscript such as this one takes many years, and this project has benefitted from the involvement of several wonderful student research assistants, some of whom, like the talented Colin Rier, now work in the world of food publishing in Canada. Others include McGill graduate students Emily Clarke, Kristen Howard, and Chelsea Woodhouse as well as skilled researcher and project manager Leehu Sigler. Nicole Chrenek provided much needed support as we prepared the final submission of the manuscript. Kwantlen Polytechnique University English major Brigitte Leblanc deserves thanks for her tireless efforts in researching many topics, including bison, Kraft Dinner, and tea. McGill graduate student Robyn Clarke designed the original logo for our Canadian Literary Fare website and charted the direction of strategic communications for the project in its early years. Several colleagues read this manuscript at various stages and offered sage advice. Editor Karen Clark at the University of Regina Press provided helpful input during the early stages. Fiona Lucas’s insights into the writing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and foodways of Catharine Parr Traill informed our analysis. Still others, like Licia Canton, contributed to our blog and enthusiastically joined us and others in conversation about food writing in Canada. Memorable discussions over delicious food included Ylenia De Luca and Oriana Palusci at the November 2019 Taste of Home Conference in Bari, Italy. Shelley and Alexia enjoyed moments when their collaborations for the website involved cooking and sampling the products of their labour in Alexia’s Montreal kitchen; and Nathalie benefitted from Shelley’s wonderful hospitality in Vancouver, where she and Shelley shaped, edited, and reviewed the manuscript’s chapters. We are grateful for insights and research support from Lonnie Weatherby, McGill University humanities liaison librarian; Greg Houston, digitization director at McGill University Library; and Juanita Peters, general manager of the Africville Museum. For historical images we are indebted to McGill University’s Rare Books and Special Collections; the McCord Museum and Archives; Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and the Glenbow Western Research Centre at the University of Calgary; the City of Vancouver Archives; the Vancouver Public Library; the North Vancouver Museum and Archives; the City of Toronto Archives; and Library and Archives Canada. Portions of this book have appeared in previous publications: Shelley Boyd, Nathalie Cooke, and Alexia Moyer, “A Literary History of the Mandarin Orange in Canada,” Gastronomica 20, no. 1 (2020): 83–9, https:// doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2020.20.1.83, by University of California Press; and Shelley Boyd, “Tablecloth and River: Dramatizing Historical Land Claims in Tomson Highway’s Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout,” in Food and Communication: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (London: Prospect Books, 2015), 83–92. Our thanks for financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the McGill University Library, and Kwantlen Polytechnic University. We are grateful to McGill’s Department of English, where the three of us met at different stages of our careers and began collaborating through our shared research and creative interests in food. A pantry of future possibilities still awaits! Our communities of learning and exchange, which have been our classrooms and reading circles, have helped to enliven and deepen our appreciation for literary fare. Nathalie Cooke and Shelley — x —

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Boyd benefitted from the meaningful exchanges with their students on the topic of food in their Canadian literature courses at McGill and KPU, respectively. Nathalie and Alexia are grateful for the company of fellow food scholars of, and encountered through, the following organizations and publications: the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Les ateliers de l’Honnête Volupté, the Canadian Association for Food Studies, CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures/Revue des cultures culinaires au Canada, and Canadian Food Studies/La Revue Canadienne des etudes sur l’alimentation. We would like to acknowledge the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueum, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waituth Nations (known as Vancouver) as well as the territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg Nations (known as Montreal) on which this research and collaborative exchange took place and were made possible. As settler scholars, we recognize that the study of Canadian literary fare is an ongoing process of unlearning and learning to fully grasp the impacts of colonialism and to appreciate how the many and diverse “food voices” of Indigenous writers have transformed, and will continue to transform, foodways of the past, present, and future.

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C A N A D I A N L I T E R A RY FA R E

INTRODUCTION

This book explores stories told by “food voices” in Canadian literature. It scrutinizes what readers can “hear” when they listen and read closely for the implications of characters’ choices of what foods to eat, prepare, serve, and share, and, just as important, what foods they or their bodies reject. As Lucy Long writes in her article evoking the food voice: “Food speaks. It tells of memories, relationships, cultural histories, and personal life stories. It reflects not only who we are, but also who we were in the past and who we want to be.”1 When we listen to “food voices” in Canadian literature – those voices born of personal memories, experiences of cultural pasts and presents, and profound desires for social connection – their stories differ dramatically from the iconic narratives of bounty, celebration, and inclusion articulated so frequently in popular media, Canadian cookbooks, food texts, or visitor information pamphlets. More often than not, food voices speak of food scarcity, resource depletion, social inequities, and exclusion. Indeed, when following the lead of Canadian writers and the topics their food voices address, we discover ways in which Canadian literary fare challenges easy assumptions of what constitutes Canadian cuisine and its significance. However, before turning to Canadian literary fare, we should consider what topics preoccupy the food voice more generally. As Diana Pittet illustrates through her annotated bibliography of sociological studies of individuals’ food choices and the volumes those choices speak, the food voice speaks to gender, culture, and class. “Food is an excellent tool for investigating these issues,” she writes. “In fact, food is key to their study and understanding.”2 The same is true for food choices made by literary characters, and even more so because literary characters, unlike we humans, do not need to eat. Some writers choose not to feed their characters, and yet, for many, food serves multiple functions. For Diane McGee, for instance, food describes and defines characters, “their world and their relationship to that world.”3 More than this, however, food in literature is always symbolic, and choices relating to it are carefully and consciously staged by the writer.

C A N A D IA N LIT ER A RY FA R E

Lucy Long provides a useful starting point for where to begin when conceptualizing the food voice, whether it be in real life or literary text. She describes a sample class assignment in which students are asked to interview an individual about a dish of special significance to them and to find out what they are attempting to say in the food voice not only through the choice of the dish but also through the circumstances of its preparation and consumption. In guiding students about what questions they might pose to their interviewee, Long organizes them around four concepts commonly used in folkloristic studies of food: meaningfulness (“the emotional and affective associations and memories evoked by food”), 4 foodways (where meaning can be attached to any aspect of the range of activities surrounding eating and food: product, performance, procurement, conceptualization, preservation, preparation, presentation, consumption, and clean-up”),5 performance theory (“which emphasizes the role of the context in which a food is consumed [performed]”),6 and concepts of identity (which “involves addressing identity as multi-faceted”).7 These same four general concepts guide our own examination of food choices in Canadian literature, but we pose questions relating to literary characters and food scenes rather than conduct in-person interviews with real individuals. Where this book of literary analysis also differs from a folkloristic or sociological study is in the close attention we pay to the form in which the food voice speaks in literary texts. We underline ways in which the author’s choice of mode, genre, and rhetorical device both animates the food voice and shapes the stories it can tell. We are conscious of the implications of writers choosing to place a food item in a poem rather than in a novel, for example, or in a work of fantasy or romance rather than in a work of realism. As literary scholars, we know that it matters that we see Cora making fish stew with her capable hands in her modest home kitchen fictionally anchored in the now destroyed suburb of Halifax, Africville, depicted in the eloquent poetic lines of George Elliot Clarke’s Whylah Falls, itself constructed in the ambitious – and now very seldom-used – epic form. The kitchen work of Cora’s hands is elevated through this very particular poetic medium. At a more granular level, we scrutinize what literary devices are mustered to grab a reader’s attention: how food items often function as metaphors to suggest a comparison and bridge between ideas; or as metonym, where the food item actually comes to stand in for, and represent, a whole host of complex ideas. — 4 —

INTRODUCTION

Because our focus is on literature and what the food voice enables us to understand through the written form, our inclusion of images is selective and in distinct contrast to today’s highly illustrated food texts. Our archival selections foreground historical foodways from which writers have drawn their inspiration or that resonate with some of many food voices analyzed in this volume. In many cases, these archival images capture places that are no longer visible to contemporary visitors. Our present-day images of food preparation point to the embodied experience of the food voice that some writers offer their readers by inviting inclusion or sharing a recipe. Trying to cook from literature can result in challenges or disappointments, helping reveal and define how food functions in literature with respect to figurative language. These brief culinary experimentations appear as part of the opening section of short vignettes, which introduces readers to the way the food voice speaks in a range of Canadian literary works, familiarizing them with its symbolic potential through reference to specific examples. The subsequent three chapters turn to a close interrogation of food metaphors that gather such resonance that they extend across individual works and even across different forms of writing. Together, these analytical sections all explore personal food choices – what drives or limits characters’ food choices – and how food voices speak out on the spectrum between amplifying and undermining the overt assertions of the works in which they figure. Our selection of writers includes those who have been pivotal in foregrounding the food voice, including some lesser-known writers for whom food circulates in their texts with expressive and critical acumen. We follow the lead of literary food voices, while also recognizing that colonial histories and social inequities have shaped which food voices have had the privilege of “speaking” and/or being heard at this juncture in time. While our selection is by no means exhaustive (and no volume could ever hope to be), our aim is to listen to a range of food voices that lead us to larger conclusions about Canadian foodways and the many counter-narratives that challenge popular notions of shared bounty and pleasure. Just as literary food voices communicate an array of deeply personal experiences through food choices (which we examine in the vignettes), we understand too that food functions to set the table, as it were, by situating plot and characters in precise moments of social and cultural history – the focus for the longer chapters on Kraft Dinner, markets, and bison. With Canadians being the world’s most avid consumers of Kraft Dinner, in a — 5 —

C A N A D IA N LIT ER A RY FA R E

chapter dedicated to this processed food we piece together its origins, history, and many brief appearances across a range of genres, especially poetry. This food’s symbolic potential gives voice to those paradoxical experiences so often implicated in Canadian literary fare: a common food language that speaks of social exclusion and disconnection. In a chapter on market scenes in Canadian literature, we describe the various ways in which public markets provide opportunities for writers to bring characters together and have them interact on the same stage. However, unlike parties or social gatherings, which are also favourite plot devices of authors who are careful to feed their characters, markets have the added benefit of bringing together individuals who are not connected by similar interests, family relations, class, or even location. Rather, markets’ governing structure, based on commercial exchange, provides writers with an opportunity to bring together a very diverse community while also evoking a well-understood relationship of commercial or barter-based food exchange. The chapter on market scenes, like public markets themselves, surveys the diversity of offerings – this time in terms of literary form, genre, and style. It pauses to examine in greater detail some of the most iconic portrayals of markets in Canadian literature, such as Sara Jeanette Duncan’s 1904 The Imperialist, and to reveal the literary devices activating painful communal memories, for example, of Snauq, once located on the now-called Granville Island, or endearing glances to the earlier years of Kensington Market in Toronto. However, as with all sections of this book, the close focus is on individual food choices and how the metaphorical food voice in which they speak unfolds a story of the relations of the self to place, family, and community. In many ways, Canadian literature’s food voices offer counter-narratives that often showcase and amplify the unspoken, the deeply personal, and what has been seemingly lost, forgotten, or silenced. Our third and last deep analytical dive involves a glance towards Canada’s culinary past as well as a glimpse into how that past has re-emerged to influence the present and future. A chapter on bison describes how that particular word, “bison,” takes on such complex resonance in multiple tellings and retellings that it no longer functions as a metaphor or even as an extended metaphor but, rather, drives narrative plots to hurtle forward, turn, and return to pursue trajectories that sadden and shock readers in ways that grab their full attention and refuse to be ignored. More than metaphor, the term “bison” serves as a charged metonym, standing in for — 6 —

INTRODUCTION

the many legacies of loss wrought by colonialism but also the promise of return for Indigenous peoples. Our book concludes with a consideration of two food items that loom large in our literatures and culinary imaginations but are absent from conversations of Canada’s iconic fare: tea and oranges. Since virtually no recipes are needed, they do not feature prominently in our cookbooks. Nevertheless, both items are very closely associated with Canada’s foodways and lore, even as they are imported from abroad. Why then are Canadian writers so interested in them? We muse in our conclusion that, while they do indeed each function as evocative metaphors, there is a surprising chemistry – almost a chemical alchemy – that is triggered when the two are brought together in literature. Our literary toolbox cannot adequately describe the resulting reaction, yet we do shed light on its very unusual persistence, hoping our close reading of the works in which tea and oranges appear together can spark further thought and conversation. Our conclusion also enables us to suggest ways in which the food voice speaks optimistically about the potential of food to bring people together to forge a constructive way forward.

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Part One VIGNETTES: M E TA P H O R S A N D FOOD VOICES

We begin by offering a series of vignettes, amuse bouches as it were, to whet readers’ appetites for longer passages of food for thought to follow. Each vignette focuses on at least one food item or dish, exploring in detail how it functions to engage readers’ attention. Most important, each vignette lays bare the mechanism of the primary metaphor – what that food item comes to mean, how the “vehicle” of food serves to convey the “tenor,” or the key idea being communicated. For food in literature is always symbolic; the literary container for ideas puts those ideas under pressure, and shapes them, conveying meaning not only through the explicit message but also through the affect of the medium of its communication. In a few cases authors share details of ingredients and food preparation techniques to invite us, as readers, to cook and experiment for ourselves. In the three such cases we include here, cooking from the book is one way we can explore how metaphor operates, by trying to literalize or materialize the metaphor and, thereby, understand what does and does not translate from page to plate. For these three vignettes, we also include a photograph of our culinary experimentation and brief commentary on how our embodied reading of the text aligns with a purely textual understanding of its central metaphor. However, in most cases we, as readers, are not invited to participate in the embodied experience of metaphor creation; rather, we are invited to listen attentively to the food voice and to engage mindfully with the lessons it serves up.

1 ICONIC FOODS

Mini-introduction This first series of vignettes examines a chorus of food voices that speak through iconic Canadian foods and symbols – beaver, maple syrup, butter tarts, pork – and critique any unifying sense of “Canadianness.” While these iconic foods instantly mark their texts as Canadian to readers, the food voice works to disrupt and problematize this categorization by underscoring the far from unifying experiences of Canadian community. Cree playwright Tomson Highway chooses to showcase the beaver not only as a national symbol but, more significantly, as a staple meat for many Indigenous peoples in order to enact a satirical commentary on the ignorance and gluttony of Canadian colonialism. In the short stories by Alice Munro, maple syrup signifies not the sweetness of Canadian confections but, rather, the socio-economic inequalities that affect her characters. Since one can never be satisfied eating just one small butter tart, we turn to several writers and characters who aspire to give to the humble butter tart a sense of uniqueness – a sweetness, an elegance, indeed an esteemed national lineage – that is at odds with the very everyday qualities it represents and universality of flavours it embodies. In the story by Rabindranath Maharaj, pork becomes an overarching symbol of the foodways of typical Canadians. The central character believes that by purchasing it at the local store (“Victory Meat”) and then consuming it, pork will become the vehicle through which he can participate in the foodways of the oppressor. However, his own body’s food voice tells him otherwise.

ICONIC FOODS

“Your Beaver Spread across the Table” Critical Bawdy Talk and National Allegory in Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout 1 Throughout Thomson Highway’s play Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, food gathering and meal preparation take centre stage with a food voice that is integral to the land. Dramatizing what he describes as a “mega banquet,” Highway presents an allegorical and miraculous feast as four Indigenous women – who embody the land and their respective First Nations – anticipate the arrival of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier for the presentation of the Laurier Memorial in 1910.2 The Laurier Memorial is a narrativized document – prepared and signed by the chiefs of the Secwépemc (Shuswap), Syilx (Okanagan), and Nlaka’pamux (Couteau) Nations – which traces over one hundred years of Indigenous-settler relations and the injustices of colonization, particularly in terms of its call for fair negotiations when it comes to unceded lands. In anticipation of receiving the prime minister as a guest in their territory, the four women focus their efforts on particular contributions to a welcoming feast: a rainbow trout, saskatoon berry pies, a tableclothturned-river, and boiled beaver meat. While all four components hold distinct significance in Highway’s play, the beaver plays a key metaphorical role in giving voice to gendered and colonial inequities and injustices. Indeed, as Canada’s national animal, the beaver functions as a multilayered metaphor that activates a critical commentary on the Canadian nation. Throughout Highway’s play, the four women – Ernestine Shuswap, Isabel Thompson, Delilah Rose Johnson, and Annabelle Okanagan – speak in critical ways through their feast preparations to reframe the narrative of the Laurier Memorial and the Canadian nation from their Indigenous, gendered perspectives. In an analysis of the historical and theatrical performances of the Laurier Memorial, James Hoffman notes that, although “there never was a First Nations feast served up to Laurier when he was in Kamloops, there should have been under normal, pre-contact protocols. By basing the play on the preparation for a meal … Highway reinscribes the truth of the presentation by focusing on the exigencies of food gathering within local First Nations culture.”3 When Highway was commissioned to write the play, he acknowledged in an interview that he drew his initial — 11 —

VIGNETTES

inspiration neither from the Laurier Memorial itself nor from a historical photograph of the male chiefs who signed the Memorial but, instead, from an unrelated photograph of four Shuswap women in a Kamloops newsletter. This array of documents prompted Highway to reflect on the absence of Indigenous women from the public or “big picture” history of the Laurier Memorial: “Why are there no women in the picture? Who prepared the meal, and who set the table and worked in the background? Whoever that is, they are never recognized, their contribution to human history is never given recognition.”4 As the play unfolds, audiences witness over a hundred years of colonialism compressed into a single day that results in a dramatic reshaping of the land and, by extension, Indigenous foodways. The women must confront the imposition of laws and physical barriers that exclude them from their ancestral, unceded lands from which their nations have gathered, fished, and trapped since time immemorial. The imposed, unjust edicts – which include not being allowed to fish in the river or gather berries from Indigenous territories that have been stolen and turned into private property owned by settlers – are directly tied to the encroaching power of the prime minister. Despite Laurier’s physical absence from the stage, he exhibits God-like influence, which Ernestine Shuswap relates: “He rules like a king over millions of people … changing people’s lives willy nilly billy … He has so much power, it is said he can reach into the sky and move the sun about like a saskatoon pie.”5 The women have massive preparations ahead of them, yet, ironically, they have been cut off from their traditional lands and food sources by the very guest who is coming to dinner. While the “Great Big Kahoona of Canada” is an angry, gluttonous male god who takes rather than provides, Highway positions the women as land-based creators of life and nourishment. Indeed, collectively the four women, not a male Christian saviour, are responsible for the miracle of provision in these dire and unnatural circumstances of scarcity.6 Responsible for the beaver, Annabelle is tasked with an enormous challenge: “to boil half a ton of beaver” and “stuff the buggers, too. Stuffed beaver for two thousand people and the Great Big Kahoona of Canada, holy!”7 It is important to note the significance of beaver to many Indigenous diets and the fact that this iconic animal – the national animal – was central to the fur trade and ultimately to the settlement of Canada, which depended on partnerships with, and knowledge of, Indigenous peoples. In — 12 —

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her study of the shifting categorization of beaver as food, L. Sasha Gora notes that, in present day Canada, “The fact that the beaver is recognized more as a metaphor for Canadianness and less as a food reveals a complex story about conflicting constructions of Canada and the ongoing tensions between Indigenous and settler imaginations.”8 In the “Two End Notes” to his play, Highway’s similar comments also highlight that many Canadians do not categorize the beaver as edible and are ignorant of Indigenous foodways, past and present: “Beaver was a staple of the Native diet here in North America for thousands upon thousands of years, as it is still in many regions of northern and western Canada (in Cree, my Native tongue, we call the animal, or dish, ‘amisk’) … We still eat it. It’s delish! Try it. You may just like it!”9 Despite Highway’s invitation and the fact that food preparation is enacted throughout the play, it is also important to note the predominantly figurative function of the beaver dish in terms of Annabelle’s critical food voice of resurgence. Highway acknowledges in his endnotes that the English have “appropriated” the word and turned it into something “completely … inappropriate” with its double entendre for women’s genitalia.10 In exchange after exchange among the women, Highway reappropriates this sexual metaphor of the colonizer, enacting a critical bawdy talk to expose the gendered, misogynistic aspects of colonialism with the invading patriarchal society subjugating Indigenous communities. For example, the Great Big Kahoona of Canada, or Sir Wilfrid Laurier, is characterized as having a monstrous appetite. Speaking of the prime minister, Ernestine Shuswap comments, “You name it, he eats it,” and the women seem destined to be consumed with Laurier “gorging himself on beaver and tits.”11 Indeed, when Isabel describes the upcoming feast, the sexualized, consumable presentation of the women is unmistakable: “Imagine, just imagine … your beaver spread across the table like a carpet for the devil, my saskatoon pies, your tablecloths, the squeals of delight, the moans of pleasure, the ambience, the feeling, the rhythm, the cat, oh yesssssss … (pinches delilah rose, viciously, in a place [her bum?] where annabelle can’t see her hand).”12 Even as the women repeatedly associate themselves with the beaver through bawdy humour, and despite the government’s denial of Indigenous rights, Annabelle persists in preparing the beaver for the banquet. Her food preparation – through a giant ladle and cauldron and scant ingredients – is imbued with miraculous force that empowers and reasserts the women’s — 13 —

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life-giving force as tied to the land. In Act One, Annabelle mentions that her sons “Ron, John, and Tom will be getting home from Johnny’s old tra … I mean … from their trap … line … other side of Lac Dubois” with the beaver they promised to hunt for the dinner.13 Her ref lections indicate generation-to-generation stewardship as opposed to the tight control of the land when settler society interrupts this continuity through prohibitions against trapping and hunting. Later, in Act Two, the world has clearly changed when Annabelle declares: “One beaver. One miserable goddamn beaver. That’s all my boys … could get me for this banquet. All of a sudden, we can’t trap is what they tell me … Another new law.”14 Unable to trap, the sons acquire a single smoked beaver from a local Indigenous woman and give it to their mother for her banquet preparations. The single beaver seems grossly insufficient given the momentous task before her, as Annabelle reflects: “The question being: now how the hell am I supposed to feed two thousand people and the Great Big Kahoona of Canada with just one beaver, huh? Where’s Jesus when you need him?”15 Shifting away from colonialism’s patriarchal god and authority, Highway imbues his women characters with a nurturing power from and through the land. As with the other three women, Annabelle enacts the miracle of provision and, while doing so, furnishes a critical food voice, inviting audiences to reflect upon the Canadian colonial nation. In addition to the bawdy metaphors, then, Highway clearly embraces the beaver to furnish the play with additional national significance through political allegory. For instance, when Annabelle learns that Laurier prefers only young, juicy beaver, she draws the line in a statement that conveys her vision of a more inclusive, respectful Canada: Oh, I’ll just boil the shit right out of it … The Great Big Kahoona of Canada won’t know the difference. The last thing Annabelle Okanagan of Kamloops, BC plans on doing is waste her time and energy standing in her kitchen the live long day separating the young from the old, the French from the English, Anglican from Catholic, the good from the bad, the white from the Indian, the Shuswap from the Okanagan, the Thompson, and the Kickapoo. That is not what I volunteered to do. Pause. Again, she looks wistfully out the “window.” And, again, a rush of “river-sound.”16 — 14 —

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The sound of the river punctuating Annabelle’s speech reasserts the voice of the land and the Indigenous women’s inherent relationship with it. In other words, their creative power, through their miraculous preparation of a feast of locally sourced ingredients, embodies a food voice that directly counters the settler-colonial system imposed by a greedy and destructive dinner “guest” who attempts to seize control of all the land and resources. Indeed, at the close of Act One, audiences witness Annabelle Okanagan silently “standing in her ‘ kitchen’ with an apron on, studying what looks like a recipe (but will turn out to be something else entirely), ladle to a large empty pot.”17 As Act Two begins, Annabelle is again seen in her apron, now reading the beaver “recipe” aloud, which turns out to be a draft of the Laurier Memorial.18 As Annabelle launches into the masculine-focused address of the Laurier Memorial, she continues to attend to the cauldron – her dissatisfaction serving as a critical commentary on a colonial nation that has ignored and continues to ignore the rights of her people: aNNaBeLLe (shouting) “Dear Sir and Father, we take this opportunity of your visiting Kamloops to speak a few words to you …” Pooh! Does that beaver ever stink! Maybe boiling it was a mistake.19 By the conclusion of the play, the four women produce what seems impossible given their circumstances and forced separation from the land: a miraculous meal that will feed the multitudes. Combining an Indigenous welcoming feast with the Christian imagery of the Last Supper, Highway uses the food voice to shift the focus away from the colonizing guests and, instead, towards the reciprocal vision of the Indigenous hosts. In this way, Highway works to restore balance by countering Laurier’s, and by extension colonial Canada’s, immeasurable appetite for land and resources, the “beavers and tits” that he will gorge upon to the detriment of the women and their communities. The play’s world premiere in 2004 featured the women facing the audience while serving the feast along one side of the tablecloth-turned-river, with the spirit of Delilah Rose kneeling by the river waiting for the guests to receive the meal and to reciprocate in kind. Projected behind the women was an image of The Last Supper “with Laurier as Christ as the chiefs as the apostles.”20 This projected “last supper” — 15 —

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scene is a reminder of Christian mythology’s misconstrued values as part of colonialism’s apparatus since the tradition of Communion, as Maggie Kilgour reveals, is supposed to be an act of “reciprocal incorporation” and “a model of relations that go beyond the binarisms which lead to cannibalism.”21 In direct contrast to a greedy, colonial, male god, the women’s alternate feast invites the hope for true reciprocity through their collective acts of miraculous provision as tied to the land. At the close of the play, the instructions read: “On their way out of the theatre … audience members will be handed a copy of what’s left of ‘The Laurier Memorial.’”22 This act of sharing – being given a copy of the Laurier Memorial that was first presented as a recipe during Annabelle’s beaver preparation and now turns out to be the historical document – invites audiences to reflect upon the metaphorical “ingredients” of Canadian colonial society, forcing spectators to consider the voices that dominate alongside those that have been excluded and silenced, as well as how the construction of the colonial nation has affected and continues to affect the physical, cultural, and spiritual lives of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, if most Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the Laurier Memorial, Highway’s play activates the collective food voices of the Indigenous women to share their worldviews and to invite those in the audience, who are uninvited guests and settlers, to contemplate their own responsibilities at the nation’s table.

A Writer’s Signature Ingredient Alice Munro’s Maple Mousse Alice Munro once described her affinity for the short story as a writerly form through a maple-inspired image. She condenses a narrative to its essence – “boiled down like maple syrup” is how she puts it.23 Raised amid humble beginnings on a fox and mink farm in southwestern Ontario, Munro’s food voice derives from a particular region where maple trees are prolific and where maple syrup enables her to foreground, by way of contrast, the far from sweet circumstances of her characters. This food voice that explores the subtle details of this confection serves as Munro’s irrefutable authorial signature. — 16 —

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While maple syrup is commonplace in Munro’s fiction,24 she perhaps gained her most prominent association with this food ingredient via literary cookbooks, especially Margaret Atwood’s The CanLit FoodBook to which she contributed a recipe for maple mousse. This recipe was reprinted nearly a decade later in Laura Critchley and Helen Windrath’s Something to Savour, which includes recipes and the stories behind them, contributed by fifty women writers from around the world.25 In both texts, Atwood introduces the mousse recipe with the aside, “This is Alice Munro’s own recipe, and she says it’s really delicious.”26 However, when we experimented in our kitchens, the dessert proved cloying after only a few bites. The ingredients are simple: milk, gelatin, whipping cream, egg yolks, sugar, salt, a splash of rum, and, of course, a half cup of maple syrup. Munro suggests serving this moulded dessert with extra syrup “if you want to be fancy.”27 Perhaps this recipe’s failure to satisfy us recently is a matter of changing times and tastes. The inclusion of gelatin signals that Munro’s recipe likely comes from the post-Second World War era, following decades of the early twentieth century when gelatin and Jell-O became popular in the preparation of moulded salads and desserts in the name of modern convenience and thrift. Yet, while our maple mousse desserts failed to please our own twenty-first-century palates, the recipe was a success, figuratively speaking, in capturing the problematic nature of sweets in Munro’s fiction. In A Feast of Words for Lovers of Food and Fiction, Anna Shapiro recognizes that “food – and love – in Alice Munro’s stories is almost always bound up with pain, humiliation, exhibiting oneself, and fear of exposure.”28 Maple syrup presents a similar dilemma for Munro’s characters, serving as a failed antidote to one’s misery or as a marker of the conviviality and leisure one observes in others but never fully enjoys. Indeed, when maple syrup appears, Munro’s subtle use of the food voice often enhances readers’ appreciation for the characters’ physical states and socio-economic conditions. Consider Munro’s “Spelling” from Who Do You Think You Are?, in which Rose visits her elderly and declining stepmother, Flo. Rose discovers that Flo’s home is in a state of rapid decay – the fridge full of “sulfurous scraps, dark crusts, furry oddments.”29 Flo has also begun placing kitchen tools in strange places, and, with her mind unravelling, she turns to sweetness in excess as a culinary charm against a world that seems nonsensical: — 17 —

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1.1 Alice Munro’s recipe for maple mousse, key ingredients, 2018

She might tip the jug of maple syrup up against her mouth and drink it like wine. She loved sweet things now. Craved them. Brown sugar by the spoonful, maple syrup, tinned puddings, jelly, globs of sweetness to slide down her throat.30 — 18 —

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The decline that Rose witnesses in Flo and, later, in the patients at County Home (a long-term care facility), is akin to witnessing a childhood in which bodies are diapered, cleaned, cribbed, oxygenated, coddled, and fed. The difference, however, is that there is no growing out of this dependency. When dreaming of County Home the following night, Rose sees the residents, including Flo, living in elaborate cages and being fed food that “was choice; chocolate mousse, trifle, Black Forest Cake.”31 Here, sweetness is a superficial escape, a sensual distraction from time’s inevitable progression, which projects adulthood extending to an imprisoned, child-like existence lacking nearly all bodily and mental autonomy. Maple syrup similarly makes a brief yet key appearance in Munro’s “Sunday Afternoon” from Dance of the Happy Shades in the depiction of Mr and Mrs Gannett’s affluent, leisured life in the city. Every Sunday, the extended Gannett family gathers for lunch. On this day, the meal includes the enriching fare of tongue, aspic, and maple mousse – with the latter two moulded dishes indicating class status and urban prestige, especially on a hot summer afternoon, because of the refrigeration required.32 Alva, the farm-girl hired as the summertime maid, works in the family’s midst – living under their roof, following their daily rhythms, eating their food. Although she is told there is “plenty” of maple mousse dessert for her,33 Alva will never be part of the family. Does she actually get some of the available maple mousse? Tellingly, the story leaves it unclear, saying only that she has lunch. She eats all her meals alone with little pleasure afforded to her nondescript food and no mention of dessert: “While they were eating she ate her own lunch, sitting at the kitchen table, looking through an old copy of Time.”34 Hers is an isolated existence distinguished by subtle humiliations: her name summoned by Mrs Gannett “in tones as … penetrating as those of the bell,” and her required uniform of “Cubanheeled shoes clomping” on the backyard patio when she carries out the luncheon dishes.35 Maple syrup may be synonymous with Canada, but when it runs through Munro’s imagination and is “boiled down” to its essence, it serves to foreground, by way of contrast, the far from ideal situations of her characters. Munro’s evocative and recurring use of maple syrup suggests that, for some writers, the food voice can speak through a signature ingredient, with a distinct flavour and poignant affect or impact when it comes to Munro’s depictions of settings, circumstances, and character. — 19 —

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1.2 Royal Victoria Cook Book, 1900

Butter Tarts Are Canadian, and That’s Our Story We would like to have offered up a distinctively Canadian cake for this series of vignettes of iconically Canadian foods. “Canada is the land of cakes,” wrote Catharine Parr Traill in her 1855 classic, The Female Emigrant’s Guide, astounded by the variety of cakes and sweets on offer to European settlers in Ontario’s backwoods.36 But it would be a stretch to claim cake as a Canadian dish. Indeed, it is not a cake that has become recognizably Canadian, vehemently defended as being Canadian, but, rather, a very small, rather bland, and not terribly attractive little tart simply known as the “butter tart.” It made its first appearance in 1900 in a modest recipe entitled “filling for a tart,” and by 1913, when included in the Canadian classic Five Roses Cookbook, it was linked to its forever name. Since then, the butter tart has grown a tourist industry – largely centred in Ontario – and a confidence that it is distinctly, even iconically, Canadian. That is, we have claimed it to be Canadian through many food voices and genres, giving this tart both symbolic and metaphorical sway. For instance, — 20 —

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1.3 Butter tarts ready to be baked, 2022

among the words Phillip Resnick identifies as “distinctly Canadian,” he places “butter tart,” along with “francophone,” “postal code,” “smoked meat,” and “Nanaimo Bar.”37 More recently, Sara Bonisteel wrote in the New York Times that “the butter tart is Canada’s gift to the dessert canon.” Tellingly assigning the task of naming to Canadians, she later says that “Canadians will tell you that these diminutive treats hold an expanse of f lavor and textures: flaky pastry, caramelized crust and a bracingly sweet filling.”38 Its forebears are multiple and manifold. In an extraordinarily comprehensive article on the tiny tart’s origins, Gary Gillman offers other plausible precursors, including Scotland’s Ecclefechan’s tart,39 the UK’s Border tart,40 and the British butter tart.41 He ultimately concludes that “the butter tart is deservedly Ontario’s pet snack”42 and that the variations he can identify “appear episodic and isolated, never rising to the ubiquity or gastronomic reputation of the butter tart in Canada.”43 (Note, of course, that Canadians themselves are responsible for their ubiquity and for consistently singing the praises of their gastronomic excellence. Tweets Ojibway writer Drew — 21 —

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Hayden Taylor: “When Settlers ask me how they can best become allies, I tell them the first step is to buy me a raisin butter tart. You must understand all journeys begin with a small step.”44) Despite variations on the general principle of sugar, butter, and egg – including additions of nuts, currants, or raisins – what all Canadian variants share is their unassuming appearance and size (small), shape (round), and taste (overly sweet). And yet physical properties are not all that they share: they also figure in books, short stories, and poems. Their ubiquity and frequent though brief literary appearances not only serve to mirror the butter tart’s presence in Canadian society as a small and ever-present dainty but also allow authors to comment on the quotidian, whether preserved in the backgrounds of their narratives or called into stark relief. When they appear in our fiction, butter tarts are often devoured in multiples as a guilty indulgence. In Alice Munro’s semi-autobiographical Who Do You Think You Are? (entitled The Beggar Maid outside Canada), Rose, the protagonist, is sent to her room after a “royal beating.” Proud, sobbing, and alone, she will eventually succumb to the tempting foods her stepmother puts outside the door. Listen carefully to the verb tense here, as the narrator describes the post-beating ritual as a battle of wills that shall inevitably conclude with gluttonous eating: Later still a tray will appear. Flo will put it down without a word and go away. A large glass of chocolate milk on it, made with Vita-Malt from the store. Some rich streaks of Vita-Malt around the bottom of the glass. Little sandwiches, neat and appetizing. Canned salmon of the first quality and reddest color, plenty of mayonnaise. A couple of butter tarts from a bakery package, chocolate biscuits with a peppermint filling. Rose’s favorites, in the sandwich, tart and cookie line. She will turn way, refuse to look, but left alone with these eatables will be miserably tempted … Soon in helpless corruption, she will eat them all. She will drink the chocolate milk, eat the tarts, eat the cookies.45 Poignantly, the foods that tempt Rose and bring this violent ritual to a close do not remind us of an active home oven and kitchen scents. These are store-bought tarts, the processed and branded sugar drink product Vita-Malt, canned salmon, and what appears to be a jar of mayo. The normalcy of the products serves to illuminate Flo’s and Rose’s ritual: just like butter tarts, — 22 —

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the beatings are unfortunately and inevitably commonplace. And, readers suspect, that quite possibly they are not exclusive to her family at all. Butter tarts tempt another troubled soul in a young adult novel called The Hunger, written to warn and inform young readers about the dangers of anorexia nervosa. The teenage protagonist, Paula, is a perfectionist and an anorexic with bulimic tendencies. After her doctor correctly diagnoses her and calls her out on her dangerously unhealthy food habits, she grabs forty dollars from a hidden stash in her house and heads off to scour the aisles of a local store. Finding a dozen store-baked butter tarts for $4.99, she grabs them, rationalizing that she would eat one and leave the rest for the family,46 but then she thinks that “a tiny glass of rich chocolate would be good with a butter tart.”47 Then the food frenzy begins until she spends all the money available to her. Ashamed, Paula tells the bemused cashier: “It’s a birthday party. Mom’s got a carload of kids to feed.”48 But readers fully understand that the food is not to assuage real hunger. “Her mouth filled with saliva at the sight of so much forbidden food.”49 The butter tarts not only foreground Paula’s condition but also expose its false commonality, revealing how even the most quotidian of foods create radically different situations for different people. Although predictable and unassuming, here butter tarts become Paula’s personal forbidden fruit. So, what happens when one eats just one small butter tart? In the opening of Dave Margoshes’ story “The Gift,” the protagonist’s eye is first caught by a striking beauty in the cafeteria. She seems to Gerry at first “native or Asian of some sort, Chinese perhaps, or Filipino; at any rate breathtaking. Beautiful.”50 When he sees her again, she’s walking to her friends carrying coffee – and a butter tart.51 It’s then that Margoshes’ readers realize she is not as exotic as the protagonist assumes; rather, the story’s protagonist is exposed as unreliable, a flawed perceiver. Readers interpret all this by listening to the story’s food voice, assessing the character on her choice of food (the butter tart) and dining location (the cafeteria). Indeed, the story is about just that – how the protagonist, time and time again, gets it wrong, especially in interpreting the women around him. Occasionally, the commonality of butter tarts allows authors to surprise us by taking advantage of their perceived predictability as a trustworthy sweet. Journalist Mark Thrice in “The Chivaree” tells a story about a modern-day enactment of an old Canadian tradition in which friends play tricks on a newly married couple on their wedding night. In — 23 —

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this case it’s the author and his pals playing tricks on his newlywed sister, switching baking powder and cornstarch, adding chicken chunks to the lemon drink mix, and adding Tabasco to the corn syrup. As a result of this last trick, butter tarts enter stage left. The new bride spends a full day baking butter tarts, but when she tastes one, her tongue burns, and she correctly guesses the culprit. She phones her brother: “I’m bringing over a bunch of butter tarts,” she tells him, “and you’re going to eat every one of them”! 52 Yet even these relatively commonplace sweets can be imbued with psychological depth and recollection that pulls them out of daily life. In particular, two poets wax eloquent about the humble tart. Dennis Cooley adds it to his list of many round objects in a resonant, meditative, and alliterative catalogue of lines, each introduced by a colon, in a poem called “Moon Musings.” “A butter tart,” he muses as the line pauses, “full of raisins,” and the line pauses again, “for whatever reasons …”53 The line is nestled between many, some metaphysical (“a tear on the face of night”), others onomatopoeic and humorous (“a hub cap hubba hubba ding ding”), and still others haunting (“an eye of a cat open in sleep/death”), before the poem concludes with “glad tidings to all.”54 Even the butter tart sounds portentous in Cooley’s treatment. Barry Butson is even more effusive, perhaps recalling a time in which butter tarts were primarily made at home. “My mother wrote no poetry,” his contained six-line ode to his mother’s butter tarts begins. A poignant poem, Butson’s “madeleine de Proust” offers no hint of irony, just a bite of pure sweetness. Like his mother’s tarts, Butson’s poem creates soft and sweet sibilance (“pastry soft as ear lobes,” full of “syrup and raisins”) alongside the texture of its alliterative hard c sounds (cradled, corn, crowned, and crust), reminiscent of the tart’s flaky crust: “Her poems came sonnet-sweet from the oven.”55 Such a small dainty, and yet the butter tart’s footprint is formidable. Butter tarts sweeten not only Canadian tables but also Canadian literature. Their presence may often seem occasional and quotidian. However, precisely because butter tarts are just so reliable, so very predictably middle-of-the-road Canadian, so “always there,” our writers can shock us by transforming their food voices into something else entirely.

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Mr Porkton The Self and the Social Body in “Bitches on All Sides” In Rabindranath Maharaj’s short story “Bitches on All Sides,” the protagonist Ramjohn, a recent West Indian immigrant living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is overwhelmed by feelings of alienation and emasculation as he struggles to adjust to his new life in Canada. Ramjohn’s defensive anger fuels his vehement rants as he curses mainstream society. Amid his sense of unjust hardship, the food voice plays a critical role in foregrounding Ramjohn’s experience as an outsider and the boundary work that he feels compelled to undertake in order to become integrated with the world around him. Testing the boundaries of the self by purchasing and consuming pork – a meat that he selects disparagingly as the majority’s s choice fare and that he has never eaten as a formerly practising Muslim – Ramjohn’s displacement of the agency of change to resituate himself relative to the larger social body onto a food item, rather than claiming that agency for himself, already foreshadows failure. Originally from Trinidad, Rabindranath Maharaj knows first-hand the challenges of adapting to a new life in Canada. This experience has informed his writing of the immigrant experience: “People whose imaginations are limited or bounded by what they see before them, especially if they’re in a new, perhaps threatening kind of situation, I don’t think they’re going to get very far … I really believe that if you have the power to imagine particular things you have the ability to transform them.”56 The transformative potential of perception lies at the heart of Maharaj’s short story, yet it is also juxtaposed against the real barriers that immigrants of intersectional identities face in Canada. This tension is brought to the foreground through the climactic food scene in “Bitches on all Sides” when Ramjohn heads to Fredericton’s iconic Victory Meat Market, purchases a sizable portion of pork, and returns home to his apartment to cook and consume the meat. An iconic butcher and grocer that has served Fredericton since 1939 and is known as a local “institution,” Victory Meat is the purveyor of everything readily bought and consumed by those of the privileged majority in the story.57 When reflecting on the depiction of Fredericton in Maharaj’s story, editor Lynn Coady notes that “Atlantic Canadian writing was supposed to be about home, about belonging – extended — 25 —

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families, close-knit communities, and a shared cultural language and identity. ‘Bitches’ had nothing to do with any of this.”58 With respect to the actual Victory Meat Market, Coady notes there is “a post-war, cando sort of pugnacity about the place. We’re gonna sell the hell out of this meat and who’s to say otherwise?”59 Pork has, of course, iconic status as a popular Canadian and regional fare of today in the forms of back bacon, or peameal bacon, and tourtière.60 Historically, European immigrants depended upon salted pork on their overseas voyage and during their early days of settlement.61 For Ramjohn, however, the pig is “a fat, dirty, stupid, ungainly animal,”62 and is part of the Fredericton environs to which he has never felt entirely welcomed. After balking at the price and staring down the woman cashier with her “fat cheeks” and “small eyes,” Ramjohn abruptly pays for the pork, thinking of the cashier: “The little bitch. I will show she. I will show all of them. Today Ramjohn mean business and just let anybody cross his path. Bitches. On all side.”63 Ramjohn’s purchase and consumption of the pork is what Ibi Kaslik describes as a “symbolic bid for assimilation” by an individual who lives “outside the cozy community-oriented provinciality” of “whitewashed Fredericton.”64 Symbolism certainly drives the final food scene, but visceral description of the meat dominates Maharaj’s text. Whereas the culinary preparation is vaguely described – a chopping board, knife, and “assortment of bottled herbs”65 – the most vivid details are reserved for Ramjohn’s personification of the meat and his uneasy, moment-by-moment ingestion of it: “Okay, Mr Pork, is time to begin surgery. You prepared? You have any second thoughts?” He saw with delight the shock on her face. “All right, Mr Pork, today you have a date with Ramjohn belly.” … He chopped, seasoned, and cooked, attempting to restrain his rising nausea. Then it was finished. He placed the cooked meat into his mouth, his hands shaking … He chewed, his tongue circling, probing, feeling the texture of the meat, collecting the hot juices flowing out. The meat felt alive in his mouth, pulsing, writhing, encircling, clutching his tongue with its own desire.66 — 26 —

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Readers witness Ramjohn’s embattled self from the inside out. This experience of food abjection tied to religious dietary taboos foregrounds the physiological, cultural, and social isolation that leaves Ramjohn feeling excluded from mainstream New Brunswick society. Throughout the scene, Ramjohn’s relationship with the pork traces a dynamic trajectory with him, at first, personifying and thereby attempting to dominate the forbidden, profane food. As the meal progresses, however, Ramjohn’s food narrative reverts to foregrounding his own unusual status as his roommate observes his actions: “What the hell you looking at? You never see a man eating pork before, eh?” … Her silence bothered him. “You find that so strange?” He swallowed with a great heaving effort. “Run fast and call up the newspaper and them. Tell them that it have a man eating pork in an apartment.” … “What happen, you still here? You know how much papers that will sell? ‘Pork eater finally located.’” The television came on with a click. He raised his voice above its volume. “Porkman. They could call me that. Strange visitor from another planet. Porkton. They could call it that. Look! Look!” he shouted, point to the ceiling. “Is it a bird! Is a plane! No … no, is only Porkman.”67 As Ramjohn’s anger and cynicism erupt, his transgressive meal exposes the way that, even in consuming what is commonplace to Frederictonians, he retains his outsider status – an alien who seemingly cannot blend into the local environs. His own identity is metaphorically subsumed by the meat, until, finally, Ramjohn realizes that he has not conquered the food but, rather, that his own body has been invaded – this unwanted substance inhabiting him, “venturing into unacceptable areas” of his body and brain.68 Nauseated, he expels the half-consumed pork down the toilet. Ramjohn’s experience of food abjection makes tangible the disjunction between what he had imagined his life in Canada would be and the reality of his lived experience. Prior to arriving in his adopted country, Ramjohn dreamt of a home idyllically situated in the woods near a brook where he would “scoop out slick salmon” every night for supper and have ample time to write poetry.69 In direct contrast, the opening scene of the story places Ramjohn on an uncomfortable concrete bench in a shopping mall, observing people who appear to be full citizen-consumers in a predominantly white Fredericton: “Shoppers breezed by, clutching substantial bags in their — 27 —

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pink plump hands … He felt defeated, isolated, persecuted. Someone sat on the bench next to him. He did not look around but guessed that it was an old woman so afflicted by senility or by cataracts that she could not detect their difference in colour.”70 Ramjohn’s poverty leaves him disenfranchised and unable to partake of the world as others do. Indeed, throughout the story, Ramjohn continually meets with barriers and impassable thresholds, both physical and social, that he is convinced exist because of the colour of his skin. In Ramjohn’s mind, everyone sees him as an “Illegal immigrant! Alien! Leech! Parasite from a next country.”71 His hatred eventually extends to all races, including the owner of a Chinese restaurant who “spurned” him.72 Unable to secure a job, Ramjohn wanders the streets of a barrier-ridden Fredericton where everything and everyone seem against him. He peers through glass windows at people working and makes faces at them; the automatic doors at the grocery store bump into him; and the post-office worker cheats him for extra postage.73 Even his elderly neighbours derive pleasure from a world that seems inaccessible to him. Their sexual moans carry through the walls at night, while he dreams of “holding a piece of his penis in his hand … spongy like a piece of gizzard” that had broken off.74 In a depriving yet polite Canadian world that “really eat [him] up,”75 Ramjohn is consumed by anger and his sense of impotence, continually responding in tirades of profanity – the phrase “Bitches! Bitches on all side!”76 becoming “his favourite expression.”77 While on the surface Ramjohn’s pork dinner is a failed attempt at assimilation, it nevertheless initiates significant boundary work by forcing him to recognize that being absorbed by, and absorbing, the profane in both mind and body are not his only options. In contrast to Ramjohn, who initially sees only an unwelcoming world, his roommate – an illegal female immigrant from Guyana – readily identifies avenues of support within Fredericton: “She told him about the Salvation Army store, where he could purchase used clothing for next to nothing. And about the food bank, where he could, once a month, collect groceries donated by bakeries or food stores that could not otherwise get rid of them. For a while his anger was replaced by a less enervating guilt.”78 Indeed, whereas Ramjohn fails to secure employment and blames Canadians for their lack of openness to newcomers, his roommate – who lacks a social insurance number – quickly lands a baby-sitting job after conversing with a woman in McDonald’s. Although Ramjohn’s consumption of pork – a kind of radical and hostile — 28 —

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ingestion of the world around him – puzzles his roommate, who gently reminds him of his Muslim heritage, she does not pass judgment. Indeed, it is her neutrality that ultimately dismantles Ramjohn’s anger and mental barriers, enabling him to move past the disjunction between his original dream of Canada and the reality of his experience. After expelling the pork in the bathroom, Ramjohn embarks on a new kind of mental rather than physical boundary work by “remov[ing] the imaginary curtain, lean[ing] against an imaginary door jam, and observ[ing]” his roommate watching television – a game show in which contestants vie for a dream vacation to the Caribbean islands. By the end of the story, Ramjohn’s failed meal has been transformative, but not in the way he had originally intended: He sat next to her; she continued to stare at the television. Something felt small and heavy in his stomach; something had eluded his finger … He was once more drawn by the neutrality of her appearance. Revealing nothing, hiding nothing. She brought her foot up onto the couch and placed her tiny forefinger on her knee, scratching. The gesture was not meant for him, said nothing. But he was touched. A small piece of meat still in his stomach moved. He asked her suddenly, “You ever think about getting pregnant?” … After about forty seconds she clicked off the set. And Ramjohn made several vows.79 The roommate’s clicking off the television program and its promise of escape coincides with Ramjohn’s introspection about the game show and his own experience: “Dreaming of going and dreaming of returning. Everybody dreaming. Nobody waking.”80 After failing to assimilate as an angry consumer of pork, though with a small remnant of that meat still in his stomach, Ramjohn has instead awakened to the possibility of connection and of sharing a life where some things – such as his burgeoning relationship with his roommate – are worthy of his care and commitment, not his constant anger and cursing. This shift in his perceptions does not discount the real exclusions he faces as an alienated immigrant but, instead, allows for other possibilities, for a life in which what he holds sacred is not entirely consumed by the profane. — 29 —

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Mini-introduction While the previous vignettes highlight the figurative uses of iconic Canadian fare in service of larger societal or even national critiques, and how what is understood as “Canadian” is dynamic and far from straightforward, this next series of vignettes shifts the emphasis onto individual characters whose food voices declare, both verbally and non-verbally, their cultural identities in response to experiences of assimilation, isolation, or erasure. The difference in this second grouping of vignettes lies in its emphasis on individuals speaking through their food voices in moments of cultural crisis and personal juncture. Their food voices serve as authentic means of selfexpression in the face of systemic racism and colonial oppression but often with either troubling or uncertain conclusions that accentuate the precarity of voices so often pushed to the margins. In the opening vignette, Fred Wah muses on his own complex relationship with ginger, a food ingredient fundamental to his family’s foodways, and also what he perceives to be a site of racial qualification. Wah details his evolving relationship with this ingredient, as well as the import of moments in which he is included and excluded from shared culinary knowledge. In this series of vignettes, we cook from Wah’s instructions because his own sensitivity to the significance of inclusion prompts him to expand the circle of culinary confidences to his readers. In fact, because Wah is pivotal to making ginger a key metaphor in Canadian literature – as evidenced by the fact that other writers’ characters’ food voices speak of ginger in concert with Wah’s – we could have readily categorized ginger (and ginger beef) as iconic. Instead, we have placed Wah at the opening of this second series, bridging both the first series of vignettes and this second grouping. The remaining vignettes, like the one

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focused on Wah, examine food voices as authentic cultural expressions that are profoundly personal in their connections to home and family. In the second vignette, Madeleine Thien uses food metaphors tied to recipes for rice and fish to signify the loss and complex legacy of one immigrant family’s Malaysian heritage across the generations. For Eden Robinson, bannock is central to her respective characters’ acts of self-definition, an attempt to reject the foodways of the oppressor and the trauma of residential schools. And finally, Marlene NourbeSe Philip bestows her character with a food voice that is a long meditation on burn sugar cake informed by colonial histories, family migrations, and racial differences across geographies in a complicated experience of the diaspora.

Food as a Site of Racial Qualification Fred Wah and Ginger Beef Writer Fred Wah’s oeuvre focuses on racial hybridity, which he often explores and figures in relation to food. One key ingredient draws his scrutiny: ginger. As a mixed-race Canadian-born youngster, Fred winces at ginger, a central ingredient in his father’s cooking.1 His father, raised in China, forces him to eat it, along with salt fish and seaweed, but he is spared having to eat wet rice.2 Only as an adult does Wah understand the hurt he caused his father by turning away from ginger, hiding it under his plate. Yet garlic, in his later life, which he comes to understand as being a “site of an implicit racial qualification,”3 becomes something that he loves eating with rice, even knowing it’s identified with race.4 When Wah offers his readers a recipe with enough detail for them to follow in his poetic bio-fiction Diamond Grill, it is for tomato beef,5 one of the many Chop Suey Chinese dishes he cooks for himself. However, Wah reserves for Ginger Beef an even closer scrutiny of its ingredients and their implications for his father, who was raised in China, and for his Canadian-born self: my father hurting at the table sitting hurting — 31 —

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at suppertime deep inside very far down inside because I can’t stand the ginger in the beef and greens he cooked for us tonight and years later tonight that look on his face appears now on mine my children my food their food my father their father me mine the father very far very very far inside.6 Apart from this very poignant small lyric by one of the most influential voices on the condition of racial hybridity in Canada, to our knowledge, Ginger Beef has no other poem dedicated to it in its entirety. In this way, Wah’s hybrid food voice connects ginger with the familial past, present, and future – signalling a suppertime tradition marked by both continuity and distance across the generations. But it is so much a part of Chinese Canadian foodways that it appears as an important and sometimes unnamed backdrop in other pivotal literary scenes about racial qualification. For example, when Ming’s Chinese parents move her to Toronto to begin medical school in a story entitled “How to Get into Medical School, Part II” by Vincent Lam: “They filled her freezer with white plastic containers of ginger beef, sesame chicken, and other favourites of Ming’s.”7 Her white boyfriend, Fitzgerald, does not come to Toronto with Ming and her parents. In fact, they don’t know of his existence. And if they had, they would not have approved. Even at Ming’s first meal with him, in Part 1 of the same story, as Fitzgerald chokes on the hot sauce in a Thai restaurant revealing his “Anglocentric intolerance to chili,”8 it is clear this relationship is doomed. It will take Lam — 32 —

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2.1 Ginger beef, 2019

two stories to trace the gradual disintegration of a relationship between two like-minded individuals caught, like Romeo and Juliet, on different sides of a cultural divide. — 33 —

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In Wayson Choy’s novel All That Matters, Ginger Beef is such a familiar home-cooked dish in a Chinese Canadian home that it is never even named. Poh-Poh, the “paper” grandmother of the Chen family (“paper” relatives being those who can enter Canada by assumed names and claim close family ties to those already in Canada) prepares a feast for the neighbourhood ladies who have come to play Mahjong. The feast’s prelude is a “hot dish of beef and greens sprinkled with herbs, all steaming with flavours and glistening from the sesame oil … and the three ladies rushed into the kitchen, exclaiming over the delicious smells.”9 If the appetizing descriptions of air smelling of “crushed ginger” that wafts from the dishes and makes everyone sigh “with delight”10 cannot alone enchant the reader, then Choy teaches his readers about Chinese Canadian table manners and good taste more pointedly. Says his young narrator, Poh-Poh had “taught me well … so that I would survive in Gold Mountain among the barbarians who boiled greens into mush and blackened whole chunks of meat the size of a man’s head, and carved the dead thing and ate whole slabs employing weapons at the table.”11 Translation? Gold Mountain is Vancouver. And the barbarians are Canadians, with their methods of overcooking vegetables being a legacy of British immigrant foodways and their preponderance of barbecuing large steaks and roasts being a proud food preparation technique of the Americas. The narrator here brings his reader into the community of the Chinese Canadian table, where, despite lack of material wealth, food is shared and appreciated, and Ginger Beef needs no introduction. “Clicking chopsticks rose and fell, and the clink of porcelain spoons in the large bowl made a happy chorus.”12 Writing about Montreal restaurants, Alan Nash explains that, beginning in the 1970s, the Asian restaurant genre pivots away from being synonymous with Chinese cuisine and begins to reflect the diverse cuisines across the continent of Asia. This is reflected in the 2001 Yellow Pages listing restaurant’s cuisines by referring more specifically to the cuisines as Thai, Vietnamese, and so forth.13 However, prior to the 1970s, “exotic” fare in Canada was Chinese food, which was available at the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants dotted across the country. For after completion of the railway, Chinese workers found themselves stranded in Canada with inadequate resources to fund their way home. Prior to the 1970s, in small towns in Canada, the Chinese restaurateur was often the only Chinese resident, so his menu naturally catered to — 34 —

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palates unfamiliar with Chinese foodways. A typical small-town Chinese restaurant would offer a hybrid menu – Canadian food, on the one hand, and Chinese food, on the other.14 But a visitor from China would have been hard pressed to find anything recognizable on that Chinese menu! What was on offer more precisely was a cuisine born of the negotiation between available ingredients, the abilities of cooks and restaurateurs who had been trained by previous café operators and owners in Canada, and the willingness of the Canadian public to venture to try new foods. In Canada, we call this “Chop Suey Chinese Cuisine,” in part because of the inevitable presence of the catch-all dish Chop Suey on every menu and to signal its distinctly North American origin since Chop Suey itself did not originate in China at all. It is likely that the phrase is a variation of “tsap seui,” a Cantonese dish that, Justine Sterling explains, translates to “miscellaneous leftovers.”15 When Ann Hui’s father, who was skilled in authentic Chinese cuisine upon immigration, takes over a Chinese restaurant in Abbotsford, British Columbia, he has to relearn how to cook – the Canadian way. “‘The people here – they won’t eat the food you cooked in Chinatown,’” former restaurant manager Mr Cheung explains to him.16 “He showed him sweet and sour pork, one of the most popular items on the Chinese menu. Sure, it was similar to gu lou yuk, a classic Cantonese dish, he explained, but there were key differences. He showed Dad how to make the sauce out of sugar, vinegar and ketchup, then build a batter out of cornstarch, egg and flour … ‘This is Chinese?’ Dad asked. Mr Cheung nodded, grinning. ‘Chop Suey Chinese.’”17 What are the staples of Chop Suey Chinese food? Chop Suey itself certainly, with its primary ingredient being bean sprouts and anything else that was available, General Tso chicken, lemon chicken. Across the country, one encounters slight variations, adjusted to please local customers. For example, in Glendon, Alberta, a town with a significant Ukrainian population, one can find “‘Chinese pierogis.’”18 In Thunder Bay, Ontario, one finds “‘Bon Bon ribs’ – a made-in-Thunder-Bay invention of spareribs coated in allspice and mSG, then deep-fried quickly and spritzed with lemon. It was one of the dishes that helped make Mr Lee so popular he was hired by the local cable Tv station to host his own cooking show. Each week, he invited viewers into his kitchen to show them the secrets of cooking ‘Chinese food.’”19 One staple of Chop Suey Chinese Food, found especially in Canada’s Prairie provinces, has taken its place in Canada’s literary landscape: Ginger Beef. Indeed, Ginger Beef has arguably earned the status of an iconically — 35 —

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Canadian food. The story goes that the idea originated at the Silver Inn Restaurant in Calgary, where Mr Wong was testing recipes and having little success with a new Peking-style snack he was introducing, reminiscent of jerky. Instead, he decided to offer his customers something more familiar to them: a fried dish, this time beef coated in a thin batter, then tossed in a “sweet chili-ginger-garlic mix.”20 That it became known as “ginger” beef was a function of customers not fully recognizing the combination of seasonings and asking for “that beef with the ginger stuff.”21 In “The Process of Chop Suey” Caitlin Gordon-Walker explains that “ginger beef is far from being representative of a discrete and static ‘authentic’ or ‘traditional’ Chinese culture, but rather emerged from interaction and mixture.”22 In Wah’s oeuvre, it is signposted as a key metaphor for Canadian foodways more generally. It is a dish in the repertoire of Chop Suey cuisine that nourishes, feeds, and communicates the racial hybridity that has a longstanding place in Canada’s real and literary food landscape.

Sharing Recipes and Family Memories: Rice and Fish in “Simple Recipes” Sometimes literary texts are so explicit in their recipe sharing that readers cannot help but imagine making the dish – that is, until the food metaphors disrupt the process. In such cases, the possibility of food’s materiality falls away, leaving readers to contemplate, instead, its literary function and figurative role. Such is the case with the short story “Simple Recipes” in which author Madeleine Thien traces the intergenerational conflict of a Malaysian immigrant family through a complicated food voice that shifts across time and space, both inviting and then dissuading readers from experimenting in the kitchen. Thien’s story opens with the declaration, “There is a simple recipe for making rice,” with the narrator moving between childhood memories of her father meticulously cleaning the rice and the delivery of the step-bystep instructions: “Once the washing is done, you measure the water this way – by resting the tip of your index finger on the surface of the rice. The water should reach the bend of your first knuckle.”23 Memories of cooking are brought to life and infused with immediacy through Thien’s use of the — 36 —

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present tense and second person voice as well as through the father’s tactile, sensual engagement with meal preparation throughout the narrative. The implications are that cultural traditions are kept alive when shared, practised, and realized in the everyday, and Thien’s narrator recalls being captivated as a child by her father’s culinary diligence, which transformed raw ingredients and animated the family home: In our house, the ceilings were yellowed with grease. Even the air was heavy with it. I remember that I loved the weight of it, the air that was dense with the smell of countless meals cooked in a tiny kitchen, all those good smells jostling for space … Beside me, my father chops green onions quickly. He uses a cleaver that he says is older than I am by nine years. The blade of the knife rolls forward and backward, loops of green onion gathering in a pyramid beside my father’s wrist.24 Alongside the narrator’s recounting of the rice recipe and her memories of her father’s skill with a knife, readers witness the father and daughter’s past preparation of a Malaysian fish dish – the fish killed swiftly, cleaned, stuffed with ginger, dressed with garlic, and fried whole in the wok. The meal is exquisite, near sacred in its transformation – with the mother removing her fogged glasses to be enveloped in the scents, warmth, and flavours of the dish: “She eats with her head bowed down, as if in prayer.”25 But as much as readers are inspired to recreate these dishes, Thien’s story works to disrupt such a culinary impulse by emphasizing the meal’s predominantly figurative meaning in communicating the family’s intergenerational divisions as affected by the systemic racism of Canadian society and by the pressure to assimilate to an Anglo-European majority. Markers of the family’s Asian heritage – including their daily meals – have slowly been eroded. The young narrator and her older brother do not speak the parents’ mother tongue, and all the characters are nameless, as if to indicate the loss of their identities. Ironically, this erosion of the younger generation’s cultural heritage comes at a time when Asian cuisine was first being popularized among mainstream Canadians in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the CBC cooking show Wok with Yan. An article reviewing the television show and sharing two recipes from it (Steamed Fish, Chinese Way, and Oriental Deep Fried Chicken Wings) in a 1980s issue of the Globe and Mail — 37 —

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reveals the fact that, by teaching the “uninitiated” about cooking with a wok, Stephen Yan, the star of the show, was navigating a kind of liminal space as a chef moving between cultures and countries: “Just as I want North Americans to appreciate ethnic Oriental cooking, I can also share western ideas when I return to Hong Kong. Call me an ambassador of cooking.”26 The article also highlights the cooking show’s strong comedic focus since Yan’s signature is “an apron emblazoned with a wok pun.”27 In Thien’s story, the narrator and her father regularly watch Wok with Yan, with the father taking copious notes on Yan’s preparation of Peking Duck. Clearly, Yan’s signature humour has had an influence, as the father even uses one of Yan’s puns – “Take a wok on the wild side” – when trying to tempt his son to try his Malaysian-style fish dish during the family dinner.28 Yan offers culinary inspiration to the narrator’s father. However, the fact that a Hong Kong chef is this Malaysian immigrant father’s popular reference point within his newly adopted Canadian home points to the fact that a more nuanced understanding of diversity and inclusion are far from realized within the story’s Vancouver setting and time period. It is not surprising, then, that the only “naming” that occurs is when the brother uses a racist slur against the father at the dinner table, a moment that erupts with the father violently beating his son. When the father later offers an apology, it is also spoken via the food voice through his serving a quintessential Canadian breakfast of French toast and maple syrup – a meal that the son is too upset to consume. As Thien’s story shifts between the past and present, readers witness the unravelling of family cohesion and cultural traditions for the immigrant family confronting external and internal pressures to assimilate. Tellingly, the adult narrator’s apartment is not infused with the smells of cooking, as was the case in her parents’ home, but, rather, the walls are “scrubbed clean” and she “open[s] the windows and turn[s] the fan on whenever [she] prepare[s] a meal.”29 And, although her father bought her a rice cooker (a sign that she does not practise the “simple recipe” given at the opening of the story), she uses the cooker “so rarely it stays in the back of the cupboard, the cord wrapped neatly around its belly.”30 This turning away from culinary traditions and practices leaves readers to ponder the final two lines of the story – “Somewhere in my memory, a fish in the sink is dying slowly. My father and I watch as the water runs down” – as a metaphor for the languishing of their Malaysian cultural heritage and the loss of family — 38 —

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togetherness.31 Ultimately, Thien shares recipes with readers not for the dishes to be prepared but, rather, for sombre reflection, since the carrying forward of cultural traditions and identities across the generations of an immigrant family is far from simple.

“But I’m Fry Bread”: Decolonizing the Diet and the Self in Monkey Beach Eden Robinson’s iconic novel Monkey Beach teems with food – from Kraft Dinner and Jell-O to the Haisla First Nation’s staples of salmon and oolichan grease. This inclusive array of industrially processed and locally harvested foods points to what Vikki Visvis identifies as Robinson’s ability to play with the supposedly rigid categories of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous: “for Robinson, bannock or ‘Ichiban’ are as ‘Native’ as ‘Kraft or hot dogs.’”32 When we look closely at Robinson’s use of food metaphors, such categories become further complicated through their intersection with the settler-colonial past and present. Indeed, one character’s affirmation of her identity through a reference to bannock, or fry bread, signals not only a move to decolonize in response to trauma from years spent at residential schools but also an embodied, cultural, and place-based experience of the Haisla community. Throughout Robinson’s novel, the main character, Lisamarie (or Lisa), learns about the land, local foods, and preparation and preserving techniques from her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo. Early in the novel, oolichan grease is given the most extensive treatment as the narrator incorporates several paragraphs with step-by-step instructions in a food-focused act of cultural resurgence tied to seasonal practices: “Fill a large metal boiler with water. Light the fire pit beneath the boiler and bring the water to a boil. Then add the ripened oolichans and stir slowly until cooked (they will float slightly off the bottom).”33 A few pages later, Lisa explains how oolichan have become sparse because of industrial pollution as she notes the impacts of settler-colonialism on the Haisla Nation’s unceded, traditional territories.34 In this regard, the food voice foregrounds food’s critical role in expressing Lisa’s family’s embodied connection to, and knowledge of, the land. Tellingly, for Robinson’s non-Indigenous readers, this shared recipe cannot be reproduced, not only because they lack this specialized knowledge — 39 —

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and hands-on learning but also because of settler-colonial endangerment of oolichan and their habitat. In Monkey Beach, the food voice carries, therefore, not only a celebration of Haisla foodways but also the trauma of disconnection from the land, the loss of cultural identity, and the violence of the present-day settler-colonial system. Indeed, one of the most powerful identity-focused uses of food in Robinson’s novel comes in response to the trauma of residential schools. During a conversation with her Uncle Mick, Lisa learns how his girlfriend, Cathy, acquired her nickname “Cookie”: He stubbed out his cigarette. He looked out over the water. “Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one – guess she was fourteen then – this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, you bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head. “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”35 The “sweet and dainty and easy to eat” description of “Cookie” speaks to the forced behavioural conformity, cultural and linguistic assimilation, and genocide of Canada’s residential schools. The fact that Cathy uses a food metaphor is doubly telling, particularly when we reflect on the malnutrition, nutritional experiments, and denial of cultural foodways inf licted on Indigenous children in the residential schools.36 Moreover, “sweetness” intersects with the broader system of starchy and carbohydrate-rich foods that appears so prominently throughout Monkey Beach. Inexpensive, processed foods are part of Kitimaat’s foodways and are signs of a settlercolonial system that has imposed itself on foodways while its industries have also devastated spawning grounds. This settler-colonial “sweetness” is rendered highly suspect, therefore, in a novel that provides direct contrasts of flavours: “[Soapberries] look like cranberries, but can be squashed and whipped into a foam – Indian ice cream, uh’s in Haisla – which is mildly sweet but with a bitter, bitter aftertaste that takes some getting used to … By the end of the week, I had become used to the taste. I didn’t even notice the bitterness any more. It was like whipped cream, but not as nauseatingly sweet as the canned stuff Mom bought.”37 — 40 —

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The fact, then, that Cathy identifies herself as “fry bread,” yet remains “Cookie” throughout her life, points to the ongoing trauma of residential schools as well as the violent intersectional racism of a Canadian society that targets Indigenous women. Ultimately, Cookie’s declaration against the nun’s attempt to make her “easy to eat” haunts the criminal circumstances surrounding Cookie’s murder – all signs of a violent settler-colonial system that consumes and destroys: “Did he ever mention Cookie?” “Cookie? His wife? What about her?” “Do you know what happened to her?[”] His face lost all expression. “Someone tied her up and put her in her car. Then they set it on fire. It was way the hell in the middle of nowhere. The police said it was suicide and the FBI –”38 Just as Cookie resisted the nun’s indoctrination in residential schools, so her participation as an adult in the American Indian Movement, resulting in her eventual murder, with the authorities seemingly complicit in the crime, points to systemic racism and colonial oppression that continually work to undermine and destroy Cathy’s existence. In contrast to the misnomer “Cookie,” Cathy’s chosen name of “fry bread” resonates with Haisla foodways, familial connections, and seasonal fishing within the broader context of the novel – and, in this regard, the name signifies Indigenous resurgence situated in the everyday. On a family trip to Kemano to fish for oolichan with her parents and aunt and uncles, Lisa recounts having fried eggs and bacon for dinner with bannock: “Uncle Geordie and Aunt Edith were already concentrating on eating. ‘Bannock’s in the kitchen,’ Aunt Edith said. ‘Hurry, while it’s hot.’”39 During this same fishing trip, Lisa awakens to her Uncle Mick’s nightmare as he shouts “Cookie” in the middle of the night – with Lisa thinking her uncle must be “having a bad dream about cookies,”40 and later he erupts in anger at the breakfast table after Aunt Edith says grace, triggering his painful memories from residential school.41 Unlike cookies, bannock is central to familial and cultural traditions, and provides a significant counterpoint to the intergenerational trauma of residential school and its related food-associations. Through its literal and metaphorical circulation within Monkey Beach, then, bannock clearly holds resonance for Robinson, yet, like many of the — 41 —

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foods given prominence in the novel, its categorization is complicated. For Robinson, herself, bannock holds associations with her journey to become a writer and connect with her Haisla territory and culture. When asked in an interview about spiritual places she has visited, Robinson recalls a 1992 trip to Kitlope as part of a Rediscovery Camp program with sixteen Indigenous youth: The cabin was haunted. I was a city kid. I’d brought my hairdryer. Someone said to me, “Where you going to plug it in?” The only generator we were using was keeping the fish and the meat cold. I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to unplug it for a while and blow-dry my hair!” [Laughter] I didn’t realize the fish were more important than my hair. [Laughter]. We went up to Kitlope Lake. There was such a sense of place! It touched the part of me that tells stories. And it was the part of me that had been missing. That trip was the first time I’d ever made bannock. [Laughter] It was the hardest bannock you’d ever had! [Laughter] Oh, God. It was rock solid!42 While this food memory is clearly a joyful one for Robinson, more recently (since the publication of her Trickster trilogy), she has been explicitly introducing herself as a writer who, after having been diagnosed with Celiac disease, can only eat gluten-free bannock. 43 Indeed, Penguin Random House’s description of Robinson on its website includes the following: eDeN roBINSoN has matriarchal tendencies. Doesn’t have a pressure cooker, but knows how to jar salmon. Her smoked salmon will not likely kill you. Hobbies: Shopping for the Apocalypse, using vocabulary as a weapon, nominating cousins to council while they’re out of town, chair yoga, looking up possible diseases or syndromes on the interwebs, perfecting gluten-free bannock and playing Mah-jong.44 Although subtly signalled in this description, Robinson’s matriarchal-culinary knowledge and dietary intolerance intersect with wider discussions among other Indigenous communities about intergenerational diseases wrought by colonialism and certain staples, such as bannock.45 This complex relationship between foodways and health surfaces in Robinson’s conversation with Emmett Matheson during her 2017 book tour for Son of a Trickster: — 42 —

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“I gave up gluten in 2005 and it changed so many things,” she says. “We thought it was Irritable Bowel Syndrome at first and I used to have to actually Google all the bathrooms any time I went out. “I do miss croissants. I had an erotic dream about croissants and smoking. I woke up feeling guilty, as if I’d done something terrible. I guess I had.” Robinson will gladly and gleefully hold forth on gluten, from the lack of grains in the traditional Haisla diet, to the joys of creme brûlée, or her patience with people who voluntarily go gluten-free.46 Bannock may circulate as both a literal and a metaphorical food central to Indigenous identities in Robinson’s writing, yet it is also important to recognize and appreciate that Robinson’s own food voice is distinct from those of her characters. In her essay “The Salmon Eaters,” Robinson shares the Haisla Nation’s connection to the salmon and other salmon eaters (bears and orcas) as well as her own finely tuned cultural sense of taste: “I can’t tell the difference between wines to save my life, but I can tell you which salmon species it is and where they were swimming and how far they had to swim [to spawn] simply by taste.”47 For Robinson, coastal First Nations are inextricably linked to salmon, something her food voice collectively declares: “When we’re protesting things like pipelines or fish farms, what we’re protesting is a threat not just to our food security but to our identity. Imagine France without cheese. Greece without olives. Germany without beer.”48

Preparing a Cake That Doesn’t Travel Well: Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s “Burn Sugar” The title of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s story, “Burn Sugar,” introduces the key ingredient for Trinidadian black cake, a Christmas ritual for the narrator and her family. But the title’s instruction is partially incorrect: it is important not to fully burn the sugar but, rather, to melt it so as to avoid its being overly bitter, to ensure the resulting cake’s sweetness has a rich depth of flavour. Like the cake, the story itself is saturated with bitter sweetness: memories and motherly wisdom (treat the cake, says Mother, with “more make-sure-isgood-Trinidad rum”49). Somehow the sweetness of memories is also tainted — 43 —

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for a narrator living so far from her Caribbean home. Something about the cake received from afar makes her “nostrils twitch”: perhaps the “odour of mouldiness” rising up from the cake tin, casting a “pall over she pleasure, shadowing her delight.”50 What is the food voice of the cake telling her? Each year, the Mother carefully prepares and mails a homemade cake to be sure the narrator has the good food of the season at hand: “cake is for eating not thinking about,” she says practically.51 Sometimes, it is true, the cake arrives after Christmas, but it always arrives eventually. For the narrator, however, “each black mouthful” of cake brings “up all kind of memory,”52 sometimes to the point that “food and memory … stick up in she throat – big and hard like a rock stone.”53 For the narrator, burn sugar cake is the stuff of memory, the stuff of her past life in the Caribbean, which still is so much of who she is even as she narrates the story from her Canadian present. The packaging is almost as important to the ritual as the “black and moist” cake.54 Mother sends it in a biscuit tin saved from the previous year, wrapped up in layers of brown paper and addressed on both sides of the package. Seeing it, the narrator “sit back on she haunches and laugh – laugh she head off – the lid never match, never matched the tin, but it there all the same … The cake.”55 That description also offers an example of what NourbeSe Philip describes as “decentring” Standard English in order to evoke the rhythm and lilt of a Caribbean-inflected idiom,56 which signals how much the narrator’s upbringing is still a part of who she is. In this story, the food voice takes on multi-sensorial dimensions – through the tastes, colours, smells, and sounds of the Caribbean. However, even the narrator, who shares in the cake’s cultural and culinary legacy, has difficulty duplicating the feat of Mother in making an excellent cake despite having apprenticed at her elbow for many years. Something in the cake changes when it travels, so it doesn’t taste the way it did “back home.”57 Philip’s narrator has learned some of the intricacies of the cake’s preparation: to wash the butter (“pushing the lumps of butter round with a wooden spoon”58), then to add two handfuls of white sugar to the hot iron pot and watch it change after the count of one hundred.59 But it “always catch she – by surprise.”60 Mother then adds water to make the “magic liquid,”61 without which the cake cannot be made. The burn sugar is absolutely essential, and the narrator wonders whether this represents Mother or perhaps she, herself: “which of them was essential to the other – which of them was the burn sugar?”62 — 44 —

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As the story progresses, the narrator seems to see herself more closely aligned with the cake rather than with the titular single ingredient. The batter transforms when beaten, rather the way her young body had changed,63 and then it gradually changes from “grey to brown” with the addition of burn sugar, “just like me she think, then it turn a dark brown like she sister, then an even darker brown – almost black – the colour of her brother, and all the time the Mother stirring.”64 Ironically, what incites the narrator to contemplate the meaning of black cake is precisely its absence, its failure to arrive one year,65 which prompts her to take up the challenge in her own kitchen, using the family recipe, and summoning “the Mother” of memory to be at her elbow.66 All the time she senses that she is as different from the Mother as white is from burn sugar, “but of the same source.”67 During this scene of cake preparation, NourbeSe Philip stages a debate. The narrator, who has carefully developed the metaphor of the cake through the story as embodying her identity, containing and communicating memories, understands this scene as two women coming together “to share in this old old ritual of transformation and metamorphosis.”68 It is the narrator who comes to understand that the funny smell of must and mould is also “the smell of [her] loneliness and separation – exile from family and home and tribe – even from the land.”69 But the Mother, now described in the story as Mammy, will have none of it. “Is only a cake, child –” she explains,70 “cake is for eating not thinking about – eat it and enjoy it – stop looking for meaning in everything.”71 Taking advice from the actual Mother by phone – rather than the imagined one of memory in her kitchen – the narrator ends up cutting off some of the burned crusts and pouring lots of rum to create smaller cakes, “not particularly attractive ones either, but they tasted like black cake should, and without that funny smell.”72 For these cakes, prepared by the narrator far from the Caribbean, do not need to travel before being eaten. The narrator cannot help but think there must be some meaning in them, and NourbeSe Philip’s readers are invited to agree. Just as the story has been told in Caribbean-inflected idiom, the black cakes have been prepared on new soil. Whereas the story began with a narrator feeling exiled, it concludes with one who has negotiated her place and how to find comfort within it. In “Making Black Cake in Combustible Spaces,” NourbeSe Philip meditates on this cake as it was made worlds apart – by Emily Dickinson in her New England home of privilege and by her own mother in Trinidad — 45 —

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and Tobago. Dickenson’s handwritten recipe can be found in Harvard’s Houghton Library, which brought together 667 individuals on a video call in 2021 to celebrate Dickinson’s birthday by preparing black cake according to her particular recipe. At first it seems ironic that Dickinson in Amherst, New England, uses molasses, obtained from a distance and through the Triangular Trade that brought her family not only food goods but also the kitchen help from which she presumably gleaned knowledge of this Caribbean recipe, while NourbeSe Philip’s own mother chooses burn sugar rather than molasses as the cake’s key ingredient. Aife Murray suggests that Emily Dickinson’s writing itself, as well as her recipe repertoire, “suggests influence by her servants … African American Vernacular English [the term linguists use for Black English].”73 When Philip herself thinks about her own storytelling method in “Burn Sugar,” she reflects particularly on her use of what she calls “the Caribbean demotic” and what Murray describes as “vernacular English.” “As I reread the story,” she writes, “I’m aware of a certain discomfort with the language, some of that because I feel more adept all these years later at how to work with the Caribbean demotic; some of it perhaps still lingering in the shametinged margins of it not being ‘proper’ english [sic].”74 The symbolism of burn sugar itself, as Philip goes on to explain, is powerfully and intimately connected to a sense of dislocation. Why does Philip’s mother use burn sugar (which Philip describes as “prized as the philosopher stone”75) rather than molasses for her black cake, which is notably described as “Burn Sugar” cake in the story’s title as elsewhere? Philip provides one answer: “It is a bitter history we consume as we consume the rich Blackness that is Black Cake, but perhaps, like the philosopher’s stone, the burn sugar has the potential of generating transformative possibilities within and for us.”76 But she also volunteers that the process is a complicated one for her, both figuratively and literally. “Making burn sugar – making blackness from whiteness – remains a challenging and difficult process for me in all respects.”77 However, it seems that it is precisely this challenge, the annual ritual of reverse alchemy, that is crucial.

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3 PLACE AND THE LAND

Mini-introduction In the previous series of vignettes, characters spoke in a food voice by making choices to assert the identities they wanted to forge for themselves. However, in this third series of vignettes, place – sometimes the land and its creatures, often aspects of the made environment – finds ways to speak in its own food voice, entering into dialogue with characters struggling to cope with hunger, even greed, all the time negotiating ways to refine their own belief systems. The earliest texts are by sisters Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, English settler colonials. They, like the dandelion about which they write, are transplants to Canada; and, like the dandelion, they too find they must adapt to the new climate and realities of life in the bush. Although the sisters believe they are attuned to their adopted home – its seasons and possibilities – their prescriptions to readers about how to adapt and survive, including ways to mimic coffee beans with roasted dandelion roots, reveal their reluctance to adopt entirely new foodways and their preference for adaptations of the foodways to preserve aspects of the familiar. Gabrielle Roy’s 1945 novel is, at first glance, a realistic snapshot of urban Montreal. However, the novel is so tightly organized, focused on a particular group of working-class protagonists trapped in grinding poverty, and its scenarios carefully constructed to reveal the characters’ own implication in the consumer society fuelling the built environment, that the city itself speaks of hunger. The city whispers it incessantly into the characters’ ears, siren-like, until the men are driven to martyr themselves and their limbs to the gaping maw of the Second World War.

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The next three works have fabular elements, their authors transforming Canada’s history and landscape into the stuff of legend. In Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordecai Richler introduces two Jewish characters, along with their dietary laws and supplies that enable them to survive, onto the doomed Franklin Expedition. The food voice here belongs to the land itself, which, time and time again, applauds self-restraint and punishes greed, and is interpreted by the curious prophet-like charlatan Ephraim. George Elliott Clarke mythologizes Africville in Whylah Falls, set in a mythical time before the actual destruction of Africville by the City of Halifax, which was completed by 1970. Clarke offers a food voice that sings of apples and apple blossoms, roses and rye, of Beauty that defies the harsh realities of a world of discrimination, unpunished crime, and the imminent destruction of the real infrastructure of Africville itself, when Halifax levelled the community. If Richler’s food voice counters the inevitable doom of the historical Franklin Expedition, and Clarke’s defies the disappearance of Africville from communal memory, then Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor’s many food voices – spoken through food choices made by humans, animals, and even the novel’s wonderful trickster figure – reinforce the lessons taught by all three novels: beware of greed, treat others with respect and empathy, tread consciously in the land that sustains you.

Weed, Flower, Coffee Dandelions in Roughing It in the Bush and The Female Emigrant’s Guide In the summer months, most Canadians curse the common dandelion, even opting for nefarious methods of eradicating this pest from their lawns and gardens. This widespread perception of the plant aligns with how most would define it: as a prolific weed. On the other end of the spectrum, however, are consumers who savour the plant’s greens, spending top dollar at high-end grocers or local farmers’ markets. These disparate views of the plant have a long literary history, particularly within nineteenth-century Canadian emigrant writing, as two famous sisters of the backwoods – Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie – worked to reform colonial settlers’ understanding of the dandelion and to describe its many uses and — 48 —

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preparations. In the hands of Traill and Moodie, the dandelion is not only a valued ingredient in the kitchen but also part of a metaphorical framework communicating the sisters’ adaptations as emigrants and their revised relationships with, and knowledge of, the land – lessons that many twentyfirst-century readers have yet to realize. Throughout their writing, Moodie and Traill work diligently to revise their categorizations of the dandelion from “weed” to “flower.” The plant’s status can even shift within a single sentence, such as in Studies of Plant Life in Canada, in which Traill describes the plant in both praiseworthy and critical terms, noting under her entry for “Dandelion” that the “Composite Order presents us with more numerous families of plants than any other, and supplies us with a host of flowers, and also some troublesome weeds, which are of wide diffusion, the winged seeds being borne to great distances and establishing themselves wherever they chance to alight.”1 It is precisely the dandelion’s rapid growth and ready propagation that Moodie embraces. The plant’s abundance makes it a reliable addition to the pantry. In Roughing It in the Bush, Moodie suggests that, in the future, settlers will be planting these “golden flowers” in their gardens for a variety of purposes: as an ingredient for coffee, salads, or beer; as a “plaything” for children; or as a “substitute for cabbage” when boiled with pork.2 Most famous, however, is Moodie’s culinary skill in the preparation of dandelion coffee. According to Moodie, dandelion roots are best harvested in the fall when one is gathering the potato crop. At this time of year, the roots are less bitter and can be dried and stored for winter as they “will keep for years, and can be roasted when required.”3 Moodie’s step-by-step recipe for dandelion coffee, which she shares in the sketch “Disappointed Hopes” in Roughing It in the Bush, can be readily reproduced by today’s readers provided they have access to dandelions that are free of chemical traces from fertilizers, weed-killers, or other pollutants. In The Female Emigrant’s Guide, Traill defers to her sister’s expertise, quoting Moodie at length in the recounting of the preparation: The roots should be carefully washed, but not so as to remove the fine, brown skin which covers them, and which contains the aromatic flavour. The roots, when dry, should be cut up into small pieces, about the size of a kidney-bean, and roasted … in a Dutch-oven, … stirring them from time to time, to prevent burning: when they are brown — 49 —

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3.1 Roasted and ground dandelion roots, 2015

through, and crisp, like freshly-roasted coffee, remove them, and let them cool; grind like coffee. Put a small cupful into the coffee-pot, and pour over it a quart of boiling water, letting it boil again for a few minutes: drunk with sugar and cream, this preparation is very little inferior to good coffee.4 In Moodie’s kitchen, dandelion coffee was not a novelty or temporary substitution but a staple. Life in the backwoods meant that store-bought teas and coffees were “expensive articles of luxury” and “for years [the Moodies] used no other article” than dandelion for their coffee.5 Moodie observes that, in her experience, her dandelion coffee “proved excellent – far superior to the common coffee we procured at the stores.”6 While Moodie’s nineteenth-century recipe is reproducible by literary cooks of today, it is important to reflect equally on the metaphorical role of the plant. A multi-layered reading of Moodie’s and Traill’s texts – in which — 50 —

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material practicality and figurative expression work in tandem – brings to the fore a wide-ranging process of recategorizing or redefining, their worlds and themselves, all within the limits of the colonial project of settlement. As educated, upper-middle-class British women, Moodie and Traill experienced the Canadian backwoods in ways that involved a series of adaptations, changing their understanding of the role and identity of a nineteenth-century “cultivated” woman,7 as well as their sense of what constituted meaningful and valued knowledge and skills. For instance, Moodie’s sketch “Disappointed Hopes,” in which she shares her dandelion recipe, contains her famous declaration: “I have contemplated a well-hoed ridge of potatoes on that bush farm, with as much delight as in years long past I had experienced in examining a fine painting in some well-appointed drawing room.”8 This comment cuts to the root of Moodie’s redefinition of femininity, class, knowledge, and accomplishment, and the fact that “stories of the everyday have the creative potential to reflect significant cultural moments of transplanting and transition.”9 The potato patch was the place where Moodie laboured physically – a kind of work she would have been unaccustomed to in England – and it was also the place where, in the fall of 1835, she first took notice of the “fine dandelion roots among the potatoes” and began making dandelion coffee.10 Thus, when Moodie concludes her discussion of the dandelion by noting that she is “convinced … the time will come when this hardy weed … will be transplanted into our gardens, and tended with due care,”11 her insight into the plant, as part of an extended network of botanical and gardening metaphors, speaks to the sisters’ sense of their own transplanting into the backwoods and how that experience brings an ongoing process of change, including revised ways of relating to and understanding the world. When one considers that colonists arriving on the Mayflower in 1620 are likely responsible for first importing dandelions (as seeds) to North America for the plant’s medicinal properties, it is telling how this intimate botanical knowledge has become distant and forgotten over the centuries.12 During the nineteenth century, Moodie herself observes, “Few of our colonists are acquainted with the many uses to which this neglected but most valuable plant may be applied,”13 and she also recounts teaching Indigenous peoples how to prepare her coffee. Over time and through interacting with their surroundings (including this invasive species), Moodie and Traill became — 51 —

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alive to the dandelion’s properties and changed their own ways of relating to this plant, working, in turn, to educate their readers on how to settle and use the land for their own purposes.14

Montreal, City of Hunger and Desire in Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute “Did you ever go walking along St Catherine Street, an’ you didn’t have a penny in your pocket, an’ you look at all the stuff in the windows?” asks Alphonse in Gabrielle Roy’s 1945 novel set in Montreal’s Saint Henri neighbourhood. “Did you ever have an empty gut and walk by a restaurant up there where there’s chicken roasting in the window?”15 Alphonse has indeed done just that, and often, as have other men gathered at Ma Philibert’s restaurant listening to him. Indeed, if the settler-colonial experience voiced in texts by Traill and Moodie is one of hard scrabble survival, the world of Montreal in Gabrielle Roy’s novel is depicted through the extended metaphor of hunger. Hunger operates in literal ways, but also in figurative ones across characters, and within the rapidly urbanizing consumer society more generally. As Alphonse bemoans his own hunger, he addresses a group of working-class men seeking solace and company when home and comfortable hearth have been displaced by urbanization. Montreal, here, offers them only grinding poverty and a world war hungry for their service. The novel’s food voice operates as extended metaphor of hunger, born of an urban, capitalist system engaged in the Second World War, which devours the characters and makes them, in turn, devour each other. Food in Roy’s Montreal is seldom found in home settings. The city seems to yearn for a past where the kitchen hearth offered comfort and the province’s bounty could satisfy hunger as it does in the countryside where Rose-Anna grew up. Rose-Anna, mother of the LaCasse family – who are broke and broken, as the family name suggests – stands beside the family meal table, holding back to leave more food for her children.16 Restaurants signal pivotal turning points in the novel’s plot. They come to symbolize the consumer society structuring urban Montreal, where the economies of need and desire intersect, and working-class men are commodities to be sold for wartime duty in exchange for putting food on their families’ tables. The novel opens at the Five and Dime cafeteria, where — 52 —

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young Florentine works and first notices young Jean and his suit of English cloth. If she were to lean closer to him, she believes, “she would breathe the odour of the great, exciting city. She could see St. Catherine Street … Everything she desired, admired and envied floated there before her eyes.”17 It is also at the Five and Dime where later she treats her mother to a rare meal out of the house, the chicken special. “My, that’s expensive though, forty cents,” exclaims her mother, demurring to take a piece of pie because it’s included in the price, “ just a taste then … But it’s not out of hunger anymore.”18 And when she slips a couple of bills into her mother’s pocket, she watches Rose-Anna finger the titular tin flute, deciding whether to put the money towards such a shiny treasure for her ailing son or towards “daily bread for the family table.”19 While restaurants offer what consumers desire in this novel, they fall short of providing the sustenance they need. Restaurant life seems even to mimic and displace nature. At the Five and Dime, we hear the “click of the toaster, the purring of the coffee pots on their electric plates, the cracking of the kitchen loud speaker, combined in a continuous sound like the hum of a warm summer day.”20 Marguerite is newly arrived from the countryside, not yet “disillusioned with the cheap glitter of the neighbourhood.” She makes each sundae like the first, the summer day in the restaurant is overlaid with “the added charm of strong odours of vanilla and sweets. You could always hear the muffled rumbling of milkshake makers … like interminable buzzing of flies caught in sticky paper.”21 But throughout the novel, sweets should be viewed with suspicion. Florentine cooks up a seduction scene as she stirs the fudge,22 and Jean grabs her instead of the candy, which she carries as a “shield.”23 At the same moment, Florentine’s family is visiting the family home in the countryside during the season of running maple sap, or “sugaring off ”; this will be a bittersweet visit that will also turn sour, Rose-Anna having to confront her heartily well-fed mother and country-based sibling’s family. Roy’s readers quickly become attuned to the ominous warning of the food voice, which sees the sour and rotten in things sweet. Roy’s Montreal is a city that fuels desire only to serve up hunger. The novel’s central characters, the LaCasse family, are all malnourished. Emmanuel – who, like his namesake, serves as a kind of saviour or safety net for Florentine – is “hungry for affection.”24 Florentine has a “hungry, defensive manner,”25 and her eyes focus on Jean with a “devouring flame.”26 Eventually, Azarius, Eugene, and Emmanuel all enlist in the Second World — 53 —

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War to fund and feed those they love and must, by enlisting, leave. Do they or their families thereby gain the titular second-hand happiness – the “Bonheur d’occasion” signalled by the original French title? Perhaps. But, like the tin flute in the novel’s translated title, when it can finally be grasped, it offers only a shadow of the pleasure it originally promised.

Food Fables in Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here The food voice in Richler’s epic novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here, repeatedly warns against greed, advocating the benefits of self-control, of consuming only in moderation. The novel is at one level a history of Canada, which includes a retelling of the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin to Canada’s Arctic, in which his ominously named ships, the Error and the Erebus, became entombed in ice, their crews dying painful deaths hastened by lead poisoning from the solder of the ships’ provisions of tinned food. Except in Richler’s retelling there are two additional crew members in the fictional expedition, observant Jews who bring their own, kosher, food provisions on board: “six coils of stuffed derma, four dozen kosher salamis, a key of schmaltz herring and uncounted jars of chicken fat, their pockets bulging with garlic cloves.”27 Both fare better than their fictional crewmates, who suffer excruciating deaths after gobbling up the liver of a polar bear.28 Not only do they outlive their greedy crewmates but one manages to survive and even thrive, becoming the patriarch of the formidable Gursky clan, and, rather comically, his pseudo-Jewish customs influence the Netsilik people of the Far North for generations, a community that offers its women and its foods each week for the pleasure of the Gursky patriarch. Indeed, the faithful take Ephraim’s lessons of strict adherence to dietary laws so much to heart that they occasionally suffer extended food deprivation because, in the fictional land of the midnight sun, the one-day fasting ritual of Yom Kippur extends to months rather than hours,29 a fate from which they are rescued by an observant Gursky heir who eventually makes his home in Tulugaqtitut, his kosher provisions being flown in by plane at regular intervals. Richler weaves Ephraim and his formidable Gursky clan into the mythic fabric of Canada’s past, the tell-tale trace of his distinctive food choices, — 54 —

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such as the “small jar of animal fat,” found on the sledge Franklin’s crew dragged across the ice, “probably walrus, that surprisingly enough tasted of chicken and burnt onions.”30 As a result, the novel troubles any historical account of Canada that ignores hybridity or, as Sarah Casteel points out, any “myths of cultural purity and authenticity.”31 The novel’s food voice emerges from the lesson Ephraim teaches his chosen grandchild, the eponymous Solomon Gursky: that greed destroys. The wolf, when coming across a knife blade coated with honey, will lick itself to death, first drawn by the taste of honey and then by that of blood.32 Ephraim tells this fable to warn his grandson to watch out for Bernard Gursky, whose unquenchable greed for money drives business decisions for the way he runs the family’s liquor business, including his comically satirized choice to reprimand his son by biting “hard” on his hand.33 That this is a family of huge appetite is sketched through the way family members literally consume one another. Isaac – who, as a child, defied laws of kashrut by asking for bacon and eating a seal’s eyes like candy34 – eventually consumes his father in bite-sized chunks when they are stranded in the north after a snowmobile accident.35 Notably, the Faithful (as they are described) do not honour this Gursky family member when he takes his turn as patriarch in the family seat. But the Gurskys are not the only characters who stray from the path of moderation, violating dietary rules in ways that bring calamity on themselves. The novel’s narrator is a drunk, his proclivity for liquor destroying the promising career of this Rhodes Scholar and his various relationships with women. Neither Mr nor Mrs Nicholson can help lusting after the young Ephraim.36 Nurse Agnes “likes men to eat her,” and the police force can be distracted from raiding establishments selling liquor during prohibition by a few twenty-dollar bills, which they scoop up like “pigs in a trough.”37 Against such a cast of characters, those who exercise or who are forced to exercise self-restraint catch one’s attention. Morrie Gursky, for example, at a business lunch with the family firm, is “served the smallest portion” of food “last,” while he sits on a chair with legs reduced by two inches (five centimetres) so that he does not appear to be taller than his brother, Bernard.38 Later in the novel, however, when we learn that Morrie has taken an envelope of money intended for someone else, we understand that, like his brother Bernard, Morrie is also driven by an unhealthy appetite.39 Henry Gursky (the family “saint”) and his Netsilik wife, Nialie, both adhere strictly to dietary laws and also keep a close eye — 55 —

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on signs of the degradation of the North as a result of climate change. And Bert Smith, who refuses to be swayed by bribery, spends much of his life living modestly, his food tastes very simple, with the exception of “one dazzling taste, an appetite for Chinese food.”40 He is eventually rewarded for his restraint in a way in which the source is carefully concealed from him so as not to sacrifice Bert’s good principles. Bert celebrates by using the money to enjoy the occasional restaurant meal. In particular, one of Ephraim’s fables about greed casts its shadow across the whole novel: that of the raven. After a great flood, Ephraim explained to young Solomon, Iktoomi sent a wolf to circle the world. The wolf returned seven years later, exhausted and defeated. The raven was the next animal to be tasked with the challenge, but he got hungry, and, “seeing a corpse floating by, he swooped down and began to pick at it.” When Iktoomi sees the tell-tale blood on the raven’s beak he decides to punish him by turning him from white, as he then was, to black forever.41 This seems to be yet another warning about the value of self-restraint, but the figure of the raven becomes in Richler’s telling a trickster figure, popping up in different times and places to right a wrong, sound a warning, and/or signal a change in fortune. Richler’s raven seems to have learned from Iktoomi and now takes it upon himself to monitor humans’ adherence to community norms and to share and care for one another. The appearance of ravens signals impending disaster, 42 and we are reminded that “a raven croaked the warning of a royal death in Macbeth.”43 Tulugak, the name by which Ephraim is known in the North, means raven, 44 and the Netsilik harpoon, with which a raven is “skewered and harpooned” on the greedy Bernard’s grave,45 signals an end to his control of the family company even as a mysterious investor (whom the reader understands is Solomon Gursky) has begun buying up company shares under the raven-reminiscent name of Corvus Trust, and who declares his support of “new management for McTavish, the next Ceo, possibly an outsider.”46 The novel ends with our narrator watching the mischievous wing wiggle of a Gypsy Moth airplane, the same kind of plane in which Solomon purportedly died, rising higher in the sky, seeing it “turn into a big menacing black bird … a raven with flapping wings. A raven with an unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures.”47 Clearly, the young Solomon has listened closely to his grandfather’s story about Iktoomi and the raven, and has — 56 —

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transformed himself into one who could circle the earth, taking care not to think only of his own physical hunger and appetites. Nevertheless, one appetite continues to consume him, and, to readers’ entertainment, it fuels Richler’s romp through history in this fabular saga: “the itch to meddle and provoke things.”48

All the World in an Apple Pie: George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls Dedicated to the memory of Graham Norman Cromwell, a young black man murdered in 1985 in Weymouth Falls, Nova Scotia, whose killer was controversially acquitted of the crime, George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls writes Cromwell back into existence, mapping him onto the landscape of Halifax’s Africville in “the era of boxcars stuffed with apples.”49 In this epic blues ballad Clarke’s readers experience Africville, before its being levelled in the 1960s, as a world of apples and apple blossoms, roses and rosewater, coffee, beans and wieners, its “soil crimsoned by butchered / Hog and imbrued with rye, lye, and homely / Spirituals.”50 Clarke maps this mythic world through lyric odes dedicated to an exquisite Beauty that emerges in spite of, and because of, the daily struggle for survival. That struggle is exemplified best perhaps by Cora, who loses her son and is betrayed by her husband, yet “brings a rural nobility to making food, a solid love,” and defies the authority of her antique cookbook with its Imperial measures and “English orders,” intoning: “‘I create not food but love. The table is a / community. Plates are round rooves; glasses, iced trees; / cutlery, silver streams.’”51 The food voice in Clarke’s Whylah Falls sings out defiantly. It is perhaps unreasonable for readers to imagine being able to emulate mythic foods, but the fare in Whylah Falls seems deceptively imitable, until one looks closely. Cora’s chowder, we learn, includes cod filets, sliced onions and rich, yellow butter, with “broth made from celery soup, a cup of water, and a cup of milk.”52 But where to source “Jarvis scallops” and “Church Point clams”?53 The answer is they are the stuff of Africadia, of the fictionalized Weymouth County known as Whylah Falls, near the Sixhiboux River – the clams, presumably, to be found on shore beside the Africville church, now — 57 —

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memorialized in a new building housing the Africville Museum. Maureen Moynagh explains in an interview with Clarke, “In remapping the official geography of Nova Scotia, and in mapping places habitually ignored by the dominant culture, Clarke constructs a nation called Africadia in order to contest the ongoing erasure of the historical presence and cultural distinctiveness of Afro-Nova Scotians.”54 And there is a territory being mapped out here, and it is one of Clarke’s making: “Why should I call Hants County ‘Hants County?’” he asks in an interview with Maureen Moynagh, “I’ll call it ‘States County,’ after a black family surname. Same thing with Digby County; that’s Jarvis55 County for me.”56 More than mapping the territory, Clarke feeds his readers’ imaginations with the tastes of this place, offering a haunting refrain of apples and roses. He writes of the era of apples in boxcars, “sedimentary notes laden with a sorrow” dredged from the nursery rhyme “If All the World Were Apple Pie”;57 also of apple trees in blossom,58 apples in delicious pies. Looking through a collection of recipes gathered in 2020 to remember and celebrate the community of Africville, it seems only right that “Apple Pie” was the first of the dessert recipes.59 This cookbook’s recipe calls for six to seven cups of apples, as does the recipe appearing in Whylah Falls ostensibly mentioned as an erratum in”: “Last week’s recipe for Whylah Falls Apple Pie should have listed the ingredients as including seven peeled apples not potatoes. The Moon regrets the typographical error.”60 Cora’s apple pie, however, is mythic, rooted in place and the poetic, offered up to the reader as an idea rather than instruction: “Her carrot cake consists of whole carrots whose green, leafy tops sprout from brown, earthen icing and whose orange roots taper to the cake’s floor. She bakes apple tree leaves, blossoms, seeds, and bark into her apple pies. Cora is the concrete poet of food.”61 Whylah Falls is created time and again in this lyric sequence – by Reverend Langford who considers it to be the New Eden,62 by Shelley plotting her miniature orchard,63 by Cora staring into her copper cooking pot to see “lush earth, bright soil, glistening with newness.”64 Cora “salts her stored, miniature sea, churns it with a walnut spoon, then lifts goodness, a kiss, to her lips while spicy, flamboyant smells green her kitchen into Eden.”65 Clarke peoples the mythical Whylah Falls with those who have the creative imagination to transform their daily battles into Beauty, and Clarke, in turn, conjures into literary memory and onto — 58 —

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the Canadian landscape the indelible presence of Africadia, with its vibrant tastes, sounds, and stories of Cora Clemence, her kitchen, and her clan.

Who Puts Garlic in Moose Stew? Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, a Novel Take moose stew as one example of a definitive way in which members of the little Anishnaabe town of Otter Lake can declare their allegiance to traditional ways of knowing and doing through food voice. Moose stew is offered to the ailing grandmother Lillian on her deathbed after she expresses a wish for “wild meat.” Her response signals the extent to which food preferences will become a way of understanding a character. “Nah,” she explains, “nobody knows how to cook decent moose any more. They put all those strange spices in it. Never mind. I’d rather go see my Maker with a pleasant memory of how moose should taste than what somebody has out there. I mean, who puts garlic in moose stew?”66 Lillian is a traditionalist, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t stir things up. “Sometimes when something’s wrong with the soup,” she explains to her daughter, making a veiled reference to difficulties she knows her grandson is having, “to make it better you got to add something nobody is expecting.” Her daughter quips in response, “Like garlic to moose stew?,” to which Lillian replies archly, “Different type of soup. You’ll see.”67 Principal characters in the novel, humans and tricksters both, speak freely in the food voice. So, too, do animals in this fabular tale in which Taylor writes his characters into the landscape’s legends. The back cover blurb for Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, a Novel introduces the book as “a story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger … and a band of marauding raccoons.” All true. The stranger is not only mysterious, he is also conspicuous when he rides into the little Anishnaabe town of Otter Lake on his handsome 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle to pay a visit to Lillian, an elderly grandmother, who seems to have summoned him from her deathbed. Missing from this description, however, is what links all these disparate elements of the book and offers ways for Taylor to cast his writerly spell, fuel the plot, and develop his characters: food, food choices, musings, and conversation about them. — 59 —

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Take those marauding raccoons, for example. They have a bone to pick with the mysterious stranger because they believe, years ago, he ate one of their own. And they spare no energy in antagonizing and scolding him – yes, scolding – since the stranger seems to understand and to be able to communicate in “raccoon.” The feud is eventually settled when the stranger makes a special trip to the grocery store to purchase a feast fit for a raccoon gathering, a “food orgy of Roman proportions” that includes:68 bacon, frozen shrimp, various fruits and nuts, cherries, walnuts, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, peanuts and dried banana slices, bagged popcorn, potato chips, cheeses, Fritos and pork rinds, half a dozen cartons of eggs, bags of jujubes, Smarties, butter tarts, Maltesers, gummi bears, Twizzlers, and chocolate-covered almonds!69 The soup in which readers find themselves when they venture into Taylor’s novelistic world is one full of food metaphors, and they must attune their ear to catch their range and nuance. For instance, when Dan challenges the stranger to a motorbike race, he says: “I’ve got a 2007 Harley Davidson. Bet it could eat your little bike up.”70 And when that stranger, John, rides his bike, “the wheels beneath him ate up kilometre after kilometre.”71 At night, the storm clouds “swallow the moon.”72 And when Maggie, the local chief, is given some advice by a visiting mP, she responds, “I will put that in the microwave and see what bubbles up.”73 If hunger is the dominant metaphor in Gabrielle Roy’s Montreal, then Taylor engages and entertains his readers by stirring the figurative soup, cooking things up. Given all these food allusions it comes as no surprise that readers come to know the characters through their foodways. There’s Maggie’s diabetic sister, Diane, who seemingly eats only processed foods,74 and young Virgil, for whom vanilla ice cream and ginger ale are culinary highlights.75 Virgil’s family includes two cousins who have started up a restaurant serving Nouveau Native cuisine to American tourists,76 which seems like a wink to Thomas King’s Dead Dog Café, a restaurant that first appears in loving and humorous detail in Green Grass, Running Water. Maggie says she likes cooking and even explains that her love of cooking prompts her decision to step down as the local chief.77 She had recently made chicken cacciatore for the visiting stranger who arrived on the Indian Chief motorcycle.78 But, despite this professed love of cooking, we usually see her preparing dinner with help from Shake ’n Bake.79 — 60 —

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The visiting stranger, by contrast, seems to have an appreciation for well-prepared meals in addition to fine motorbikes. His food tastes are eclectic, and his humour finely tuned. When he plans a picnic, the menu includes a Chilean Syrah, Greek salad, moose chili, and buns.80 And he is appalled by what passes for food at the local diner. At Betty Lou’s takeout there are two menus: The first was the Canadian menu with your usual fast-food potentials like hamburgers, hot dogs, fries and BLTs. The other listed Indigenous fast food, such as elk burgers, buffalo stew, Indian tacos and the oddly named Indian steak. “Interesting. What’s Indian steak?” He asked Elvira, who had come out of the kitchen. She had hair like Flo from Alice – A Native Flo, mind you. “You probably wouldn’t like it,” Elvira said, drying her hands on a stained tea towel. “It’s fried baloney on a bun. A local delicacy.” “I could never be that Indian,” he muttered to himself as he continued to scan the menu. “How about an Indian taco. I’ve heard of those. Fried bread, chili, cheese, hot sauce. That sound about right?” Elvira nodded as she disappeared into the kitchen. “You know your Indian cuisine.”81 Full of humour, the novel is also profoundly moving. Again and again, characters learn to care for one another, and often show their empathy through food. Young Dakota offers her friend Virgil corn soup, or what her Jewish teacher calls “native chicken soup.”82 With Lillian ailing, friends and family come bearing dishes to nourish body and soul. Maggie’s kitchen at the novel’s opening is replete with “half a dozen casseroles, several roast chickens, moose stews, chicken stews, salads and freshly baked bread.”83 Perhaps the most poignant moment of food communication occurs when Maggie visits the home of a local drunk, Sammy Andaag, whose mind and spirit were broken during years of abuse at a residential school to the point that, in the novel’s present tense, he defiantly speaks not only in Anishnaabe but also only in iambic pentameter. Maggie introduces herself as Lillian’s daughter, Lillian having been a close ally of Sammy Andaag at the residential school during their childhood. Maggie’s words break through Sammy’s cloud of confusion, — 61 —

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prompting him to enter his kitchen to find some offering of friendship. He eventually offers her a piece of toast and jam: “The way he held it out, it seemed to Maggie to be more than just toast and jam, like the gluten, sugar and strawberries contained precious memories. She took it, and he gave her a weak smile before the more familiar Sammy came rushing back.”84 Food offerings, Taylor’s novel suggests, bring healing when the food voice accompanying them is heard.

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Introduction to Long Chapters If the vignettes serve as textual appetizers to this volume, then the next three chapters serve as entrées – offering more extended food for thought in the form of close scrutiny: first, of a particular food item; next, of a food locale; and finally, of an animal that fuelled the founding of the Canadian colonial nation, whose near eradication meant the displacement and starvation of Indigenous peoples of the Plains, and that has come to represent the toll of our long-standing disregard for sustainable foodways. All three function as extended food metaphors, which we trace across works by different authors and through different literary forms, attentive to the rhetorical affect or impact that results from the confluence of medium and message. Listening closely to food voices in Canadian literature, one hears a refrain that is quite different from the inclusive and exuberantly positive stories of the bounteous fare on offer across the country in the pages of food magazines, visitor information brochures, and works of food-centred creative non-fiction. “Our Canadian food culture is rich, diverse, and remarkable,” writes Chef Lynn Crawford in the foreword to the cookbook Feast, articulating a sentiment with which we would like to agree wholeheartedly.1 And we can’t help but be swept up with the enthusiasm of Elizabeth Baird in Rose Murray’s cookbook A Taste of Canada as she sings the praises of our cuisine: Could our cuisine be the sum of all our native ingredients … and the dishes that have evolved out of them? Is it the recipes that waves

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of immigrants have brought to our shores, to be kept intact or mixed and mingled with the traditions of groups who arrived before them as well as with First Nations traditions? Is Canadian cuisine one created by recent generations of chefs, raised and trained in Canada and devoted to in-season and locally grown ingredients? Take a deep breath. Canadian food is all of the above.2 However, when one listens closely, literary food voices murmur a more mournful refrain, emerging from works that offer complex, meditative, and probing portrayals of Canadians’ relationship with food over time. Our writers are drawn to a repertoire of foodways-related themes that signal fissures in the story of celebration, through expressions of lack, loss, exclusion, hunger. In the chapters that follow, we focus on extended metaphors, both because they appear in a wide variety of works and, in large part, because they have escaped extensive literary commentary to date. The three chapters that follow focus on three foodways that assert their prominence in our literary landscape. For the most part these foods, products, and places, as well as the scenes that showcase them, have not been recognized as key to the literary landscape; not surprisingly, perhaps, because they seem to belong to the stuff of everyday life in the past if not the present, elements of the prosaic rather than the romantic. What ode, for example, might one imagine a poet might write to Kraft Dinner, despite Canada being the country that consumes more of this food product than any other in the world? While the vignettes were tightly focused on particular food items, often in individual literary texts, the following chapters explore themes gathering resonance through treatment across different works and even different literary genres over time. The sheer diversity of the works in which these three elements can be found attests to the remarkably effective way food can serve writers to develop with greater precision their central themes, setting, characters, and plot. We begin by building on the bite-sized metaphorical analyses of the vignettes by exploring an extended metaphor: Kraft Dinner. At first, the appearance of this processed food item in Canadian literary works surprised us. But the more we considered this comfort food, its affordability and ubiquity, the more we realized how much it is a fundamental element of Canadian foodways, hidden in plain sight. And the more we realized — 64 —

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how, in briefly mentioning Kraft Dinner, Canadian writers depicted the subtle nuances of lived experience at a particular moment in time, to poignant literary effect. Next, we turn to public markets, beginning our survey of literary treatments of them with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s classic 1904 novel The Imperialist and going on to scan literary portraits of markets familiar to those in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal. Literary markets, it turns out, serve multiple writerly purposes. They establish setting in very concrete ways: geographically located in a particular milieu and functioning on a regular weekly schedule, they serve as a mechanism to bring together different factions of the local society. While parties are certainly an effective vehicle for the writer to bring individuals together, usually parties require a certain commonality between those individuals – a shared friend or acquaintance, for example, or a shared interest. Markets, on the other hand, because of the understood commerce of exchange, enable writers to bring together individuals of different professions, socio-economic positions, interests, genders, nationalities, religious denominations, and races – all within the constraints of verisimilitude. As such, they serve not only to advance the author’s establishment of a specific setting but also to provide an extraordinary opportunity for individual character development through interaction with multiple food voices. The markets chapter in this volume provides closer discussion of examples of both. The choice to include a chapter on markets rather than restaurants, which do appear in our literature from time to time, is a carefully considered one. In part, this is because one guiding principle of this book has been to showcase works with food scenes that have not yet been examined in detail. For example, readers can find many published commentaries on the nature and effect of writerly decisions to feed fictional characters (Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Carol Shields are some of the many of our writers who carefully select menus for their characters); can look to literary considerations of food in such anthologies as The Canlit FoodBook (1987); or can peruse authors’ preferred recipes (see The Great Canadian Literary Cookbook, 1994). In this study, however, we opt to trace modes of the food voice’s expression in ways that have yet to be widely showcased. To return to the question of why marketplaces rather than restaurants or cafés, our answer is that the — 65 —

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latter have benefitted from serious literary inquiry that paves a very solid foundation for extending the critical conversation. For example, for those interested in restaurants in Canada, Lily Cho’s multidisciplinary investigation of the way Chinese restaurants figure in Canada and the Canadian imaginary is fundamental reading.3 Here, because we are always focused on the food choices of individual characters, and the way this shapes the food voice and its ability to further or frustrate the development of a primary narrative arc, restaurants appear only to set the stage, so to speak, as they do in our commentary on works by Gabrielle Roy and Fred Wah. Marketplaces, by contrast, are not content to stay in the background, as scene or prop; rather, they intrude by setting the terms of engagement between characters, and their real-life counterparts in cities like Vancouver or Winnipeg or Toronto or Montreal loom large in character development. Markets have asserted their presence on the literary scene perhaps most memorably in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. How have they so long been ignored in the Canadian literary landscape, their writerly wares put so explicitly to the fore? Finally, by way of identifying a particularly telling instance of writers’ acute awareness of how a food item can contribute to the sophisticated development of plot and how, in turn, those narratives shape our understandings of the land and our relationships with it, we turn to the fraught issue of the story of how bison consumption fuelled and shaped Canada’s story of colonialism. In this context, of course, we look primarily to literary treatments of this history of bison in Canada through both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. And these, in particular, are marked by complicated plot trajectories, shifts in tense from past to present and back again, from past conditional to present sense of loss, from linear to cyclical time in which the supposed past becomes ever-present in its return. In some instances, plots hurtle forward, as though mimicking the movement to a buffalo jump itself, only to stop abruptly. More than any other of the three chapters, chapter 6, which is devoted to plot development in relation to this food-related theme, is surprisingly characterized by an abundance of poetry. Perhaps the form, which involves putting words under pressure, is particularly well suited to the troubling history of bison in Canada, sudden leaps in time, and the range of emotions expressed through bison-related food voices.

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While this introduction to part 2 aims to manage readers’ expectations, so that they do not anticipate the upbeat rhetoric of food bounty and culinary inclusion in the chapters to follow, let us disclose now the good news emerging out of our analysis. In summary, while we discovered that Canadian literary food voices do use certain foods to signal concerns, problems, and fissures in our food system in Canada, they also collectively point to salves and solutions: and these are also in the form of foods and foodways. More of this to follow in our conclusion, but it seems important at this moment to signal that, while writers use foods and food metaphors to set the stage for sounding notes of caution and concern, they also offer foodways as holding the potential for solutions.

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4 KRAFT DINNER: N AT I O N A L S TA P L E AS SUBSTITUTE

I taught in the daytime, ate canned food, did not wash my dishes until all of them were dirty – the biologist in me became very interested in the different varieties of moulds that could be grown on leftover Kraft dinner … M A R G A R E T AT W O O D 1

It may be hard to imagine one of Canada’s most famous writers subsisting on Kraft Dinner, but Margaret Atwood – like many university students, young professionals, or struggling artists – had to make do in her mid-twenties when she worked as an instructor at the University of British Columbia. Living on a shoestring budget and borrowing a folding table and dishes from her writer-friend Jane Rule, Atwood turned to the highly economical Kraft Dinner (as well as Smitty’s pancakes) to fuel her writing into the wee hours of the night.2 Atwood’s memories point to Kraft Dinner’s time-honoured role in Canadian pantries and the collective imagination. Canadians have been devouring this product for over eighty years since it was first sold in North America in 1937 during the Great Depression as “an inexpensive meatless entrée” and, later, as a popular option during wartime rationing.3 Archival photographs of Canadian grocery stores during the 1940s show towering displays of this “dinner” in a box. Ever since then, Canadians have grown both their waistlines and reputation for loving Kraft Dinner. In the twenty-first century, Canadians con-

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4.1 Kraft displays at Jenkins’ Groceteria, circa 1945

sume more of this dish per household than do the people of any other country in the world. As food scholars Melanie Rock, Lynn McIntyre, and Krista Rondeau noted in 2008, “Canadians annually purchase about 90 million boxes … and consumption is spread remarkably evenly across the country, and in terms of age group, gender, occupational status, household income and level of education.”4 When we turn to Canadian literature and search for Kraft Dinner, however, the story is fraught with contradictions. Writers repeatedly reference this brand knowing readers recognize its place within the national foodscape. On the surface, Kraft Dinner symbolizes Canadians’ domestic worlds and family mealtime rituals, yet it also enables writers to give voice to the disconnected, marginalized, and alienated circumstances of their characters. In other words, even as Kraft Dinner offers a common language, or food voice, for the nation, writers highlight the particularities of individual — 69 —

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histories and, in doing so, challenge ideas of what constitutes daily life in Canada. For writers, Kraft Dinner is paradoxical literary fare: it simultaneously signals shared foodways and societal exclusion and isolation.

Gotta Love KD? A Short History of Canada’s Dinner in a Box Writer and artist Douglas Coupland was once asked by a newspaper in France to describe Canadian food. His answer, “It has to come from a box,” points us down the grocery store aisles of Canadian food history in order to understand Kraft Dinner’s prominent shelf space in Canadian pantries as well as writers’ recurring yet deeply ambivalent use of it in fiction, drama, and even poetry.5 When Canada was maturing as a country, processed foods played a major role in shaping the nation’s foodways. The years from 1867 to 1967 were formative for Canadian identity in terms of international events and challenges (the First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression) as well as major milestones, such as the Centennial celebrations, which coincided with Montreal’s Expo ’67, the latter being an event that food scholars often point to as a time of defining Canadian cuisine for Canadians and international audiences. Canada may have been coming into its own, but the reality was that its citizens were increasingly shaped by the processed food industry and had been for decades. The first one hundred years of Canadian Confederation coincided with a culinary transformation across North America. In her research on Heinz, for instance, Nancy F. Koehn notes that, in the early nineteenth-century United States “most households grew or made the bulk of their food at home. What they could not produce themselves, they bought on a local or regional basis.”6 Processed foods emerged by the late nineteenth century and by the 1920s were in every household.7 In her foundational essay on Kraft Dinner for Walrus magazine, food writer Sasha Chapman points to the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 as a pivotal moment in creating this vision of modern consumerism. The World’s Fair marked a time of transition when processed foods were gaining prominence and Kraft processed cheese was about to appear on the horizon. Canadian literature includes evidence of these dramatically shifting foodways. Composing odes to Ontario’s dairy farmers and cheese-makers in — 70 —

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the 1800s, James McIntyre – who has been described as the “Cheese Poet,” the “Chaucer of Cheese,” and “Canada’s worst poet” – paid homage to what was, at the time, a major industry.8 The title page of his book Poems of James McIntyre (1889), which contains a whole section of “Dairy and Cheese Odes,” opens with the epigraph: “Fair Canada is our theme / Land of rich cheese, milk, and cream.”9 Although not a cheesemaker, McIntyre was proud of what was, in his words, “the principle article of export for the Province of Ontario.”10 At the turn of the twentieth century, Ontario cheesemakers were major players in the Canadian economy, exporting “some 234 million pounds [106 million kilograms] in 1904,” which was “second only to timber.”11 Flaunting the industry’s strength in 1893, the Dominion Dairy Commission, with the help of twelve Ontario cheesemakers, produced and shipped a mammoth cheese weighing 22,000 pounds (9,980 kilograms) to the Chicago World’s Fair. The 6-foot-tall (1.82 metres) mammoth cheese, which was part of the Canadian exhibition, apparently crashed through the wooden stage. Mammoth cheeses were, of course, an established marketing technique to showcase the Canadian dairy and cheese industries to international markets. In his many cheese poems, McIntyre commemorates several mammoth cheeses, including a 7,000-pound (3,175-kilogram) one produced in Ingersoll in 1884, in “Ode on a Mammoth Cheese”: We have seen thee, queen of cheese, Lying quietly at your ease, Gently fanned by evening breeze, Thy fair form no flies dare seize. … Of youth beware of these, For some of them might rudely squeeze And bite your cheek, then songs or glees We could not sing, oh! queen of cheese. We’rt thou suspended from balloon, You’d cast a shade even at noon, Folks would think it was the moon About to fall and crush them soon.12 — 71 —

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In hindsight, McIntyre’s focus on this “queen’s” imminent perishability not only highlights cheese’s tenuous shelf life at the time but also unwittingly foreshadows the eventual decline of local cheese producers with diminishing international markets as well as increased competition from more stable, processed cheeses. Ten years after the Chicago World’s Fair, Ontario-born James Kraft (who had been raised on a dairy farm), moved to Illinois and began distributing cheese to small shops. Looking to refine and commercialize a process for stabilizing cheese to reduce waste due to spoilage, Kraft obtained a patent in 1916 and launched a series of processed cheese products.13 Early advertisements in Canadian industry newspapers demonstrate the Kraft company’s clear focus on promoting the unique qualities of its products. The full-page cover from a 1919 issue of Canadian Grocer promoted Kraft’s eight varieties of tinned Elkhorn Cheese by informing wholesalers: “Elkhorn Cheese is made by a special process fully protected by patents, put in air-tight parchment-lined containers, and guaranteed to keep. No spoilage or waste, your profit is sure, sales are continuous the year round.”14 Another advertisement advises grocers on the unique advantages of this product’s placement within their stores: “Get the tins out from behind the counter – display them in your windows, on your shelves and counters. Every tin is guaranteed to keep without ice. Sales are increasing by leaps and bounds. Get your share of the increase.”15 In small print, the modern production process is underscored: “All this is done by machinery so that no hands touch the cheese until the tin is opened and the parchment paper removed.”16 Using a similar tone, but this time directed at the consumer, a 1925 advertisement from the Acadian foregrounds the words “quality,” “purity,” and “cleanliness” to establish a relationship of trust and reliability.17 When Velveeta hit the market in 1928, print advertisements and displays at public exhibitions showcased the tinfoil wrapper as the modern way of extending the product’s shelf life without refrigeration, especially at a time when household fridges were neither widely available nor dependable. Fewer than one hundred years after the publication of McIntrye’s “Ode on a Mammoth Cheese,” the Kraft company held a monopoly of contracts with dairy farmers and “controlled more than 50 percent of cheese production in Canada.”18 If Kraft cheese changed Canadian dairy farming and cheese production, then it also affected family meals and home cooking. Affordability via a — 72 —

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4.2 Mammoth cheese made at the Dominion Experimental Dairy Station, Perth, on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893

meatless entrée has always been a key selling point for the Kraft company and especially for Kraft Dinner. A 1925 Kraft advertisement from the Athens Reporter and Leeds County Advertiser promotes a cheese roast “in place of meat” through a reassuring recommendation: “serve this unique roast as the — 73 —

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main dish of the meal. Your folks will be delighted.”19 By the time Kraft Dinner appears on grocery store shelves as the convenient dinner in a box, it is one of the most affordable Kraft products. One archival photograph (circa 1940s) of a store display from Lethbridge, Alberta, shows the price as $0.15 per box. Kraft products may have been inexpensive, but they also carried the promise of modern nutrition and even elegance. Anticipating parental concerns over the nutritional qualities of processed cheese, James Kraft funded research at Rutgers University in 1927.20 The results led to Velveeta’s approval by the American Medical Association and the Chatelaine Institute, with the ensuing advertising campaigns touting this “mellow cheese food as digestible as milk itself ” and as a source of calcium, phosphorus, and Vitamin A.21 While the marketing rhetoric appealed to mothers’ parental concerns, it also targeted their desire for culinary sophistication when entertaining. A full-page advertisement in a 1936 issue of Maclean’s (the year prior to the launch of Kraft Dinner) provides a recipe for boiled green peppers stuffed with macaroni and cheese through language that weds affordability and refinement: “This autumn platter will save many a dime and quarter on the food budget. Yet it doesn’t taste economical at all, thanks to the rich, tantalizing flavor of Creamed Old English Cheese.”22 Two years later, a sleek display at the 1938 Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver featured life-size cut-outs of women in evening gowns presenting the variety of Kraft cheeses to passing consumers. The newly launched Kraft Dinner took pride of place at the centre of the display. While Kraft’s advertising messages of nutrition and refinement have long since faded into the background, affordability and convenience endure as the touchstones of the brand’s narrative. Not surprisingly, Kraft shares these qualities with so many other brands that established themselves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her research on the Heinz company, Koehn observes that the demand for modern processed foods intensified throughout the twentieth century because of North America’s “rising incomes, urbanization, and women’s shifting roles” with work opportunities outside the home.23 Advertisements from the late 1930s to the 1950s guarantee meals ready in minutes, liberating mother from household drudgery and replacing time-intensive food preparation with other tasks or leisure. Indeed, a Heinz advertisement entitled “The Lady Vanishes” from a 1939 issue of Maclean’s features a woman happily hitting her stride about town (with an image of her former self labouring over the stove at home — 74 —

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4.3 Kraft Foods display with Kraft Dinner, Pacific National Exhibition, 1938

in the background). The alliterative phrasing sings of a newly transformed housewife: “Wonderful places to go – games to play – life to be lived – who wants to devote long hours to the humdrum task of making the family soup? Certainly not this clever, modern-minded maker of meals. She is among the thousands who leave the soup to Heinz.”24 Canadian consumers followed this growing trend of convenience foods as researchers studying household food expenditures reported to Statistics Canada between 1938/39 and 2011 paint a picture of dramatic changes to food habits. For instance, between 1938/39 and 2001, “ready-to-consume products rose from 28.7% to 61.7% of total dietary energy.”25 This same period was accompanied by significant declines in the purchases of unprocessed or minimally processed foods (such as grains, fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc.) as well as processed culinary ingredients (such as oils, animal fats, sugar, flour, etc.), “which clearly indicates the declining importance of home-cooking.”26 These statistics point to what Tim Lang and Martin Caraher define in the context of the United Kingdom as a “culinary transition,” that is, “the — 75 —

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process in which whole cultures experience fundamental shifts in the pattern and kind of skills required to get food onto tables and down throats.”27 Increasing the demand for convenience foods means “reducing the maximum cooking skills needed to those of simply re-heating and assembly.”28 Part of this “culinary transition” includes the privatization of knowledge, with corporations becoming de facto teachers of domestic cooking. In its marketing of convenience, especially as this relates to Kraft Dinner, the Kraft company has a long history of prescribing culinary practices by way of sharing of its recipes through diverse media channels (print, radio, television, the internet). Print advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s typically invite homemakers to mail a request or coupon to Kraft’s Montreal office for free recipe books, mediating any uncertainty they may have about how to cook with, or serve, processed cheese. A full-page ad from a 1931 issue of Maclean’s entitled “3 Quick Tricks with Cheese for Pleasing Summer Menus” features two couples dining on an elegant outdoor terrace. The men are wearing suits and ties. The text highlights the hostess’s need to impress her guests, but with ease: “A few quick turns about the kitchen … a competent stir or two … and there you are! A royal dish that looks and tastes like hours of careful preparation, yet is only a matter of minutes.”29 Significantly, the first recipe listed is for “Macaroni and Velveeta” – a quick dish that would become even quicker when Kraft Dinner hit the market six years later. After 1937, advertisements offer embellished ways of preparing Kraft Dinner to alleviate a housewife’s anxieties around not cooking a macaroni meal from scratch. One such recipe from 1948 is for the “Kraft Dinner Ring,” in which prepared Kraft Dinner is moulded, placed on a platter, the centre filled with creamed dried beef, and the macaroni ring surrounded with buttered peas and carrots. The recipe is framed as a “mouth-watering quickie” that will elicit “‘ahs’ at the dinner table!”30 In the twenty-first century, Kraft Dinner continues to adapt for the non-cook who is short on time by providing fast, pared-down instructions or ready-to-eat alternatives. With “EasyMac,” which was first sold in the early 2000s, you simply add water and insert the product in the microwave.31 The KD Shaker of 2018 allows you to add the familiar cheese flavour to anything you desire (popcorn, baked potatoes, salads, etc.) with a few quick shakes of the wrist.32 Despite these novelties, the dinner in the box persists as an ever-reliable national staple, especially during moments of crisis. In the midst of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, Canadians — 76 —

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turned to Kraft Dinner in record numbers as they remained at home to prevent the spread of the virus and participated in panic buying at grocery stores. KD production at the Montreal plant increased to meet the consumer demand.33 Danielle Nguyen, the Montreal Kraft Heinz plant manager, stated: “It’s a feeling that’s very hard to describe. It feels like you’re serving your country.”34 Indeed, during the month of March, Canadians purchased 15 million boxes of Kraft Dinner, whereas the average sales for January and February (before Covid had affected Canadians) were 7 million each month.35 Also telling in terms of Kraft’s confidence in Canadians’ penchant for KD is that, even as the pandemic persists, Kraft Heinz Canada partnered with Burger King in June 2020 to launch a new product, a fast-food snack called “KD Bites”: six coated, deep-fried nuggets of Kraft Dinner. With KD Bites being promoted as a snack or side dish to a meal, Daniel Gotlib (associate director, Brand Building and Innovation, Kraft Heinz Canada) highlighted the brand’s national status and the ever-increasing need for convenience: “‘We are really excited about this collaboration between Kraft Dinner and Burger King. With snacking occasions on the rise, we saw an opportunity to bring these two iconic brands together to give our KD fans a new and delicious way to enjoy their favourite, one-of-a-kind cheesy taste in an ultimate snacking, bite-size format.’”36 Clearly, Kraft Dinner’s material properties – its long shelf life, transportability, affordability, and ease of use as well as its advertising narratives – have helped it to crisscross Canada’s expansive geography and to become an enduring part of domestic foodways. But while Kraft Dinner may have gained supremacy in the Canadian dairy and cheese industries, its place in the Canadian literary pantry is far less elevated. There are no odes, such as those written by McIntyre for Ontario’s mammoth cheeses, venerating Kraft Dinner. Instead, there are brief but repeated references to this product that, when brought together, form an intimate and troubling picture of Canadians’ KD habits.

Kraft Dinner as Pan-Canadian Literary Fare In many ways, Kraft Dinner is the readily obtainable food that temporarily erases, or at the very least bridges, regional distinctions in taste. From coast, to coast, to coast, Canadian writers recognize its ubiquitous presence as — 77 —

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a totem food. In a lecture that touches on foodways, Atlantic Canadian author Alistair MacLeod explains that the daily fabric of each writer’s physical and cultural landscape is unique: As children, we are born into a specific geography. When we look through whatever windows (openings?) there are, we see what is before us. We may see the ocean, we may see forest, we may see icebergs, we may see … looming apartment towers. We eat whatever is given to us. We may eat codfish, we may eat porridge, we may eat blubber, we may eat French fries from McDonald’s, we may eat Kraft Dinner, we may eat tortillas.37 Although MacLeod highlights the specificity of personal geography, the fact remains that Kraft Dinner pops up across Canada’s many literary landscapes. Indeed, MacLeod’s reference to McDonald’s, Kraft Dinner, and tortillas identifies three foodways that are not specific to a particular regional geography but, rather, are shared across Canada’s borders. In the short story “Parrot” set in Newfoundland, Lisa Moore depicts a young couple, Peter and Sandra, struggling to make ends meet until the ever-affordable Kraft Dinner comes to the rescue. Whereas a freshly caught pond trout, brought home for breakfast in a Dominion grocery store bag, points to their specific Newfoundland foodscape, Kraft Dinner – which alleviates the expenses of birthday party celebrations for Peter’s five-yearold daughter, Hannah – is part of their broader Canadian pantry: “Guess who’s going to the circus tomorrow?” “Goody.” “Pete, we can’t afford that. We don’t have anything for supper.” “We’ll eat Kraft Dinner.” “Hurray. Kraft Dinner.”38 On the opposite side of the country, Vancouver artist-writer Douglas Coupland includes Kraft Dinner in his Souvenir of Canada, a compendium of all things Canadian. The meal, according to Coupland, “laser-targets the favoured Canadian food groups: fat, sugar, starch and salt.”39 When Coupland opened Canada House (2003), a five-day art installation in a soon-to-be-demolished Vancouver home that Coupland designed to be “a — 78 —

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uniquely Canadian environment,” he created a dresser entitled The Kraft Singles Chest.40 Art historian Michael Prokopow interprets Canada House as “a contemporary twist on the valorizing aesthetics of the national tableaus typical of world’s fairs,” with Coupland’s furniture sculptures operating as “the place where hope chest meets sarcophagus.”41 Modern food brands serve to galvanize citizens’ identities through consumption and through the powerful interrelationship of food, idealistic narratives, and memories in attempts to preserve and promote notions of the nation, moving them forward through time. While such nostalgia may serve the brand and the company’s sales figures, Canadians’ unref lective safeguarding of national traditions is misguided. Indeed, in a follow-up solo exhibition at the Dx Design Exchange in Toronto, Coupland repurposed empty Kraft Dinner boxes as invitations to the opening, a way of signalling the debris of consumption and how we cling to the past, and to supposedly stable icons of Canadiana, despite the nation’s own ephemerality, inconsistencies, and continuous state of flux. In more recent KD musings, Coupland has tweeted a series of comments and images about his failed attempts to assemble his meals. Damaged packaging and macaroni noodles that shredded upon boiling are just some of the ways his assembly of this national staple has gone awry. Perhaps these tweets are a way of questioning the supposedly endless reproducibility of Kraft Dinner and its associated rituals and meanings in an ever-changing global economy. Or they could simply be evidence that Coupland is immersing himself in his craft since he once identified Kraft Dinner as a surefire remedy for writer’s block.42 Incidentally, when Coupland tweets about his KD mishaps, he receives prompt replies from the Kraft company. Concerned followers also respond: “Oh Douglas, why are you eating that stuff?”43 A similar argument can be made when we shift our attention to the North, where Kraft Dinner appears as a sign of thwarted dreams. Yukon writer Erling Friis-Baastad reflects that, when he first arrived in Whitehorse in 1974 and hiked the trails outside of the city, he “regularly came across lean-tos abandoned by people who had discovered living in the bush is harder than it sounds, even in sight of town. Ravens and coyotes tore apart garbage bags with Kraft Dinner boxes spilling out of them. Kraft Dinner boxes were among my first memories of the north.”44 This recounting of food packaging debris and individuals’ failed aspirations to live in the — 79 —

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wilderness, while ironically subsisting on industrially produced food, helps readers to glimpse the clear disjunctions between the realities of life in Canada versus the idealistic (food) narratives of communion with the land and each other. Clearly, even if Kraft Dinner has created a “Canadian” name for itself through its nationwide reach, its totemic status does not equate with deeper understandings of the natural environment, let alone citizens’ sense of belonging and connection. For instance, KD commentators often highlight immigrant families who do not eat Kraft Dinner and how this avoidance creates intergenerational tensions between the parents and their Canadianborn children. For Italian Canadian writer Mary di Michele, Kraft Dinner stands out as one of the recognizable culinary landmarks of Canadian culture from her childhood – a landmark that left her disoriented: Back then you couldn’t have imagined yourself Openly savouring a cappuccino, you were too ashamed that your dinners were in a language you couldn’t share with your friends: their pot roasts, their turnips, their recipes for Kraft dinners you glimpsed on Tv commercials – the mysteries of macaroni with marshmallows.45 Despite being a pasta dish, Kraft Dinner seems utterly disconnected from the language, culture, and tastes of di Michele’s Italian homeland. While the alliterative “mysteries of macaroni with marshmallows” make this North American concoction sensual to the ear, di Michele must translate and reduce the melodious Italian word melanzane to eggplant in order to be understood by others, even though she cannot escape the feeling that her beloved vegetables remain alien – “their purple skins from outer space.”46 And while di Michele’s opening phrase “Back then” suggests that some aspects of the Canadian foodscape have changed and become more inclusive, she continues to experience moments in which her cultural background – with its passion for life and food – remains unappreciated. While the examples traced so far are by no means celebratory, they nonetheless reveal that Kraft Dinner is clearly entrenched in the Canadian literary landscape and, especially, writers’ vocabularies. Consistently — 80 —

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referring to “Kraft Dinner,” writers share a distinct national idiom since this phrase “has been uniquely Canadian since the 1970s when U.S. markets ditched it in favour of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.”47 These variations are even evident in the American-based food journal Gastronomica in which Canadian and American food poets diverge in their brand terminology.48 Such an established presence in Canadians’ culinary imaginations and vocabularies, then, fortifies Kraft Dinner as a national totem food, but the thing about myths, according to Roland Barthes, is that they require a “conjuring trick”: a myth “has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature.”49 In other words, when it comes to material circumstances and social relations, myth “purifies … and … makes them innocent.”50 The Kraft company’s ability to maintain its “innocent” associations with family dinners and the national pantry, while also keeping its price-point low, goes a long way to explaining Canadians’ affectionate embrace of this processed food. For Canadian writers, however, they continually push back against the brand image and messaging by presenting the private, everyday contexts of KD through complex food voices. Writers simultaneously draw upon KD’s totemic status and return the particulars of individual and communal histories into the mix. In this way, Canadian literary fare allows us to see past the preternatural orange vibrancy of the dish and to focus on descriptive practices, as opposed to the prescriptive ones delivered through the company’s marketing narratives.

A Metonymic Meal A processed food designed to counter hunger cheaply and quickly, yet without much nutritional value, Kraft Dinner offers Canadian writers a similar kind of quick replacement: an instantly recognizable shorthand for communicating experiences characterized by lack, inadequacy, and social alienation. In literature, Kraft Dinner is what we would call a metonymic meal. The term “metonymy,” which is “Greek for ‘a change of name,’” identifies words used as stand-ins or substitutes for something else that goes unnamed in the sentence.51 Canadians and journalists often use metonymy, for example, when referring to the federal government as “Ottawa” since that city is so closely associated with the elected members of Parliament and the civil — 81 —

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service. The metonymic role of Kraft Dinner, then, is to stand in for something else with which it is connected – experiences that are larger and more complex than can be stated in two words: experiences of poverty certainly, but also familial loss and disillusionment, social isolation, colonialism, and the commercialization of all aspects of life.

Kraft Dinner as Toy Food One of the most frequent substitutions that Kraft Dinner affords writers is to signal the inadequate and sometimes destructive circumstances of childhood. When Canadians purchase Kraft Dinner, the advertising narrative is part of the package – its most powerful themes being those tied to childhood, home, and family. In a 1996 article from Saturday Night tellingly entitled “An Orange Crush,” Joan Skogan interviews cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken, who had researched Canadians’ understanding of home as a place of warm colours (including orange) that provides “the same symbolic and psychological value as a parental embrace.”52 Chapman echoes these sentiments in the Walrus when she reflects that KD’s “essential dairyness connects it to that most elemental of foods: a mother’s milk. KD is the ultimate nursery food.”53 In her research on Kraft Dinner and socio-economic inequalities, Melanie Rock similarly notes that “Canadians who are food secure tend to think about Kraft Dinner as a palatable meal-in-a-box that is simple to prepare and easy to store. These symbolic associations are regularly reinforced in the mass media and help guide Canadians’ purchases – and donations – of Kraft Dinner” to their local charities and food banks.54 Indeed, Rock admits that her own position of food security and privilege initially led her, as a postdoctoral fellow, to overlook a key ingredient not included in a box of KD: fresh milk, which is expensive and out of reach for many low-income Canadians.55 While privileged Canadians may associate KD with childhood nostalgia and view it as an inexpensive indulgence, low-income Canadians see it as an “obligatory” and unappealing meal, often “prepared without all requisite ingredients” at the end of the month when cash is low.56 In Rock’s research, food insecurity alters the physical taste and cultural meaning of Kraft Dinner, and Canadian writers have certainly been voicing these kinds of critical observations for decades. For instance, while — 82 —

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Chapman points to the popular advertising myth of KD being “the ultimate nursery food,” poet Gwendolyn MacEwen undermines Kraft Dinner as “toy food”: in other words, an unhealthy substance that plays at being food and makes low-income kids “fat, poor fat” because their parents’ welfare cheques cannot sustain a diet of fruits and vegetables – only “pork and beans and Kraft Dinner.”57 For MacEwen’s childless speaker, “The Transparent Womb” (the title of her poem) is the visible world of impoverished, malnourished children for whom we all bear responsibility since “All the world’s children are ours.”58 As a cash-strapped poet in the mid-1960s, MacEwen was, of course, well versed in the monotony of inexpensive meals, having once told editor, anthologist, and broadcaster Robert Weaver that his modest payment of $150 for some of her poems: “would have kept me in Kraft Dinners for three to four months.”59 While economic disparities are an undeniable part of Canadian literary fare, Kraft Dinner’s meanings extend beyond these concerns. If the KD brand works to uphold an overarching narrative packaged in images of childhood, family, pleasure, and convenience, then Canadian writers consistently reintroduce the particulars of individual childhood experience within fractured families. In these instances, Kraft Dinner cuts to the heart of the so-called family meal, exposing dysfunction predicated on a fundamental lack of cohesion, commensality, and care. Kraft Dinner is “assembled” not only by busy or financially strapped parents but also by isolated and even abused children whose parental figures are either absent or to be feared. One common perception of Kraft Dinner is that it facilitates times of transition towards independence. As Chapman notes, “[Kraft Dinner] may be the first dish children and un-nested students learn to make (‘make,’ of course, being a loose term; ‘assemble’ may be more accurate).”60 In Canadian literature, this metonymic meal is part of the vulnerable, isolated lives of children and adolescents, often pointing to family dysfunction and emotional hunger in a developmental process that has gone awry. In other words, KD signals not only the “culinary transition,” in which food-related skills and knowledge have shifted outside of the home, but also parenting transitions, in which the responsibility of care has shifted away from the adults and into the hands of the children themselves – with troubling outcomes. In Alex Leslie’s collection of stories, We All Need to Eat, the character Soma in “The Sandwich Artist” reflects on growing up in relative freedom — 83 —

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but also in isolation after her mother leaves. A latchkey kid who spends hours at home alone while her father is at work and her younger brother Josiah is in after-school daycare, Soma grows up binging on American daytime talk shows featuring “the trashiest dead ends of adulthood” and filling herself with processed foods: “I watched, inhaling my Ichiban instant noodles with an egg swirled in, my hot chocolate bloated with marshmallows, Kraft Dinner with butter and instant milk crystals sprinkled on like Pop Rocks.”61 The instant milk implies a lack of fresh ingredients, but the added comparison to Pop Rocks candy signals the carbohydrate-rich diet that attempts to serve as a kind of antidote to family dysfunction. The story begins with Soma reciting the advice always given by her father: “‘If anything terrible happens, treat yourself to a nice meal.’ Advice passed on from one generation to another, a recipe for a history of starvation.”62 With the father continually away on extended business trips, Soma and Josiah fill themselves with an encyclopaedic list of processed foods they “never ate in front of other people’s mothers.”63 Having relied solely on each other, Soma retains an image of herself and her brother eating and sleeping on the carpet in front of the television: “Bellies painfully hard, pressed together. Conspiracies of sugar and loneliness.”64 While parental neglect is the root cause of Soma’s processed food diet, sexual abuse and isolation surround a Kraft Dinner meal in Linda Svendsen’s short story “White Shoulders.” In the story, divorcee Adele travels from New York to Vancouver to visit her sister, Irene, who is battling breast cancer. Irene and her Belgian Canadian husband, Peter, are supposedly the one successful marriage in the family. During her visit, Adele immediately notices how her niece, Jill, has changed from a bubbly, active, and social little girl to a withdrawn, overweight teenager. Witnessing moments when Peter appears selfish and controlling and when Irene seems most concerned about Jill catering to her father’s needs, Adele finally pieces together the abusive situation. Returning from the hospital prior to Irene’s mastectomy surgery, Adele stumbles upon Peter lying naked on his bed in the dark and then finds Jill downstairs, having locked herself inside the bathroom: She looked tense and peculiar; it looked as if she’d just thrown water on her face. She was still dressed in her clothes … from the day before … and she’d obviously been sitting on the edge of the tub, writing. There was a Papermate, a pad of yellow legal paper. The top — 84 —

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sheet was covered with verses of tiny backward-slanting words. There was also last night’s pot of Kraft Dinner on the sink.65 Jill’s isolation, unkempt appearance, and stale pot of KD consumed in the bathroom signal a meal of the impure – the abject – all suggestive of an abusive family life that has breached standards of morality and parental care. Having been told by her sister not to interfere, Adele turns a blind eye. A few months later, after receiving two of Jill’s poems in the mail – one entitled “Black Milk” about a mother who accidentally poisons herself and her nursing child, and the other, “Belgium,” about an abusive father – Adele weeps with this confirmation of her niece’s desperate situation yet continues to do nothing. In the fall, when Irene’s cancer returns, Jill commits suicide. Clearly, when Kraft Dinner appears within the context of childhood, this metonymic meal communicates what are oftentimes abject familial scenes marked by poverty, neglect, or abuse. When it comes to stories of adult life, Kraft Dinner continues to communicate experiences of lack and inadequacy; however, these are usually tempered by the characters’ relative agency.

Kraft Dinner as Adult Food Underscoring the many phases of adulthood, Kraft Dinner facilitates contrasts by highlighting the shortcomings of the present against other stages of life when circumstances either were, or will be, better – in other words, a time when the food is less orange in hue. The most popular association is with young adulthood and the newfound independence of university life. The Globe and Mail’s one-time food and restaurant critic for almost forty years, Joanne Kates, vividly recalls relying on Kraft Dinner while living in a fridgeless dorm at Wellesley College. For Kates, Kraft Dinner brought solace when one could only dream of home-cooking or when one tried to compensate for an unsatisfactory sex life: “Like the monks who invented Benedictine and monks’ cheese, we turned our noble selves to food, the best fun substitute there is … Th[e] monks of Europe … I’m sure, worked off their sexual energy by bathing themselves in Chartreuse and Port Salut. We addressed ourselves to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner. It was a large favorite. In fact, a — 85 —

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dish so loveable that even today I cannot turn aside from a dish of Kraft Dinner.”66 This culinary tradition has clearly stood the test of time, as the 2011 commercial online publication McGill University: Off the Record, which targets American students shopping for schools, includes “Kraft Dinner” in the glossary of school slang. The entry reads, “What Canadians call Kraft Macaroni and Cheese; a student dietary staple.”67 While the assumption is that university students are not yet well equipped – with life skills, maturity, finances, or physical surroundings – to truly realize what will eventually be a fabulous banquet of life experiences, for other writers, such as Douglas Coupland, there is an awareness that Kraft Dinner is not necessarily a developmental phase easily passed through and left behind. For Coupland’s characters, young adulthood is prolonged, especially in a late capitalist world where maturity is defined by the ability to garner wealth – a threshold that is increasingly difficult to reach. In Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture, the Canadian character Dag recounts his meagre-paying job in Toronto, where he and his friends could “barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in [their] grimy little shoe boxes” even though they were “pushing thirty.”68 Dag clearly fears a life of perpetual processed-food limbo, and the reality is that KD “phases” accompany adult characters across different stages of life, marking their realizations of independence or the loss of it, and not only in terms of finances. In Naomi Guttman’s poem “Supermarket Blues,” husband Donny bemoans the “Pop Tarts, Cocoa Crisps, Kraft Dinner, chicken nuggets” as the only foods “the kids will eat.”69 These boxed products, which by default have become the parents’ own diet, are a decided contrast from the feastfull days of Ari and Donny’s child-free courtship in which pad thai, foie gras, melon, and prosciutto were on the menu.70 For Donny, family life means grieving the loss of a Dionysian world of indulgent pleasures and sensual edibles. If the parental years are bound by KD, so too is the single life. Jacob Scheier’s poem “Single Man’s Song” (an unromantic look at bachelorhood and a tribute to Al Purdy’s “Married Man’s Song”) presents a “not quite middle aged single man” who masturbates in his favourite ugly wool sweater before returning “to the Kraft Dinner / he has been eating with a ladle.”71 The unrefined meal points to the speaker’s social isolation and lack of selfcare even as, ironically, “he makes love to himself.” Here, Kraft Dinner is — 86 —

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the provenance of the unloved as the rest of the poem hints at the sometimes harsh truths but also warmth provided by the ex-girlfriend, until the speaker realizes that his new-found freedom is merely the freedom from “no one caring / what you look like.”72 These examples reveal different phases of life marked by metonymic meals of unsavoury transitions: a yet to be realized sense of ownership over one’s life; an overabundance of responsibilities and a shortage of time; and a gross deficiency of care, or, more specifically, of feminine affection. But such understandings come from positions of relative privilege. For others, Kraft Dinner is a continuous meal, an eternal substitution that signals not merely a “culinary transition” but, rather, a “nutrition transition” in which “whole cultures experience fundamental shifts in their diets.”73

Kraft Dinner as Indigenous Food The most provocative and telling treatments of Kraft Dinner come from Indigenous writers who turn to this culinary shorthand to evoke the devastating legacies of colonialism. In her chapter “Stories of Traditional Aboriginal Food, Territory, and Health,” Margery Fee writes, “The history of colonization in North America is the history of the ongoing ‘nutrition transition’ as more and more Aboriginal people have found themselves unable to harvest their traditional foods, either as their sole diet or to supplement a more Western one.”74 Examining a network of causes – such as displacement from traditional territories, relocation to marginal or isolated lands, land-use restrictions, pollution, historical outlawing of communal feasts (such as the potlatch ceremony), and loss of languages and knowledge-transfer as a result of residential schools – Fee’s careful tracing of the fundamental changes to Indigenous foodways leads to the realization that the term “nutrition transition” is far too euphemistic, with its connotations of a “shift” or “modification.” Indeed, Indigenous writers’ KD narratives are explicit, the brand name focusing their fierce denouncements of Canadian injustices. Consider, for instance, the title of writer and performer Anna Marie Sewell’s 1993 essay “Macaroni Nutritional Genocide?” Of Anishinaabe and Polish heritage, Sewell’s satirical answer to the question “why do Native people love macaroni?” carries a ring of truth: — 87 —

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I used to think that maybe it was a tool of Evil Colonists. My friend Debra says that if you eat only Kraft dinner for a year, your hair and nails will fall out … Maybe we’ve been victimized in our own kitchens … Somewhere, there may be a room full of Kraft, corporate managers, rubbing their fat, rich little hands together and laughing like Satan as they plot to finish what Columbus and his crew set in motion 500 years ago. Death by macaroni. Who would ever suspect?75 Sewell’s satire intersects with other writers whose brief but repeated mentions of Kraft Dinner coincide with harsh commentary on how colonialism and Canadian society have fundamentally devastated Indigenous peoples’ foodways. In contrast with non-Indigenous writers who bemoan Kraft Dinner as an adult “phase” of temporary deficits, Indigenous writers name this metonymic meal to point to multi-generational harms that are the result of a colonial system. One recent example is Alicia Elliott, a Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations of the Grand River. In her 2019 collection of personal essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Elliott associates Kraft Dinner with childhood poverty and intergenerational colonial legacies that have harmed the health of Indigenous peoples. In contrast with Naomi Guttman’s character Donny, who grieves the loss of foie gras now that family life means feeding “from the towers at the supermarket’s center,”76 Elliott opens her essay “34 Grams Per Dose” recounting a conversation with an incredulous friend who was shocked that Alicia had never tried this delicacy: “Foie gras is more than just two French words I can barely pronounce, more than just a meal certain people sometimes enjoy. It is a test that separates the high from the low, the rich from the poor, the worldly from the ignorant. The white from everyone else.”77 For Elliott, her childhood was marked by the shame of not being able to eat according to the directives of the Canada Food Guide as her diet, “like the diets of so many poor and racialized families, consisted mostly of carbs, dairy and fat. There was very little protein, fibre, fruits or vegetables.”78 In her essay “Scratch,” Elliott recalls constantly battling head lice as a child without access to de-lousing medication, money for laundering clothing and bedding, or proper plumbing for hygiene: “To wash meant pouring water from a giant blue jug into a pot, heating it on the stove, then sponging ourselves off in the otherwise useless bathroom. Washing — 88 —

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our hair was the same, though we did that over the kitchen sink once we removed all the dishes, still sticky with ketchup and leftover Kraft Dinner.”79 As Elliott recounts, Canada’s colonial past – which includes policies of starvation, malnourished children in residential schools, the forced relocation of Indigenous communities away from their traditional territories and foodways, and fishing and hunting prohibitions – has contributed to ongoing trauma in the present that is tied to impoverished, carbohydrate-fuelled diets and correlated diseases (such as diabetes) for Indigenous communities.80 She ponders how these diseases have altered her at the genetic level and how these changes will be passed onto her children and her children’s children. Similar to Elliott’s multi-generational view of food- and health-related colonial traumas, Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor repeatedly references Kraft Dinner in a range of contexts and always with the objective of critiquing Canada’s racism and socio-economic inequalities. This chapter begins with a quotation from Margaret Atwood highlighting Kraft Dinner as the diet of struggling writers, and Taylor acknowledges a similar experience: “The reality is, if it weren’t for Kraft Dinner, I wouldn’t weigh anything at all. Most of us Aboriginal writers, like the majority of all writers in Canada, get by on what little money we can muster from our writings.”81 Taylor is a connoisseur of “47 different recipes for Kraft Dinner” because major film companies (who pay relatively well for screenplays) demand stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous peoples, something Taylor has always been unwilling to supply.82 To challenge these long-standing prejudices and injustices of settler society, Taylor often grounds his satire through the realities of Kraft Dinner. For instance, in a satirical letter published on Canada Day (and in response to the fourth-year anniversary of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for the residential schools), Taylor offers a series of pointed “apologies” on behalf of Indigenous peoples: “We hereby apologize for straining the Canadian health system due to our propensity towards diseases like diabetes. I know it has been said we put the word ‘die’ in diabetes, but being introduced to all that Kraft Dinner and potato chips was definitely worth giving up the steady diet of salmon and deer.”83 Taylor’s comment reveals the fact that, historically, Indigenous peoples have often been described in racist ways by settler society as having propensities in their physical constitutions that make them more susceptible to diseases, rather than settler — 89 —

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society assuming accountability for taking the land, destroying or replacing Indigenous foodways, and creating ongoing legacies of poverty and disease. What is particularly telling about Taylor’s plays is the fact that his Indigenous characters often consume Kraft Dinner in unusual ways out of necessity: that is, without the most essential ingredient needed for its preparation – water. In The Berlin Blues, the character named Trailer, who lives in a trailer on the Otter Lake reserve, boils KD noodles in root beer after his water pump fails.84 Trailer comments that he usually prefers ginger ale, suggesting that his kitchen improvisation is a regular occurrence, especially when living without reliable water or plumbing. Trailer jokes that his Kraft Dinner is “Indigenous fusion cuisine,” underscoring the fact that Canadians’ assumptions about KD as a national meal shared by all, on the one hand, and their embrace of popular “foodie” culture, on the other, are grossly out of touch with socio-economic disparities and living conditions for many Indigenous communities – which include decades-long boil water advisories and inadequate infrastructure.85 In the play, this ignorance is embodied by the German developers who work to transform the reserve into a theme park called “OjibwayWorld,” with poorly named restaurants and fairground menus that appropriate and commercialize the names of Indigenous leaders, historical events, and traditional foods. Understanding food, culture, and the land purely as commodities and forms of entertainment, these developers fail to appreciate and respect the daily realities of life at Otter Lake.

From Kraft to Craft When Canadian writers reach for Kraft Dinner, they know they are incorporating a brand narrative that is instantly recognizable. But rather than repeating advertising rhetoric, they push back against this supposedly “innocent” totem food through their critical use of metonymy. This meal instantly communicates a lack of control in characters’ lives as related to finances, health, family, and the nation’s colonial legacies. In the hands of writers, this prosaic brand cuts through the fabric of Canadian society by exposing socio-economic and cultural disparities. A fitting conclusion, then, to this meditation on Canadian writers’ complex and varied Kraft Dinner shorthands is bpNichol’s 1978 work Craft — 90 —

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Dinner: Stories and Texts 1966–1976. Nichol’s title instantly evokes the popular brand, and, in a poetical essay responding to the work, Brad Flis notes how it stirs up a range of ideas and emotions: a “sense of cultural dilution” but also “nostalgia for those commodity objects of my youth which remain the defining/signifying markers of difference between myself and my American peers.”86 The pun that is Nichol’s title creates an even further distinction by highlighting artisanal, rather than simply mass-produced, processes and products. With its individually fashioned volumes, Craft Dinner was a labour of love: of its 631 copies, five (not for commercial sale) were published with an original poem poem/drawing; twenty-six were hand-bound with a page from Nichol’s “An Ilphabet Primer”; one hundred were signed by the author; and five hundred were distributed in paper wrappers.87 Fittingly, apart from the pun in the title, Nichol never names Kraft Dinner in his book. Instead, he invites readers to become conscious of how an artist’s craft, word by word, makes the human experience and social connection tangible, as suggested by his opening lines: you turn the page & I am here that in itself is interesting to me at least it is interesting since my existence begins as you turn the pages & begin to read me88 What Nichol implies through his title and text is, in fact, what all the writers in this Kraft Dinner chapter reveal: that authors play crucial roles in making sense of Canadian life – its shared and unshared foodways as tied to socio-economic inequalities, life stages, and devastating colonial legacies. These writers incorporate popular consumer culture into their narratives and push beyond the illusions of advertising myths through the particularities of human experience. Where Kraft Dinner is lacking as a quick substitution, these stories nourish precisely because they unsettle our appetites by detailing the multiple contexts of this pan-Canadian meal.

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In April 2019, Maria Coletta McLean offered a remarkably candid contribution to the Globe and Mail, admitting to feeling lonely and isolated, desperately disconnected in the hyperconnected world that is our current moment. Facebook, Twitter, and Text Messages offered her little solace, nor did the library with users reading their own books or using the desktop computers, or the local coffee shop peopled with customers glued to their cell phones. (And McLean was writing this before she was presumably to experience the additional isolation of periods of imposed lockdowns due to Covid health policies.) Eventually, McLean admitted to having pretended to forget the pin number for her banking card in order to initiate a conversation with one of the bank tellers, just to interact with another human being.1 McLean is far from being alone in experiencing such isolation, of course, and her confessional account struck a chord with many Globe and Mail readers. That longing for a human connection is not just a contemporary phenomenon: it is age-old, part of the warp and woof of the human condition. Yet, while many restaurants, bars, and supermarkets have made the transition from flesh-and-blood human contact towards interactions on digital platforms, food markets remain the space where human connection is not only unavoidable but also encouraged and welcomed. Unlike cashonly transactions (at least until Covid prompted some markets to move quickly to accepting debit cards), bargaining over the price of a tomato and constant shouting – the plethora of sensual input – remain fundamental to the thriving communities that bring food markets to life. It is therefore unsurprising that such locations are often invoked by writers for their liveliness, their constant interaction and emotionally charged conduct. From the emphasis on communication to the very quilt-work that comprises

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the diversity of foods, cultures, and relationships, markets offer writers the perfect setting for exploring the ailment with which many are inevitably preoccupied: the human condition. In literature, depictions of food and food gatherings often illustrate the desire for human connection and contact – the longing for a pleasurable meal and excellent company. But one of the most striking ways in which writers ring the changes on this central trope of bringing people together in a way that creates commensality occurs specifically in those literary scenes depicting public markets, where the sourcing of foodstuffs involves a cacophony of voices, languages, and sensory experiences, in addition to individuals’ inner food voices, urging them to seek out either familiar foods or, alternatively, those offering intimations of the exotic. Far from being a harmonious coming together of a community sharing a common language, set of beliefs, and ceremonial practices, literary market scenes derive energy from chance encounters, new discoveries, and the shifting boundaries of neighbourhoods as waves of new immigrants to Canada find their own ways to define a notion of home. Public food markets in Canadian literature provide a rich tapestry in which readers can glimpse the nuanced interactions of individuals, their languages, and cultural traditions. At their foundation are two primary assumptions: 1) that markets bring individuals who might not ordinarily socialize into contact with one another, and 2) that they bring them together specifically to participate in an economy of exchange. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first section showcases how food markets are locations of complex diverse human interaction and argues that their depictions in literature suggest that they stage a complex, nuanced, and sophisticated dialogue about the day-to-day experiences of cultural diversity in Canada. The second section reveals how these nuanced locations invite and enable experimentation and exploration, particularly in terms of literary form. And the third section shows how writers use the markets’ fundamental system of 1) interaction, and 2) exchange to structure and signpost key characteristics of the human condition. From the clash of cultures that occurs in the market space to the unique encounters between individuals, this chapter shows how authors certainly do invoke the food market to explore the complexities of humans’ interactions with one another. Yet it also emphasizes the way many authors also invoke the market for its literary qualities as well. The food market — 93 —

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in Canadian literature appears across multiple genres and literary forms – memoirs, novels, poems, and even plays. Just as the market can accommodate and reveal nuanced and complex interactions between cultures, Canadian authors rework the food market as accommodating settings for genres as diverse as fairy tales and detective novels. Markets in literature are not mere locations of plenitude but, rather, serve as the governing web of a primarily human community in a world of activity, dynamic movement, and radical change. Food markets are chaotic, ephemeral, and constantly in motion – just like human life. It will come as no surprise, then, that authors often draw on food markets to make sense of the often frenzied activity. Markets, organized around the exchange of goods, help make authors’ literary communities more readily comprehensible. Their structure is loose enough to allow writers to illuminate the multiplicities of human interaction, but their founding principles of contact and exchange give writers reasons to bring very different individuals together. In other words, literary food markets do much more than depict the exchange of goods between diverse groups. They are stages on which human interactions play out, including the chaotic dynamism of human communication. And they stand as testimony to the human need for connection. Perhaps the most iconic and memorable of literary marketplaces is the one in Elgin, Ontario, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s fictionalized version of Brantford. Her 1904 novel, The Imperialist, opens with a market scene starring the formidable Mother Beggarlegs, who “came, it was understood, with the dawn; with the night she vanished, spending the interval on a not improbable broomstick.”2 Duncan gives the portrait of Mother Beggarlegs the precious first page of her novel, describing what she sold in the covered part of the market-place (“gingerbread horses and round gingerbread cookies, and brown sticky squares of what was known in all circles in Elgin as taffy”), speculating on her past (“some said that Mother Beggarlegs was connected with the aristocracy and some that she had been ‘let off ’ being hanged”). All this not so much to survey the market itself, or even to develop a character sketch, for Mother Beggarlegs plays only a very peripheral part in the novel. Rather, this leisurely survey of one member of the local group of “odd characters” serves to set the stage for Duncan’s introduction to her readers of the novel’s protagonist, Lorne Murchison. We, as readers, find ourselves placed in the role of the various “untrounced young male[s]

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of Elgin” through Duncan’s insistence on the second-person singular. “So you bought your gingerbread, concealing, as it were, your weapons, paying your copper coins with a neutral, nervous eye, and made off to a safe distance, whence you turned to shout insultingly, if you were an untrounced young male of Elgin, ‘Old Mother Beggarlegs! Old Mother Beggarlegs!’”3 By contrast, the upstanding young man who steps into this market scene and into the role of protagonist is described as behaving differently. He asks Mother Beggarlegs a question about her gingerbread, a question, the narrator tells us, that is fuelled by curiosity. “Sociably,” he asks her, “why the gilt was generally off her gingerbread.”4 Of course today’s readers, familiar with the idiom “to take the gilt off the gingerbread,” as in to spoil or devalue something, might interpret Lorne Murchison’s question less favourably. Certainly Mother Beggarlegs herself does not see Lorne’s question as well intentioned. Our narrator explains her prickly response as the result of her being “so unaccustomed to politeness” and offers the interaction as “the first indication I can find of that active sympathy with the disabilities of his fellow beings which stamped him later so intelligent a meliorist.”5 For Duncan’s readers, this is the first of many examples in which Lorne’s interventions miss the mark, and indeed, as the novel unfolds, the considerable promise of this well-educated young man fails to reach its full potential. The marketplace becomes a kind of leitmotif in the novel, bustling with the activity of commercial exchange, situated right beside the law offices in which Lorne Murchison practises, gaining symbolic resonance with each reappearance: “Elgin market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County, and, in little, the history of the whole Province.”6 In terms of plot development, market days enable the coming together of all elements of Elgin society, particularly the interaction between the Indigenous community from the Moneida Reserve and the settler colonials of Elgin. For the narrator, such occasions allow her to step back and survey the landscape of characters and community, capturing a slice of life in small-town Ontario at the turn of the century. Duncan, herself, was living in India when she penned The Imperialist. But her fictionalized Elgin – with its “teas” of scalloped oysters;7 or chicken salad, pickled pears, cold tongue, and tea biscuits;8 or its status concerns over the hour of dinner9 – captures in precise detail not only the political movements of the time but also the domestic routines and foodways of the newly established Canadian nation.

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Food Markets at Second Glance The Story of Snauq/Granville Island Public Market (Colonial Legacies and the Underrepresented Musqueam, Tsleil Watuth, and Squamish First Nations) If Elgin’s market lay empty for four days of the week in 1904, then today, during the summer months, whether it’s a weekend or a weekday, Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market is abuzz with tourists, foodie walking tours, and local shoppers relishing the sun after a rainy spring. Ranked as one of Canada’s most popular tourist attractions, Granville Island Public Market is a “must see, must taste” destination. It’s also a “must read” place of storied histories that trace shifting relationships with the land, labour, and food. If you wander through the market today, seasonal produce towers in the aisles. Everything is within reach: freshly caught halibut from Haida Gwaii, fine cheeses, artisanal chocolates, and more. In the early morning hours, you may even spot restaurant chefs purchasing ingredients, much as chef Jeremy Papier does in Timothy Taylor’s novel Stanley Park. Shopping for chanterelle mushrooms, Jeremy first glimpses Jules Capelli, the woman who eventually becomes his sous-chef, inspecting celery root – smelling each specimen and “setting aside ones that met with some clearly exacting standard.”10 Hailed for “the best fresh seafood, produce, meats, sweets and global specialty foods in the city” of Vancouver,11 Granville Island Public Market may be a food lover’s paradise, but it is also a place of colonial conflict and changing economies. Beyond the visual cornucopia lie intersecting histories of destroyed gardens, poverty, and industrial giants. The market is located on the traditional Indigenous territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil Watuth, and Squamish First Nations. In her narrative essay “Goodbye, Snauq,” writer Lee Maracle, a member of the Stó:lo Nation, recounts how the Squamish resided year round at Snauq (now called False Creek) since the early 1820s. Since time immemorial, Snauq had been “a common garden shared by all the friendly tribes in the area … On the sandbar Musqueam, Tsleil Watuth, and Squamish women till[ed] oyster and clam beds … Wild cabbage, mushrooms and other plants were tilled and hoed as well. Summer after summer the nations gathered to harvest.”12 These clam beds, or clam gardens, were not naturally occurring. — 96 —

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5.1 Group near Jericho Charlie’s home on Kitsilano Indian Reserve (Snauq), 1891. Photograph shows May (Yam-schloot), Jericho Charlie (Chin-nal-set), William Green, Peelass George, Jimmy Jimmy, and Jack (Tow-hu-quam-kee).

They were, rather, a deliberate, long-standing (and highly effective) form of aquaculture. Indigenous communities built sheltered rock-walled terraces for clams to grow and thrive along the Northwest coastline. This sustainable supermarket, as Maracle calls it, is now being intensely studied by scientists for its use in both past and prospective resource management.13 The market, in other words, is not merely a locale for high-end goods but a geographical marker of the historical tensions between settler society and Indigenous peoples that inhabit the space every day. In 1931, the Squamish people living near the south end of today’s Burrard Street Bridge on reserve lands were forced out of their homes, which were promptly burned to the ground. 14 The Squamish people’s unjust expulsion allowed for Granville Island’s construction since the sandbar – or Snauq, to which Maracle refers – was eventually built up and turned into Granville Island. The inlet known today as False Creek was reduced in size and polluted by — 97 —

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garbage, toxic chemical waste, and human sewage.15 Maracle makes this explicit. What she calls the “Snauq supermarket” of locally sourced and cultivated food was entirely destroyed by Vancouver’s industrial development and urban settlement.16 Maracle’s essay marks the occasion of the Government of Canada and the Squamish Nation reaching a $92 million land claim settlement.17 Deeply ambivalent about the outcome, Maracle concludes that she is “not anxious to be a part of an environmentally offensive society that … make[s] war on people, plants, and animals to protect and advance financial gain.”18 Nevertheless, she will “accord [her]self a place. This place is still at the bottom as the last people to be afforded a place at the banquet table the attendees of which have been partaking for over 500 years.”19 If you head west from Granville Island, walking along the seawall and underneath the Burrard Street Bridge, you will pass one of Vancouver’s literary landmarks that, embedded into the area around the market, pays tribute to Lee Maracle and her story “Goodbye, Snauq.”20 Visual reminders of this industrial chapter of Granville Island’s history are everywhere. Many of the original buildings remain but have been refurbished to house the food market, artists’ studios, community centres, and shops. Next door to what was once the Edible Canada restaurant is a small parkade, which was once the Canada Chain and Forge Company (est. 1922). A large piece of chain is still affixed inside a parking garage wall, a leftover discovered after the company vacated the property. Today, one of the last remaining heavy-industry tenants is Ocean Concrete, which has been operating on the island since 1917. In 2014, Os Gemeos, two Brazilian street artists who were commissioned to paint Ocean Concrete’s silos, entitled their work “Giants.” Looking beyond the colours of the fruit, one can see that the complex history of the food market is engrained into the visual identity of the widely celebrated space. Purdy Writes (of Underrepresented and Forgotten Socio-Economic Groups) The ethnical and cultural clashes to which the market stands testimony may also be seen in terms of the economic inequality and financial distress that haunts Granville Island’s history. If you would like a more visceral sense of Industrial Island’s past, we recommend Al Purdy’s poem “Piling Blood,” — 98 —

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5.2 Group of butchers and a view of the interior of P. Burns & Co. Limited, circa 1911

which recounts memories of strenuous manual labour during the Great Depression. Travelling to Vancouver at the age of seventeen in 1936, and then again in 1937 and 1938, the Ontario-born Purdy hopped onto freight cars along with other unemployed Canadians, riding the rails westward in search of work.21 One of Purdy’s jobs was at Arrow Transfer on Granville Island, piling ten-foot-high (three-metres-high) stacks of seventy-five-pound (thirty-four-kilogram) paper bags of “powdered blood” from butchered cattle, horses, and sheep.22 Purdy remembers that the blood meal sold as fertilizer tended to “belly out / from the bags in brown clouds” and “settle on your sweating face” reconstituting itself as liquid blood.23 Purdy’s other job at the time was working at Burns’s slaughterhouse on East Hastings Street. This abattoir was part of the vast empire of Canada’s “Cattle King” and one of the founders of Calgary’s Stampede, Patrick Burns. Having made his initial fortune after receiving a contract from his — 99 —

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childhood friend William Mackenzie to supply meat for railway construction workers in the late 1800s, Pat Burns went on to develop meatpacking facilities in several western Canadian cities and to open over one hundred retail shops in Alberta and British Columbia.24 A true giant who monopolized the meat industry, Burns was famous for his industrial efficiencies and immense land holdings. (At the start of the First World War, he reportedly had “more than 400,000 acres under his control.”)25 His modern abattoirs harvested as many animal byproducts as possible, everything from blood meal to “strings for musical instruments.”26 In his biography of this meat-mogul, Grant MacEwen writes, “With a chuckle from deep in his abdominal cavity, Pat Burns said that the only remaining step in complete recovery was to capture and can the pigs’ squeals so that they might be shipped to Ottawa for use in making political speeches.”27 Imagine that stand at a local market. Burns may have joked about canning pigs’ squeals, but for Purdy – who worked on the slaughterhouse floor hauling frozen beef and hearing the sounds of animals having their throats cut and blood collected – his poem recalls a haunting period of his life in the 1930s, a time when he “wrote no poems.”28 Purdy’s silence is revealing. A market space so often invoked today for the cacophony of speech, the clamour of human interaction, is remembered by Purdy as a period in which he lived in silence and worked with the products of animals who themselves had been silenced. Following the Second World War, Purdy returned to Vancouver in 1950 with his wife, Eurithe, and their son. The young family found themselves living in an unfurnished apartment on 2nd Avenue near Cambie Street, foraging for food along what had once been the “Snauq Supermarket” of the Salish peoples. With little money, Purdy recalls his family surviving “on potatoes, blackberries that grew around False Creek and crabapples from a vacant lot across the road.”29 Eventually, “Industrial Island” was transformed into Granville Island Public Market, which opened its doors to the public in 1979. Today, the market is indeed a foodie paradise, but its storied memories give shape and meaning to Snauq and Granville Island, revealing the troubling histories of Canada’s past 150 years and beyond.30

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Harris and Wiseman: Focusing on the Specifics Amy Lavender Harris, writing about the Kensington Market area in Toronto, identifies a central tension at the heart of Canada’s urban markets between “legacy and aspiration.” “If the Market has long been a portal for those seeking entry, it is also a doorway most are relieved to exit.”31 While Harris focuses on the Kensington Market in particular, the same could also be said of other urban markets that underwent significant cultural transitions – with their predominantly Jewish shopkeepers in the early twentieth century and their increasing diversity over the course of subsequent decades. Harris delves deeper into the varied people of the marketspace. Rather than understanding the location through a binary of the unprivileged and the privileged, Harris illuminates how the market’s history is also one of tension between various minority groups attempting to establish a space for themselves: their history, or legacy, alongside their future, or aspiration. Of Kensington Market, Harris writes: If the market had always seemed exotic to Anglo-Saxon Torontonians, by mid-century it began to seem foreign to Toronto Jews, many of whom had moved to North Toronto to become middle-class suburbanites … From the 1960s onward, particularly as Portuguese, West Indian, South American, Chinese and Vietnamese specialty stores began to replace many of the Jewish businesses, Kensington Market became something of a tourist attraction, a chance for Anglo-Saxon Torontonians to encounter the exotic in their own city.32 Harris is careful to differentiate groups who might be considered newcomers, showcasing a location of cultural flux, one that is constantly in transition. Rather than designating the area as falling within a singular umbrella, Harris markedly calls on each ethnic group by name and nationality. This serves not only to elaborate on the varied persons within the market space but also to differentiate those groups from one another by refusing to aggregate them all under the quasi-inclusive “multicultural.” Historical detail provides concrete evidence of other ways in which markets are places of transition. Writes Adele Wiseman in 1964, “the little fruit shop is gone” and “the old market on Winnipeg’s North Main has given way to a parking-lot … The Farmers’ Market, what’s left of it, — 101 —

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5.3 Kensington Market, 1957

has been removed to an arid, antiseptic setting somewhere in the city’s outskirts.”33 For Adele Wiseman’s autobiographical narrator in Old Worlds, New Markets, the passing of time is more intimately marked by the departure of her uncle’s beloved horse and the arrival of a “sky-blue, halfton truck, which is as carefully if not as lovingly groomed as Nellie used to be.”34 Wiseman’s narrator muses later: — 102 —

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There are lovely old markets in Canada still, and peddlers who still sit on their wagons behind blinkered old nags. But the horses are disappearing and the markets are developing a kind of strangeness about them that is in addition to the strangeness they once had as places where immigrants gathered and practised feeling at home. It is the strangeness of the past persistent, the past persisting into a future which probably has no place for it. Not long ago some friends introduced me to the Kensington Market in Toronto … the customers were mainly fairly recent immigrants and those of us who like to drop in on the past, occasionally, when we have time.35 Similar to Harris, Wiseman pushes back against the abstract descriptions of the food market as a locale of multicultural plurality and dynamism. Rather, she capitalizes on a specific time in history to emphasize a more nuanced quality of the market: that it is rooted in time as it enables immigrants to transition from being other to “feeling at home.”36 If contemporary accounts of the multicultural aspects of food markets suggest a timeless, detached location of plurality, Wiseman wishes to complicate those accounts. Diversity, Wiseman reveals, is comprised of the particular individuals of a particular period. While she recognizes that there are still “mostly fairly recent immigrants,” the market’s “strangeness” reveals that, for all of the food market’s diversity, its colours do not remain the same.37 Adele Wiseman’s meditative narrative on Old World markets explores the theme of transition and human interaction more deeply in relation to one touching anecdote about an old woman she encounters in a supermarket who first asks her to reach for goods off a shelf and then gradually proceeds to nudge her cart along beside her until she engages in conversation. The old woman is clearly lonely (reminiscent of the anecdote with which this chapter opens), and the modern supermarket offers little opportunity to assuage that loneliness. When Wiseman’s autobiographical narrator kindly pretends to recognize an older lady she encounters in a modern-day supermarket from “the market,” the Bobeh’s (an affectionate Yiddish term for grandmother) “wrinkles righted themselves slowly to a smile” as she responds animatedly, “Rachel Street?” and then: “That’s a market. There at least you can say a word to someone. Not like this.”38 Such a reference to Rachel Street is wonderfully resonant. Might it refer to Montreal’s Old World market? Or to her memories of the “now vanished — 103 —

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market” in Winnipeg, which Wiseman invokes when she supplies the text to accompany Joe Rosenthal’s illustrations?39 Since the days of Wiseman’s childhood, Rachel Street has been renamed Anabella Street.40 However, Wiseman’s market narrative is more about a nuanced portrayal of humanity in a specific time rather than in a specific geographical location, and she is astute to signal that the importance of market culture involved much more than the display of colourful foods and people. Rakoff: Particular Individuals in Particular Place and Time Blanche Gelfant in The American City Novel identifies different ways in which a novelist can engage with a municipality. One is coined “the ‘portrait’ study”: that is, what occurs when a single character discovers and explores a city.41 It is through one individual’s viewing lens that readers encounter Alvin Rakoff’s Kensington Market, an autobiographical glance that captures his neighbourhood in a particular time and from a very particular perspective. Like the other commentators and authors mentioned in this section meditating on literary depictions of marketplaces, Rakoff recognizes the food market for its nuance; his Baldwin Street: A Novel teases out the complex stories of particular immigrant groups, historically specific forms of interaction and identity, as well as violent, and eventually redemptive, stories of individual human beings. A two-time Emmy Award winner, Alvin Rakoff is best known for his successful career in Britain as a Tv and cinema writer and director. His early years, however, were spent in Toronto’s Kensington Market, which is lovingly detailed in a series of vignettes he penned late in his career. Baldwin Street: A Novel is dedicated “to the people of Kensington Market,” with the explanatory coda for those unfamiliar with the market’s geography: “Baldwin Street is the main intersecting street in Kensington Market. I called it home.”42 Baldwin Street is not a novel as the title suggests but, rather, a series of character sketches that come together much in the same way people and immigrant communities come together and engage with one another’s lives in Kensington Market itself. Some of the vignettes are narrated in the third person, others in the first person by aspiring young writer Leonard Abelson, who eventually, late in the book, is advised to write about Baldwin Street. Abelson, like Rakoff, takes on the task of bringing the people and places of Kensington Market in the late 1930s to life. — 104 —

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Rakoff ’s Baldwin Street is a bustling place, a community. The changing of seasons is marked by the changing produce on offer.43 The market’s shopkeepers have no need of banks since they borrow from one another.44 Some days are busier than others, as when shopkeepers like the Abelsons rise at 5:00 a.m. to prepare to bring their goods to the family stall, ready to open for 9:00 a.m.45 Menasha, who plays the part of a Shakespearean wise fool, equal part philosopher and man plagued by mental illness, offers a succinct description: You asked me about Baldwin Street … It’s a market. Full of life. Buying. Selling. Trucks. Cars. People. All kinds of people. Babies. Mothers. Old men in black yarmulkes. With long white beards. Old ladies in shawls. With stooped round shoulders. People. People mean sound. Noise. Car horns. Pushcarts squeaking. Horses clopping. Storekeepers shouting bargains. Hucksters. Chickens squawking. Children crying. Customers haggling. Full of life. Things to do. Things to see.46 Already, Menasha suggests an alternative perspective on the spectacle that the Kensington Market website’s home page calls “Toronto’s most vibrant and diverse neighbourhood.”47 While Menasha indeed provides an overview of the cacophony of the market, Rakoff typically focuses on exchanges and accommodations in his vignettes. His most loving glance falls on Menasha himself, who voices the moral lessons pointed out in Rakoff’s stories: that humans, however flawed, and all so different, need one another and flourish within a supportive community. For example, one story details how the Catholic Mike Manzi carves himself a place in the predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. First puzzled by the practices of those around him, as when stores remain closed on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for his Jewish neighbours, he slowly becomes familiar with the neighbourhood’s rhythms, and, in deference to the Jewish faith, his store also remains closed. In turn, Manzi is treated with courtesy, granted the monopoly on bananas – his store’s only product – by the fruit sellers around him. Over the years, in Rakoff ’s recounting as in practice, there is a gradual erosion of the strict adherence to religious holidays, some stores (like Lottman’s bakery) staying open on Sunday, and some Jewish shopkeepers serving customers on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. 48 At Manzi’s request, on the day of — 105 —

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his funeral, all stores in Kensington Market remain closed, a gesture of solidarity on the part of the Jewish shopkeepers towards their Catholic friend. 49 Rakoff ’s vignette is a complex charting of specific individuals within the larger constellation of diverse religions; he does not merely celebrate the diversity but illuminates how the nuanced portrayal of the market community offers readers an exploration of the varied and empathetic human existence within. In other words, Rakoff shows that the blanket of religion and cultural difference cannot fully account for the interaction between residents of the market; the individuals of the food market are, first and foremost, human. Two stories particularly gesture to moments when the community’s considerable tolerance is sorely tested, both exemplified by the seemingly mundane act of household shopkeeping and then moments of naming. The first involves Murray Millstein, whose anguish after the death of his beloved wife, Molly, is almost beyond endurance. He eventually finds solace in wearing her clothes and performing the tasks that she once performed. At first, Murray transforms himself into Molly only behind closed doors. But gradually he goes out in public as Molly, going from shop to shop, wearing a skirt, holding a purse, just as Molly had done.50 The community is at first stunned, unable to adjust to this behaviour. Adults stop to stare, and children chase after Murray while he’s dressed as Molly. Shopkeepers Mr Simon and Mr Kruger serve Murray, but with an embarrassed silence. Finally, shopkeeper Mr Gelman breaks the impasse one day by addressing Murray, quite simply, as Molly. “From that day on when Murray shopped wearing women’s clothes, he was called Molly. At other times, to and from work, at work, in his usual clothes, he was Murray. By day, Murray. By night, Molly.”51 Once again, neither religion nor culture accounts for Rakoff ’s narrative; rather, the much more complex matrix of individual human emotion, compassion, and acceptance colours the story. The second story praising the virtue of empathy and tolerance also involves a tragic death. This time it is the beloved and long awaited only son of Ira and Eva Altman who dies, felled by a motorcycle ridden by the unsavoury police officer George Untzmann. The accident occurs in the aftermath of a clash between the Jewish boys of Kensington Market and a group of young Italian youths who come to the neighbourhood looking for trouble. Ira Altman enters the mêlée to end the fight, and, when he is hurt, fouryear-old Bernie Altman rushes down to his side, hurtling out of the front — 106 —

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door of their house without checking the street for oncoming traffic.52 Such a violent clash between cultural communities is strikingly at odds with the otherwise neighbourly accommodations of Rakoff’s vignettes. But one must also remember that Rakoff’s narrative details the Toronto of the 1930s, the decade in which the city witnessed the dark chapter of the Christie Pits riots in 1933, when violence erupted after Pit Gang members displayed a swastika.53 In Rakoff’s telling, there is a kind of resolution. Officer Untzmann is assigned to patrol Kensington Market and inevitably experiences the neighbourhood’s rough justice. At first, the Altmans are inconsolable.54 When they attempt suicide by gas inhalation, the wise fool Menasha comes to their aid by dragging them outside into fresh air in their back garden, away from possible onlookers, lecturing them loudly on why they must live.55 The Altmans’ story is not over, however. After the war, as the community receives new immigrants fleeing Europe, the Altmans welcome a young Romanian family to their home – a family with a young daughter who has a baby on the way. At first, they have difficulty communicating without a common language, but gradually the routines of shopkeeping and of family settle into place. A moment of pure joy occurs over a lunch shared by this blended family. The little girl calls Eva Altman “Bubba” – or “grandmother” in Yiddish – and the young toddler Chaim (itself a Jewish rather than a Romanian name, meaning life) echoes the phrase.56 With that one word, “Bubba,” the bond is cemented between the newly arrived Berclov family and their adopted parents, the Altmans. And so, in Rakoff ’s vignettes, as in the market’s bustling streets, varied individuals come together, in conversation and community rather than in the cacophony of cultural clash. As Rakoff’s Baldwin Street reveals, this coming together can only be accounted for by the complex portrayals of individuals who find their common language not through language acquisition but, rather, through their humanity amidst, and in spite of, diversity. For Rakoff and many of these writers, scholars, and commentators, the food market is more complex than contemporary critics and journalists allow. The food market is a space that contributes verisimilitude to the representation of interpersonal relations between humans; all the legacies of the diverse groups that comprise the market are mixed, overlapping stories of expulsion, socio-economic stratifications, period specific identity, and, essentially, the individual’s need for belonging, acceptance, and tolerance in a locale that is relentlessly in flux. — 107 —

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Food Markets as a Location of Literary Experimentation and Exploration The nuanced portrayal of diversity enabled by the food market is not only exclusive to the market’s inhabitants but also to the literary forms within which these settings are invoked. Canadian authors draw on the food market locale in a variety of literary forms – from the short quasi-autobiographical vignettes of Rakoff, to plays and poems, and in genres as diverse and disparate as the detective novel and fairy tales. In many ways, the food market is the perfect setting for literary exploration; the nuanced representation of interactions between humans that the market allows similarly facilitates an equally complex assortment of generic interactions with the market setting. Meyer’s Detective Novel In addition to positing the “portrait” city, Gelfant offers other ways in which a city can be detailed and explored in literature. One of these is “the ‘ecological’ study,”57 in which readers are invited to focus on and experience a particular section of the city and to experience its unique manners of life. An excellent example of this second variant of the city novel is one that depicts Toronto’s Kensington Market in the form of a roman écologique, focusing exclusively on the single neighbourhood: Vivian Meyer’s debut novel, Bottom Bracket. The market serves as home neighbourhood to Abby Faria, the novel’s protagonist and hip detective. Kensington Market is also the home of the author herself, clearly recognizable in the novel’s lucid rendering of the streets, characters, and food haunts. In her review of the novel, Margaret Cannon pauses to note its vivid evocation: “Kensington Market, that jewel of the city centre where you can get Nicaraguan coffee, Mexican pupusas, some of the best Quebec artisan cheeses, superb bread to serve it on and some exceptional vintage clothing to wear while serving it. Meyer manages to bring all that atmosphere into her story of murder and escape.”58 Throughout the novel, the food market expands to encompass the entirety of the mystery in which it is set, as the market’s wares weave the fabric that constitutes the locale of Meyer’s narrative. From drugs to murder, the market of Bottom Bracket is unlike the upbeat descriptions of the Kensington Market website. In a detective fiction, more important than market customers are the mystery, crime, and someone to solve the crime. — 108 —

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The novel’s principal detective, Abby Faria, is a young bicycle courier. As such, she realistically maps out the market in exquisite detail. She walks or zips from place to place on her bicycle: along Augusta Avenue, College Street, and Baldwin. The market itself visually unravels as Abby traverses the neighbourhood, taking care to hide former addict and illegal immigrant Anita, a murder witness, from potential onlookers and pursuers. Abby’s own home is above “Neptune’s Nook Fish Shop.” The shop is on the north side of Kensington Avenue and is run by her friend Maria and Maria’s mother, a source of many gifts of fresh fish filets to keep Abby’s hunger adequately satiated. Other landmarks of the market include: Adrenaline, the coffee shop that Abby seems to single-handedly keep in business with her need for caffeine; Beano’s, “the coolest bike shop in Toronto”;59 Stan’s, the place to get a beer with friends; Roach-a-Rama; and even the Hot Box Café, “the only openly pothead restaurant in Toronto.”60 It would be wrong to give away the outcome of a novel highly driven by plot – but suffice it to say that, as in most detective novels, the day is ultimately saved, and here the concluding scene involves a “delicious vegetable pasta dinner” shared with friends.61 While for the most part Abby appears to survive largely on coffee and croissants, Meyer’s readers eventually come to understand that what fuels the community of Kensington Market, and what is on offer for those who live and visit there, is the much more varied menu of very human connections – the stuff for which the characters’ food voice yearns. Meyer stretches the world of Kensington Market to accommodate the detective genre – instead of the brilliant array of goods on display, Meyer’s novel revels in the hidden, the mysterious, and the underrepresented corners of Kensington Market, where human connections are not simply encouraged, they nourish and quell the rumblings of disquieted food voices. Robert Rotenberg and the Detective Novel To the southeast of Kensington Market in Toronto lies the St Lawrence Market, another food-market-turned-detective-novel setting. While the market takes a more peripheral role in Old City Hall by Robert Rotenberg, its function is similar to Meyer’s portrayal of Kensington Market. Both books use the market as a space for generic experimentation while anchoring them geographically, not only rendering the literary marketplaces more familiar and realistic to readers but also teasing out the more obscure, often — 109 —

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omitted aspects of the locale. How many mysteries can the food market hide under the goods and commodities of its kiosks? Like Abby’s various culinary landmarks, food establishments signpost the geography of Rotenberg’s detective novel, allowing his readers to follow the movements of his characters across the city and through the logical sequence of a crime investigation. As Bottom Bracket’s concluding scene exemplifies, food in literature serves as an effective vehicle for the precise portrayal of character, an opportunity to bring different characters together and explore the nature of their exchanges. Depictions of food gatherings are also a valuable tool for writers to provide credible local colour and realistic detail to enable the willing suspension of disbelief. However, in Old City Hall, the first in Robert Rotenberg’s Ari Greene detective fictions, the food itself is seldom mentioned. However, some of Toronto’s iconic restaurants and food purveyors make key appearances. When nearby police are first alerted to the crime, they are found across the street, in St Lawrence Market, and the only description given is that it is “the city’s big indoor food emporium.”62 The Vesta Lunch, a 24-7 breakfast diner near Dupont and Bathurst is the setting for two important meetings.63 And the detectives’ food tastes also allow Rotenberg to give a brief portrait of what part of the city they call home. “What else?” asks the lady in Gryfe’s Bagels of Detective Ari Greene, the same question heard by bagel customers over the decades and posed by the same lady that Greene seems to remember from his childhood.64 If Greene lives near this north Bathurst culinary landmark, as readers understand from his frequent visits there for staples,65 then policeman Daniel Kennicott makes Little Italy his home. Getting off the streetcar he glances into the window of Café Diplomatico, west of Clinton, before entering the Riviera Bakery to pick up some pizza dough and fresh prosciutto.66 It is possible that food plays a peripheral role precisely because of the detective novel genre. If food provides authenticity to literary depictions, by experimenting with the food market and transforming its location to accommodate the mystery genre, Rotenberg’s incorporation of the food market grants the verisimilitude that readers anticipate from the genre. Even so, in a later scene, readers glimpse Kennicott having an informal dinner with his former classmate from law school, Jo Summers, and colleagues from her former law firm. As expected, the food itself goes unmentioned; the “meal seemed to fly by,”67 readers are told. Yet this lack is precisely that which enriches the romance plot and readers’ respect for — 110 —

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this young woman, her mastery of Mandarin, and her ability to order from a menu unavailable to everyone else at the table as well as to the readers themselves. The mystery remains. There are two exceptions to the rule of Rotenberg foregoing the mention of food items themselves, and these are significant because such moments are rare in his writing. One occurs when defence counsellor Nancy Parish visits Ari Greene and notices that, instead of the “jet fuel” coffee one stereotypically expects when visiting the Toronto police force, she found in the cafeteria a range of “cappuccinos, lattes, mint teas, yoghurt smoothies, fruit salads, granola bars, croissants, and mini-brioches. Mini-brioches. This was no cop shop, it was a café. Where was the weak coffee, the glazed doughnuts?”68 Parish’s detailed observation of the foods on offer, all of which she rejects, provides a remarkably effective introduction to Parish herself, and her down-to-earth attitude towards her job, through her food voice. The other exception comes as Ari Greene visits the Hardscrabble Café, itself a culinary landmark, in small-town Coboconk. This little restaurant is known for its bread, and the aroma of its being baked fills the restaurant as soon as Greene enters. Mention of that aroma also tells Rotenberg’s readers volumes about the little café, and the woman who runs it, who also foregoes the modern conveniences of a cell phone.69 Davis’s The Grimoire: A Fairy Tale By contrast to Meyer’s and Rotenberg’s very realistic portrayal of food markets, in which the food market is transformed to accommodate a detective narrative adding verisimilitude to the details of murder and mystery by locating it in a specific space in time, Lauren Davis’s novel showcases the food market’s generic versatility. Rather than draw on the realistic genre of the detective novel, Lauren Davis transforms Kensington Market into the setting for her autobiographical fairy tale, which includes elements of the fantastic: The Grimoire of Kensington Market (2018).70 Although the title alerts readers to the novel being set squarely in the heart of Toronto’s Kensington Market, The Grimoire of Kensington Market is a contemporary folk tale, and the landscape of the market follows the laws of narrative rather than the laws of physics. “Specific references to an urban landscape are useful for readers who are uncomfortable with reading fantasy,” writes Marcie McCauley.71 “The Necropolis, the Canada Malting Silos, the — 111 —

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Rogers Centre, Allan Gardens, even the cow statues in the financial district: today’s Toronto is in clear evidence.”72 But, in this fairy tale, Toronto’s geographical landmarks are transformed into story world settings: Toronto’s Regent Park, for example, becomes the forest, and a dangerous one at that – the entire market area figures as an unpredictably active agent in her fiction. As such, it aptly fits Gelfant’s description of the third and final variant of the city novel, “the ‘synoptic’ study … which reveals the total city immediately as a personality in itself ”73 – in which the city is transformed into a character in the fiction. “Imagine downtown Toronto transformed into a fairytale world,” writes Trevor Corkum in the Toronto Star, “a city where streets contract at will and charmless laneways contain portals into magic underworlds.”74 The central character, Maggie, notices that her garden seems to be shrinking incrementally. The bookshop she stewards can be found only by some people and not by others – including her own brother, for example. Also, the books in Maggie’s bookshop, and the stories they contain, seem to come and go according to the story world’s timetable. When one appears, as one does at the end of the novel (itself called The Grimoire of Kensington Market), the story’s birth is signalled by a golden light. When a story disappears, the book evaporates from the shelf, as if by magic. If Davis’s Kensington Market helps unfamiliar readers navigate the novel’s generic peculiarities, it also helps express and contend with modernday challenges. North Americans face an opioid crisis in the real world, a crisis of which Davis is all too painfully aware. Describing what motivated her writing this book, she explained: “I had been working on a memoir about the deaths-by-suicide of my two brothers. But I couldn’t write it as a memoir, it was too dark for me. It was just some place I didn’t want to go for a long period of time.”75 “It was only when I found the fairytale structure that I was able to write it.”76 Transforming the food market into a fantasy world allows Davis to approach such heartbreaking struggles. Like the people in her own personal experiences, Davis’s characters find themselves tempted by drugs and, specifically, by the mythical drug “elysium.” As Marcie McCauley reminds us, “In Greek mythology, Elysium represents an afterlife for the heroic; in this novel, it is a black tar-like substance smoked in a pipe, which leads users – Pipers – to a temporary refuge.”77 Not only does elysium draw those who consume it into a dreamlike world, it also marks them with a silvery swirl on their bodies, an outward and visible sign that they are in the thrall of the drug and its snow-queen-like purveyor, Srebrenka. — 112 —

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In this novel, although the plot is fuelled by hunger, the ubiquitous compulsion to consume elysium, and the heroic struggle of its central characters to resist that compulsion, one hears little of the foods on offer in Kensington Market. Nevertheless, positive moments of human connection are marked by food scenes: as when Maggie shares a chamomile and lavender tea with Mr Strundale, proprietor of the nearby Wort and Willow Apothecary,78 for example, or when Maggie prepares a delicious meal of chicken stew, salad, crusty bread, and tea to share with Alvin.79 Maggie finds the strength to resist elysium in two ways when she wanders into a bookstore in Kensington Market, shivering from withdrawal, and draws strength from the books she reads and the community she finds. The novel itself is transformed into the generically flexible food market that allows both Davis and Maggie to cope by bridging the realistic and the fantastic. As if metaphorically reaching out to readers, the bookstore’s ironically named proprietor, Mr Mustby, invites Maggie to stay in the bookstore – her ability to find her way to the store within the tumult of the market having spoken for itself. At the book’s opening, Maggie finds herself very alone. Mr Mustby, whom she credits with saving her life,80 has been deceased for three months, and although she is clean with regard to drugs, she has lost touch with her only brother. No spoiler alert is needed for us to share that the ending of this folk tale, like that of so many others, underscores the importance of community, of a family of the heart. And it is no coincidence that this narrative compelled by hunger concludes with hearty food offerings. Alvin, no longer the consumer of Maggie’s chicken dishes, becomes master of the kitchen. Mysteriously, he wakes one morning, as he describes it, “with the sudden urge to cook soups and stews and pies, of all bloody things.”81 When Maggie eventually finds her own way back to the bookstore, after the quest to find and save her brother, bringing with her a gang of other child strays from Davis’s elysium-clouded dreamscape, Alvin’s newly found urge to cook seems practical indeed. For Davis, the food market’s ability to tease out nuanced interactions between humans renders it ideal as a vehicle that enables literary experimentation. By expanding to encompass the fairytale genre, Davis’s Kensington Market harnesses the fantastic to describe the very real experiences of both the author and the character. In other words, the market encourages a complex yet common language not merely across cultural boundaries but also across literary ones. — 113 —

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Lean-Simone Bowen: Using the Play Form to Bring the Underground to the Fore The food market accommodates another kind of experimentation as well – at the level of presentation format. While radically different genres, the works of both Rakoff and Davis remain within the literary space of the novel, one tipping towards the biographical. However, one very unusual – even dramatic – departure from this convention is Leah-Simone Bowen’s contemporary short play The Flood and Other Misadventures of the Female Prisoners of the St Lawrence Market. Here, Bowen stages the market space for her audience as a multi-layered locale. The play brings together a cast of five female prisoners who, in the spring thaw of 1887, find themselves imprisoned beneath Toronto’s St Lawrence Market, completely disempowered within a system that allows their male relatives to incarcerate them at will. As the play develops, it becomes clear that most of the women’s “crimes” are minor indeed: “Irish” Mary was impregnated by her employer, charged with tempting him despite her repeatedly trying to avoid his advances by feigning sleep. Mary, a member of the Mississauga First Nation who was taken from her family, stole food items. The Ukrainian Iryna shattered the windows in her home in a desperate attempt to get fresh air after hours of, quite literally, slaving over a hot stove. Victoria is a mute prisoner, whose crime is having multiple sclerosis, the result being that her family finds it difficult to succeed in their business with her present. Only the feared Sophia is suspected of murder. As the title reveals, the play is about the steady flooding of the prison. At first, liquids are those pouring down between the floorboards of the market: “a cow taking a pee practically over our heads,” says Sophia; “Blood running down the slats fresh from slaughter,” says Irish Mary; or “the spit and the garbage,” adds Iryna.82 They long for useful detritus: a carrot, an apple core, a dropped cigarette.83 But gradually the spring melt means that the prison is infiltrated by damp, cold, and the gradually rising waters.84 Victoria, despite her cellmate’s best efforts, is the first to succumb. As the floodwaters continue to rise, only one prisoner is able to swim her way to safety, taking along with her the newborn infant of the friend she has made in prison.85 Written for the stage, the short play is riveting, drawing on and blurring historical events to describe a narrative that quite literally unearths the — 114 —

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5.4 Painting of St Lawrence Market, 1895

past. Was there such a flood? Was there such a women’s prison beneath the St Lawrence Market, where prisoners could smell the “sweet smell of roasted nuts” or hear “the flower cart making its way to be parked”?86 Certainly, the St Lawrence Market Jail was first built in 1844, together with the police station. Both were moved when City Hall relocated from the market in 1899, two years after Bowen’s play is set.87 And while there is no specific major flood event in St Lawrence Market that seems to have affected prisoners, there is evidence that occurrences of minor flooding were common, and very likely influenced prisoners’ lives: according to one history provided by Lost Rivers Walks, “Police Station Number One was on the main floor of the centre block and the jail cells were in the basement. Flooding of the basement could not be controlled so eventually the cells were relocated elsewhere in the city.”88 Indeed, as tourists visiting the St Lawrence jail reveal, the conditions were indeed as horrific as Bowen’s play depicts. “Devoid of any light, fresh air or clean water, jail conditions in 19thcentury Canada were so appalling that even Charles Dickens on his visit — 115 —

5.5 St Lawrence Market, 1957

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here was so disgusted at the way we treated prisoners he once wrote that it’s much worse here than in England, which itself is absolutely wretched.”89 Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of the play is the one closest to home. Is it true that one of the women gave birth while jailed beneath the St Lawrence Market? Rather than drawing on facts from Toronto’s distant history for this element in the play, Bowen draws on a much more recent story, one in which “an inmate in Ottawa in 2012 … was forced to give birth in jail alone.”90 And lest Bowen’s readers feel that such subhuman treatment, as of Irish Mary who is forced to birth her first child alone in her cell, is a thing of the distant past, Bowen takes care to remind us that, when Bilotta (the inmate from Ottawa) was in labour, one officer is quoted in the Ottawa Citizen, claiming that she was “faking it” even as the baby was emerging.91 There is little to no food in Bowen’s St Lawrence Market. With the few exceptions of food refuse that makes its way through the floorboards, it is just out of reach for her characters. What nurtures her characters, and her audience, are the tales of strife and the women’s hunger for community. As with other works featuring marketplaces, it seems the food voice speaks out, and hungers, for human connections. Austin Clarke: The Public Market in His Memoir Unlike an autobiography, which tells the tale of a single individual, the memoir is a life writing genre that focuses on the principal character’s interactions with others. It offers a window on the writer’s sense of self in relation to his community. And, unlike the other explorations of food markets discussed so far, the depiction of Kensington Market in Clarke’s memoir, Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, explicitly references the food available. Clarke describes his encounter with the market, its spaces and community, in a way that lays bare his particular cultural history. As reviewer Maureen Moynagh writes: “We learn about class distinctions read through the texture of sweetbread, or the class stratification of cooking stoves and kitchen architecture.”92 His Barbadian history is both encountered and consumed through his culinary practices. Yet Clarke’s personal experiences are clearly portrayed as well. In Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit not only does he try to represent dialect in his vocabulary and grammar but he also offers detailed instructions about how to warm — 117 —

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up a cold, Toronto evening: rice, oxtails, a bottle of wine, and a nice salad. He also offers very specific instructions about where a Torontonian might want to buy those oxtails: from the European Meat Market in Kensington Market. But Clarke makes it clear that there are a lot of inconveniences to shopping at the market: Spadina Avenue always being torn up, expensive goods, waiting in line forever, not being understood by the staff. So, why the market when the supermarket boasts an excellent product? Indeed, Clarke himself says he prefers buying his oxtails from an “ordinary” supermarket. “They have a nice thick ring o’ fat round the bigger pieces, and the fat is the thing that does give the oxtails flavour.”93 Nevertheless, the European Meat Market is near the “Wessindian specialty shops that does sell the other things that you need,” and it is right across the street from the liquor store. “You don’t want to have to walk all over Toronto, with winter bursting your arse, just to pick up a few ingreasements,” he sensibly reasons.94 “Wessindian,” a cultural signpost of identity not unlike his own, is subtly transformed into a marker for both his personal experience and cultural identity. In other words, Clarke draws on the memoir to bridge the gap usually forgotten by tourists to the market – the cultural alongside the individual, a specific experience within a shared language. Therefore food, the food market’s primary product, is not necessarily what people come to consume. Clarke makes similar arguments to other writers who claim that the value of the market space involves much more than the provisions on offer – it is the stuff of human connection itself. The irony here is that Clarke recognizes that shopping in Kensington Market involves a certain level of frustration when compared to the ease of the supermarket experience. Not only should one be prepared to wait at least thirty minutes, standing in a queue, and heaven help you if you forget to pull out a number on its piece of paper from the dispenser, but also “whilst you in there, all kinds o’ people who think that they own the store going be pushing you and shoving you, while the cold wind bursting your arse every time the door open to let the next customer enter.”95 Nevertheless, he urges his readers to frequent the European Meat Market, and, despite the difficulties, “try to enjoy the waiting. Buy a hot dog or a cup o’ coffee and listen to all the different languages that licking-down your ears. Try to pick up a word or two in Russian, Chinese or Italian. You might even get a lil advice ’bout sausages.”96 Taking up a similar point to that made by Maria Coletta McLean in her anecdote about the need for human contact — 118 —

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in a rapidly digitizing world, Clarke reveals that, while people come to the market for food – they stay for the people. Clarke asks someone, and by implication also the reader, whether she has ever seen black rice, having seen with his own eyes not only black rice but also brown and red in the basement of Toronto’s “Sin-Lawrence Market.”97 What the market offers its customers is variety – of wares and languages and foodways. When buying one’s oxtail, it is important to ask the server to cut it at the knuckle just so. “You may have to point to the exact pieces that you like, ’cause the woman serving you may not understand English too good, and you are not here in this noisy place, standing up in sawdust with all these people pushing you, to worry about speaking proper English – not even if you are a teacher of English-as-a-Second-Language programme in the George Brown College down the street. You here for one thing: oxtails.”98 Yet the irony is all too clear – if the oxtails at the supermarket are better, why not go there? The answer: while in line, one likely has a chance to exchange a word or two with other customers, the real food for which the food voice hungers. Through such conversations, recalled and rehearsed for Clarke’s readers, Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit emerges as a memoir. And the market, with its fundamental principles of human contact and exchange, serves as the ideal setting and vehicle for the genre that is memoir.

Food Markets as Vehicles for Human Organization Markets organized around a principle of exchange, whether of goods or dialogue, serve as a useful vehicle for organizing literary communities. Complex interactions, including notions of identity and belonging, can be clarified in light of the market system. Essentially, while the market is an apt location to describe the chaos of everyday existence, it also gives meaning to a life that appears, and in many ways is, disorderly and random. Robin’s The Wanderer: Homely Chaos Montreal’s Jean Talon Market is depicted in lush detail in Régine Robin’s The Wanderer, Phyllis Aronoff’s 1989 translation of Robin’s 1983 publication, La Québécoite. In this novel, Robin places her protagonist in three different — 119 —

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Montreal neighbourhoods, having her explore the city and find her place within them. Living near Jean Talon, the protagonist lovingly describes the almost overwhelming plethora of the food market: On summer Sundays they’d like nothing better than to spend hours wandering around the Marché Jean-Talon … There would be mounds of tomatoes, cauliflowers, lettuces, and peppers, straw baskets full of blueberries or strawberries, and further on, braids of garlic, red and white onions, shallots, herbs. There would be the scent of fennel, thyme, and mint amidst the flies and wasps, between the slightly sour watermelons and the prickly pears from who knows where. Still further, flowers and plants, mellow odours wafting over the voices speaking Italian and Greek. A cheerful confusion they’d feel at home in, delighting in the array of honey and natural jams, jars of wild garlic, sachets of lavender.99 Feeling “at home” amidst the “cheerful confusion” is precisely the effect of the market. Despite staggering plenty, the food market offers the protagonist a sense of belonging amidst the unordered chaos of life. “Cheerful confusion” is also an apt phrase to encapsulate a number of depictions of writerly explorations of Montreal’s Jean Talon Market and writers’ observations of what market visitors and inhabitants want to find. An urban market, like Kensington and St Lawrence Markets in Toronto as well as the Atwater Market in Montreal, Jean Talon Market’s aspirations extend beyond those of the local farmer’s market, which sells only and uniquely local and seasonal produce. Indeed, it does this, as do the other urban markets – but it also does more. These markets, like food markets globally, sell food products sourced from around the world, bringing and maintaining the bounty and diversity of place-based foods. The “Italian and Greek” that the protagonist experiences are not just conversations between people but also products exchanged and consumed from all over the world in the space of the market. Journalist Sarah Musgrave draws a distinction between “localist” motivations (to buy and shop local products) and “locationist” motivations (to buy products reflecting the taste of place, or terroir, but not necessarily the taste of their own local place). Referring specifically to the Jean Talon Market, she argues: “It is not only the localist experience that its consumers are after, but also the locationist one. The Marché’s — 120 —

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shoppers are not only buying food from a place they know, but places they want to know exist.”100 While Musgrave agrees to distinguish between its shoppers and its purveyors, she nevertheless observes, as do those writers examined here who depict Montreal’s markets in their fictions, their shared journey: Today’s Marché shoppers and feta cheese buyers encompass a variety of people who may share purchasing behaviours but not necessarily motivations (a taste of home versus a taste of the exotic, for example). They may, however, all be navigating the space between the local and the global in search of placerootedness [sic]. The consumption of placemarked authentic foods – and their production, for that matter – may be reflective of a longing by a denationalized population at large to take pride, comfort and identity from real or imagined traditions.101 Musgrave’s commentary aligns nicely with the depiction of events given by Robin’s protagonist. The food market’s members are, for different motivations, in search of a sense of ordered belonging, of “placerootedness” in the chaos – what is essentially a “cheerful confusion.” It is in this chaotic sensibility that the marketplace locale resembles the tumult and turmoil of daily life. Local yet global, individual yet cultural, the food market space provides authors and readers a sense of organization, some meaning, in the crazy experience of existing within the contexts of place. Dickner: Geography as a Marketspace of Interactions Not all literary communities achieve the sense of satisfaction of Robin’s protagonist. Nicolas Dickner’s charming novel Nikolski, first published in French in 2007 and translated into English by 2009, finds all three of its central characters with “locationist” motivations as they search for a sense of their place in the world as well as the traditions that bind them to their family and heritage, even as they are always, intentionally and inevitably, on the move. Dickner is more cynical than Robin of “cheerful confusion” – indeed, not all confusion in Dickner’s novel is cheerful. Yet Dickner similarly explores the search for order in chaos while illuminating the systems that allow us to do so. This is a novel of place that explores and often defies concepts of placerootedness while suggesting to readers how a food market — 121 —

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system can clarify a seemingly random world, even if the characters themselves are unable to comprehend how it does so. Montreal’s Jean Talon Market plays a pivotal role in the novel both as place and rendezvous point, and the characters are drawn there not so much to participate in buying and selling as to experience the comings and goings, the human interactions, that we have already seen draws writers to set their fiction in public markets. As in other Canadian market narratives, the market’s primary function is both setting and catalyst for action, as a melting pot of foods, tastes, and languages. The twist is that the three individuals whose fates steer them towards the same neighbourhood, and even to moments when they meet one another for fleeting instants, are not drawn from continents and cultures far apart. Instead, all three central characters are related by ties that become clear to the reader but, incredibly, never to the characters themselves. Those ties include Jonas Doucet, who is father to the novel’s unnamed narrator (who runs a used book shop on Saint Laurent), and also to Noah (an archaeology student who studies in Montreal). He is also uncle to Joyce Doucet, a self-styled female pirate, following in the footsteps of her family’s quasi-mythical past. The novel’s name derives from Jonas Doucet’s presumed resting place and relates to a small compass he once gave to his son, which has the proclivity to point slightly askew of true north and towards the Aleutian island of Nikolski. Another human link between the characters, recognized by readers but not by the characters themselves, is Maelo, Noah’s Dominican landlord and owner of a fictional fish shop (Shanahan’s) in Jean Talon Market, where Joyce finds work soon after journeying to Montreal from a childhood spent near the sea. After her departure, her world falls out from under her as the family seat at tête-à-la-baleine, Quebec, literally falls into the sea – one of two houses in this novel sharing the same fate. Joyce and Noah share another penchant: both, for different reasons, forage through garbage for treasure. Dumpster divers both, neither one forages for food. Instead, Joyce-the-pirate dumpster dives to find valuable technology amidst discarded computer equipment. Alternatively, Noah’s interest in garbage is sparked by his archeology mentor, Thomas Saint Laurent, a “garbologist,” who traces the layers of garbage in ways a geologist would trace sedimentary layers. Although Dickner’s characters seem to follow a fated path, the novel signposts its close engagement with cartography and location-based sense — 122 —

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of identity. The unnamed narrator has a collection of maps and travel guides, a prized legacy from his mother. Noah has been raised travelling Canada’s west in a trailer with his mother, to whom he now sends regular letters addressed to general delivery in locations that he can only guestimate she might visit. For these reasons, the geographical landscape of his Montreal is carefully charted. Yet, as other authors, Dickner blurs the lines between the fictional and the factual. At one point the unnamed narrator notices that his customer (who turns out to be Noah) has emerged from a seemingly realistic deli across the street from his store because of his “delicate aroma of charcoal, caramelized meat, and cloves.” However, no such delicatessen as “Dunkel’s” can be traced to Montreal of 1999.102 Instead, Dickner maps landscape in this novel like other literary food markets, in multiple dimensions. Noah works as a pizza delivery man, zipping along the roads and pathways near Jean Talon Market with its familiar landmarks (the St-Zotique church, the statue of old Dante Alighieri) and conversing with those he encounters. What Noah comes to understand, however, and what Dickner wants his readers to appreciate, is that a narrative map is textured and multi-layered, as complex as any notion of home: He [Noah] tries to transpose his observations onto a map of Montreal, but two dimensions are not enough to contain the wealth of information. Instead he would need a mobile, a game of Mikado, a matryoshka, or even a series of nested scale models: a Little Italy containing a Little Latin America, which contains a Little Asia, which in turn contains a Little Haiti, without forgetting of course a Little San Pedro de Maroris. For the first time in his life, Noah is starting to feel at home.103 Dickner’s narrative similarly charts a course between the worlds of land and sea through food scenes. Pizzas are delivered and fish filleted by the main characters, all of whom are seldom at rest in one spot. Rather than descriptions of meals shared, dishes over which characters linger and bond, Dickner offers scenes of food as trace evidence of a character’s presence. This is even more explicit in the narrator’s description of Joyce’s apartment, after her hasty departure: — 123 —

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Strewn over the floor are a bowl containing remnants of crab fried rice (topped with a pair of lacquered chopsticks), a pot redolent of codfish soup spiced with cumin, a tin of sardines emptied of its passengers, and a depleted bag of shrimp chips. The culinary trail leads to the sink, which is surrounded by an even greater jumble of dirty dishes. A kettle, a jar of tea bags, and a teapot have been left high and dry on the stove.104 After all, this is a novel about characters whose fates and lives are intertwined but whose storyline has them passing as ships in the night, resisting the impulse to ground them in a particular place. It is for these reasons that Dickner’s novel seems to function like a market in itself. Just as the market organizes random goods and unorderly human interactions, Dickner shows how location can perform as a system, both map and map legend for readers of his world’s inhabitants. For the characters of Dickner’s fiction, a sense of placerootedness and delimited human relations are out of reach every step of the way. Yet, as readers come to understand, even the random act of brushing up against one another’s shoulders can make meaning. Rather than grounding these characters in a single moment or location in time, Dickner roots them in a food marketspace organization, one in which, ultimately, their intertwined lives can make sense. Zorn: Emotions Explained through Foodway Interactions Both Robin and Dickner choose the Jean Talon Market as their locale for mapping human connections. Montreal’s other big market, the Atwater Market, appears and functions similarly in the fiction of Alice Zorn. We say “appears” because it is only one setting of many for food purchases and consumption in a fiction that uses food and foodways as potent vehicles for meaning making, most often concerned with loss, longing, and the human capacity for emotion. Like other authors in this chapter, Zorn uses culinary practices to consolidate human connections and to underscore the way they are what the food voice seeks. Uniquely, however, for Zorn this is not merely a literary device but a practice she endorses in her day-to-day life. Herself a trained pastry chef, Zorn gave a brief workshop on making desserts at the launch of her second novel, Five Roses, its title referencing the flour milling company once very visible on the port of Montreal’s shoreline. — 124 —

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Singlehandedly, Zorn reveals the intimate ties between literature, food, and community by choosing cream puffs as the focus of her workshop – a pastry that features prominently throughout her novel. It would spoil the novel’s suspense to outline the ways in which the lives of Zorn’s central characters are woven together. However, like Dickner’s characters, their ties to one another are unwitting. Primarily located in Pointe St Charles, Montreal, each character experiences a profound sense of loss. The linked nature of these losses, which becomes apparent to the reader but not to the characters themselves, forms the delicate fabric of Zorn’s narrative. The novel is one of loss, with food figuring as a much needed means of emotional as well as physical sustenance. Early on Thérèse, for example, loses her mother to the “ravage” of illness, after feeding her bread that has been softened in milky tea to give her some comfort.105 After her death, Thérèse continues to feed and care for her father as well, but they “hardly talked,” their home a silent one.106 Later, settling in a room in a hippie flop house in Montreal near the comforting sign of the Five Roses building, Thérèse begins to bake bread in order to nurture “the kids” living in the house, whose names she did not even know. “In the house, the kids woke in the late afternoon to the yeasty odour of bread baking … She was happy with her new life … the easy company of kids who said her bread was the greatest.”107 The act of providing and feeding bread becomes the manifest testimony of Thérèse’s care and concern for others. Rose, named to honour the flower as well as in allusion to the Five Roses sign that dominates the Montreal skyline, eventually moves to Montreal after the death of her own adopted mother, with whom she once shared a small cabin in the woods. Once in the city, she is exposed to new taste sensations by her roommate Yushi, who works at a patisserie counter in Atwater Market. “Yushi had made her taste mango, avocado, pomegranate, and papaya. Her life, once so austere, unfolded now with variety and sensation. All wondrous and new.”108 And yet, despite the banquet of culinary pleasures, Rose still feels at a loss: “Sometimes … a moment yawned – when she sat on the bus, watching an elderly man grip his shopping bag between his bony knees – and she knew she was adrift without attachment or family.”109 Maddy is another character who benefits from Yushi’s culinary generosity and works alongside Yushi at Atwater Market. At one point, Maddy learns to make Channah, aloo, baigan, intrigued by the exotic — 125 —

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names of the ingredients – Baigan or eggplant, aloo or potato, channa, the “turmeric-yellow stew.”110 Maddy’s own culinary background is Eastern European: “we lived on cabbage rolls,” she explains, “Golabki.”111 Food not only stands in for the relational ties between characters, but the exchange and reciprocity necessitated by the novel’s foodways charts the lines of their emotional evolution. Readers are granted access to, and made to understand, the characters’ emotional states through the food being prepared, given, and consumed – spoken in their food voices. Before moving to the patisserie shop at Atwater, Yushi worked as a restaurant cook, and, throughout the narrative, Rose benefits from her cooking skills. One day she comes home to find a delicious bean ragout, one example in which Rose learns of new foods and flavours like fennel.112 Yet not all is revelation in the culinary landscape. For Zorn, food can also stand in for simplicity, a resistance to the complexities of daily life. Whereas Yushi and Maddy serve pastries to happy customers at the bustling market by day, Rose works with people in distress in lonely hospital rooms. Rose likewise feeds people, but, rather than providing warm pastries like Yushi and Maddy, she provides tube feeding, with “different ratios of protein, electrolytes, vitamins and minerals.”113 When she has a break from work, she relishes the opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasures of fresh foods from the Atwater Market: cheddar, tomatoes, cucumber, baguette. “A feast! Yushi would have added a more exotic flavour – spiced Moroccan olives or a jar of baba ghanouj – but Rose looked forward to the simple farm vegetables.”114 Zorn is able to figure the food market, and the foodways it provides, as consolation through simplicity. Often, it seems Zorn’s novel suggests that all one needs is a moment of spare time and some fresh bread. Yet providing others with food that delights also becomes a source of fulfilment in this novel, and a bonding experience as well. Yushi, who describes herself as a “Canadian Trini who masquerades as Irish,”115 eventually launches her own bakery business, backed and supported by her friend and market co-worker Maddy. On offer? Tarte à la crème fraiche with redcurrant topping,116 and Marzipan Rose, translated simply as Rose en Amande rather than Rose en pâte d’amandes.117 In keeping with the novel’s title, and the name of a company known for its wildly popular baking cookbook, sweet indulgences in Five Roses come to stand for the comfort of sustaining human connections. Throughout, Zorn reveals that food and foodways are not mere sources of consolation, but the explanatory coda for the human — 126 —

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emotions that are felt, transmitted, and received. Like Robin’s The Wanderer and Dickner’s Nikolski, the food market, with its food and foodways, acts as a system of exchange that allows readers and characters alike to make sense of the world around them. Whether through implied familial ties, geographical proximity, or emotional identification, culinary practices and the food market space allow authors to organize communities in a radically disparate and chaotic world. In all these novels the food market establishes a framework within which movement, dialogue, and transactions can unfold, illuminated and crystalized in light of the marketplace system of foodways. If the market is indeed a quilt – with the vast variety of meats, cheeses, vegetables, and fruits comprising the patchwork – then these novels reveal that the stitching that binds such a quilt together is human: the authors, readers, and characters themselves. This is not to say that markets are depicted as exclusively positive spaces. These texts showcase the literary food market as a complex and nuanced setting for drug addictions and extreme poverty, for loss and for grief, for intolerance and violence. Much more than a simple celebration of goods, these authors and commentators alike push back against the food critics and journalists who tend to reduce markets to locales of celebratory “multiculturalism.” The complexities of Canada’s rich heterogeneity are taken up by the authors of this section, showcased through literary experimentation, and explored within the framework of the literary locale of public markets.

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6 RE/TURNING POINTS: B I S O N N A R R AT I V E S

When I came into the Northwest in July, the 1st of July 1884, I found the Indians suffering. I found the half-breeds eating the rotten pork of the Hudson’s Bay Company. They were getting sick and weak every day. TH E TRIAL O F LOU IS RI EL1

Cree and Métis writer Marilyn Dumont opens her book of poems The Pemmican Eaters (2015) with an epigraph from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life: “What the map cuts up the story cuts across.”2 De Certeau’s statement implies that, even as nations engage in conflicts and fundamentally reshape physical, political, and cultural geographies, narratives have the power to traverse space and time. Such is the case with bison narratives of the western Plains. Past and present stories of this foodway and its rapid destruction represent a major turning point in Canada’s settlement of the west. When grappling with history, we often debate what constitutes a turning point, such as a critical event or larger societal transformation. In literature, turning points are similarly key moments in a plot that alter the situation of a character or speaker, with food often playing a central role in communicating these transformative moments. With respect to bison narratives, diverse re/turning points are embedded in complex plot trajectories – some linear, some cyclical – shaping distinct relationships with this foodway from either settler or Indigenous perspectives. The settlement of the western Plains, which followed quickly on the heels of the near extermination of the bison, stands as a major turning point –

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ecologically, culturally, and imaginatively – in Canada’s colonial history and literature. The devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples are made clear in the historical testimony (quoted above) of Métis leader Louis Riel – whose words were reformulated into John Coulter’s documentary drama The Trial of Louis Riel (1968) on the occasion of Canada’s centennial. But to focus solely on the loss of the bison as the single “turning-point narrative” of irreparable change restricts one’s understanding of the Plains by perpetuating settler-society’s control over the land, resources, and foodways. In order to cut across colonial maps and traverse space and time, bison must also be understood through what Peepeekisis First Nation scholar Tasha Hubbard describes as narratives of return. “Turning-point food narratives,” or rather, in this case, “re/turning-point food narratives,” require, therefore, a cross-cultural and cross-temporal perspective attuned to distinct meanings and purposes: some narratives document, protest, or are complicit in the historical devastation of the bison; some speak to ancient cycles of renewal that hold great relevance for present and future transformations; and some critique Canadian society through bison-inspired visions. In addition to these distinctions of time, the bison food voice also has the capacity to challenge colonial understandings of the animal solely as a food resource. When contemplating the past and, especially, her people’s heritage as bison hunters and pemmican eaters, Dumont states that she does not believe in linear time but, rather, understands history as “the continuous present” in which her ancestors are alive.3 For Dumont, these ancestors include all her relations: her Métis Nation and her four-legged relations – the bison. This inclusive vision helps to explain why First Nations and Métis writers reconceptualize the presence of the bison within the twenty-first century in ways that settler writers typically do not. Moreover, Dumont’s insight helps to shed light on the roles that temporal frames and plot structures play in food narratives by significantly affecting how readers experience and understand foodways.

Buffalocide The eradication of the buffalo, or bison,4 in the 1800s marks a human-caused ecological disaster as invader-settlers annihilated these animals, reducing them from tens of millions prior to settlement to fewer than one thousand — 129 —

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6.1 Buffalo bones ready for loading on a Canadian Pacific Railway boxcar, circa 1887–89

in a matter of decades. This radical turning point in Canada’s colonial history is one that writer Al Purdy identifies in his poem “Sundance” (1976) as a “kinda genocide or buffalocide” since the destruction of the bison meant the starvation and displacement of Indigenous peoples of the Plains.5 On the blood-stained Plains, “buffalo thunder / to their cave in the earth / their wallow in the sky,” but no settlers appear to hear what Purdy calls this “god in the ground.”6 In the poem “Creating a Country” (1994) Anishinaabe writer Armand Garnet Ruffo similarly describes American lieutenant colonel George Armstrong Custer’s plan to exterminate all the bison in Montana as “the final solution” since “He also knew Indians could starve / just like white people.”7 Ruffo parallels Custer’s genocide to the hypocrisy of Canada’s own famous settlers, such as nineteenth-century emigrant writer Susanna Moodie, who wrote “anti-slavery tracks in England” but “shied away / from both mosquitoes and Indians,” equating Indigenous peoples with a less-than-human nuisance that would eventually disappear from the land.8 — 130 —

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Canadian literature serves, therefore, as one source of this turning point’s documentation, capturing the brutal impact that the loss of the bison had on First Nations and Métis peoples. Published during the time of the bison’s near extinction, Mohawk writer and performer E. Pauline Johnson’s ballad “The Cattle Thief ” (1895) foregrounds the territorial injustices inflicted upon the Plains Cree. In the poem, the unarmed, fifty-year-old Eagle Chief – who is described as having a “fleshless, hungry frame, starved to the bone” – is hunted down and murdered by a dozen settlers.9 His body about to be dismembered and fed to the wolves, the Chief ’s daughter bravely guards his remains and accuses the settlers of immorality, theft, and the desecration of the Plains all in the name of so-called Christian progress: “What have you left to us of land? what have you left of game, / What have you brought but evil, and curses since you came? / How have you paid us for our game? how paid us for our land? / By a book, to save our souls from the sins you brought in your other hand.”10 In a close analysis of the poem, Margery Fee notes that Johnson explicitly writes that the daughter’s words are “spoken in Cree,” signalling that the settlers within the poem do not understand her message, whereas Johnson’s audience, who hears the poem performed in English, does.11 This dual presentation of settler audiences, as both hearing and not hearing the Eagle Chief ’s daughter, points to what Fee describes elsewhere as the critical role of stories in enabling “all cultures [to] make sense of the world,” particularly when it comes to understanding foodways and the nutritional impact of colonization; unfortunately, “Aboriginal voices and stories have often been missing in scholarly accounts.”12 Especially troubling with respect to bison narratives is the fact that settler-narrative tropes – which “naturalized” the animal’s demise, containment, and erasure during the nineteenth century – have persisted into twenty-first-century popular Canadian discourse. Indeed, Driftpile Cree Nation writer and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt makes the argument that “animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions are only possible because of and through the historic and ongoing erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion.”13 In Johnson’s turn-of-thecentury poem, audiences witness this real-time erasure through a settler politics of land acquisition and greed combined with a corrupt Christian faith. Domesticated cattle have replaced exterminated bison, just as the twelve, apostle-like settlers now occupy farmland, rather than First Nations — 131 —

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territory, when they betray, starve, murder, and remove the lone Eagle Chief – his identity redefined as “Cattle Thief ” within a settler-colonial economy and value system.

Vanishing Bison When settler-invaders hunted the bison to near extinction, settler narratives were complicit in ideologically and imaginatively clearing the Plains of this animal as well as of the Indigenous peoples who relied on this foodway. As Tasha Hubbard reveals, one dominant trope from the period was the “Vanishing Indian”: “ecocide was justified through story. The disappearance of buffalo and Indigenous people … were often rhetorically positioned as the same.”14 Hubbard points to Paul Kane’s artwork from the 1840s, which depicts the Plains as empty (ready for settlement) with a solitary bison being pursued by Assiniboine or Nakoda hunters, in the same vein as Italians hunting a bull for sport, even though bison herds would have still been plentiful at the time.15 In keeping with Hubbard’s argument, Charles Mair’s 1890s’ poem “The Last Bison” conflates the bison with Indigenous peoples when the speaker personifies the “vanished” bison and describes one remaining injured bull as “the last survivor of his clan!”16 This bull sings his death-song, and, although he prophesizes that white civilization’s future cities will eventually fall, the poem concludes with the animal’s demise. This last bison seems an irreparable turning point, especially since Mair opens his poem by transforming the western Plains from a decimated landscape into “undeflowered” territory filled with “virgin air and waters undefiled.”17 While the poem is a lament, its other purpose is to communicate that the Plains are ready for settlement, with Mair even providing clarification in an endnote that he witnessed this scene back in 1882 and that “the bison of the plains is extinct.”18 Ultimately, these turning-point narratives of colonial conquest transform the bison into what Hubbard describes as a “symbol of the ‘wild’ west” and “a tokenized remnant of what had to be overcome if the frontier was to be ‘won.’”19 These settler tropes are so entrenched that they continue to shape discourse about, and attitudes towards, bison and Indigenous peoples of the Plains in the twenty-first century. For example, in 2009, Regina’s — 132 —

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summer fair, or exhibition, which had been known since 1967 as “Buffalo Days” and sported the mascot “Pemmican Pete” (a Caucasian figure in buckskins riding bareback on a bison), changed its name to “Queen City Ex,” or the Queen City Exhibition.20 The original name is, of course, an example of what Hubbard describes as the token symbol of a now-tamed “wild west.” In media stories about Regina’s summer fair, organizers and a local historian suggested the fair’s new name was about modernizing as the fair was no longer a heritage celebration and the bison had no relevance: “buffalo were nowhere near Regina when the city was founded,” and the change “gets rid of a name that had nothing to do with the history of Regina.”21 While the organizers were correct to set aside an outdated, culturally insensitive brand, some of the explanations reveal the persistence of settler narratives that compartmentalize and erase history by not acknowledging their correlation to ecocide and to the starvation and displacement of Indigenous peoples. One way of countering such erasures is to reimagine, and reorient oneself within, the landscape through bison narratives. Often these stories are uncovered when sifting through the naming and renaming of bison-scapes. For instance, Regina’s original settler-given name (an English translation from the Cree) was “Pile of Bones,” which the city’s website explains through Indigenous foodways and their destruction prior to the agricultural settlement of the Prairies: Regina is located on Treaty 4 land and within the traditional territory of the Métis. Indigenous people have lived in this region through many thousands of years. This area was one of the important places where Indigenous people would come to hunt the roaming herds of bison. They began to stack the long bison bones into large piles in an effort to honour the animals’ spirit as the bison herds were becoming depleted due to overhunting by non-Indigenous hunters. Indigenous peoples named the area oskana ka-asastēki, which roughly translates to “bone piles.” European explorers, fur traders and settlers translated this to Pile of Bones.22 A derivative of the Cree word “Oskana,” Regina’s Wascana Park is the site of the Saskatchewan legislature and is close to downtown, where Louis Riel was tried before his execution. These bison stories that traverse time — 133 —

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and place even inspired Jes Battis’s novel Pile of Bones (2013),23 which is set in Regina and the fantasy world Anafractus. Battis situates Wascana Park as the bridge between these two worlds, a decision he made after learning that the park was the site of a bison ossuary: “I wanted to keep in mind the reality that this was borrowed land, laced through with complex histories, and that we were all sort of tourists there … By the end of the series, the park came to represent a social contract between various species and realities, and the characters came to the recognition that (to quote Leonard Cohen) ‘magic is afoot’ in their daily lives.”24 The complex histories to which Battis refers are important to consider, especially because “Oskana” holds other possible meanings. In his essay “Skeletons in Regina’s Closet” (2006), Greg Beatty suggests that the actual site of Oskana was several kilometres northwest of Regina and that the pile of bison bones likely included human remains of Assiniboine or Nakoda people, who had fallen victim to a smallpox epidemic introduced by Europeans.25 Beatty’s claim concurs with James Dashuck’s detailed historical study Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. In his book, Daschuk notes that smallpox epidemics “ravaged” the Indigenous nations of the Plains throughout the 1830s, especially the Assiniboine and Niitsitapi during an outbreak in 1837.26 Daschuk quotes Paul Kane, who a decade later in 1848 wrote about seeing the bones from an entire camp “bleaching on the plains,” and tribal historian Chief Dan Kennedy, who noted “the group was ‘literally wiped out.’”27 Clearly, just as bison bones scattered across the Plains told a story of ecocide, so human remains testified to diseases and starvation inflicted upon Indigenous populations by Europeans. Indeed, the nearby town of Indian Head (seventy kilometres east of Regina) has its own connections to the smallpox epidemic. Bill Barry’s People Places describes the town’s origins: “The name is a translation of the Cree phrase iyiniwistikwânaciy, ‘Indian head hill,’ and the Nakota refer to the low-lying hills to the southeast of the modern town as wiča pa iyaxen, ‘skull mountainettes.’ A Cree and/or Nakota band which lived in the hills was wiped out by smallpox (likely in the epidemic of 1837–38) to the point that their skeletons, including ‘Indian heads,’ littered the area.”28 The process of reimagining the Plains as bison-scapes requires a storied understanding of place and a process of thinking through what the land was like prior to the landmarks Canadians have inherited from — 134 —

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colonial settlement. Such is the experience of Regina-born and -raised writer Cassidy McFadzean, who explores her hometown through the technological distance and zooming feature of Google Street View in her poem “Skin for a Skin” (2015). Telescoping time and space by referring to “the Bay’s glossy flyer,” the fur trade, and smallpox epidemics in quick succession, the speaker traces Dewdney Avenue across the city.29 The avenue is named after Edgar Dewdney, the Indian commissioner for the North-West Territories (1879–88) and lieutenant-governor of the NorthWest Territories (1881–88), who was responsible for implementing reserves in the west and manipulating rations as a way to subjugate Indigenous peoples. A major thoroughfare, Dewdney Avenue has been the subject of recent public debate as White Bear First Nation artist and Regina resident Joely Bigeagle-Kequahtooway requested that the City of Regina rename the street “Buffalo Avenue” as a response to recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.30 In the poem, McFadzean’s speaker contemplates “the meandering path of Lieutenant Edgar Dewdney” and notes how the street named to honour him divides the city – “All this city’s roads split / from Dewdney Ave.” – between the economically depressed North Central neighbourhoods and the more privileged ones to the south. These divisions are also racial as the speaker locates “Kokum’s Bannock Shack” and contemplates the symbolic tensions of white on red and red on white that mark the Canadian flag. Ultimately, the speaker drags her “cursor to the park / where Louis Riel hanged,” declaring, “my flag flies at half mast.”31

Containing Bison The fact that Canadians can still encounter bison today is largely due to the national parks, which have played a leading role in bison conservation. A Government of Canada website states that bison stewardship began in 1897 when “Banff National Park (then Rocky Mountains Park) protected some of the few remaining wild bison left in North America as a display herd (the enclosure and the bison were removed in 1997 to facilitate wildlife movement around the Town of Banff). In the early 1900s, 700 plains bison from the last wild herds were bought by the Government of Canada from a rancher in Montana” and transported to Elk Island National Park and — 135 —

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Buffalo National Park in Alberta.32 While Buffalo National Park was later closed because of disease and overgrazing, Elk Island National Park continues to have success, with its herd serving as “the primary seed stock for reintroduction projects around the world.”33 If we consider that historical estimates place the North American bison population at around 60 million in 1800, but fewer than one thousand by 1899, then the species’ survival in the face of such grotesque slaughter is astounding.34 Given such erasure, it is not surprising that bison can only be seen today in protected environments like enclosed ranches and parklands. But these national parks still function entirely within what Belcourt describes as “the settler imagination” since “colonialized and vacated spaces (such as [factory] farms, urban apartments, and ‘emptied’ forests)” uphold the settler-colonial system of land ownership, whereby animals are understood primarily as resources.35 In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” John Berger argues that, over the course of the last two centuries, animals have become entertainment and that “the animals transformed into spectacle have disappeared.”36 Our encounters with and knowledge of animals are defined precisely by our power over, and distance from, their natural state.37 For the Plains bison, their “disappearance” has been both literal, through their near extermination, and figurative, through their representations within settlerculture narratives. Margaret Atwood captures this imperfect, at-a-distance vision in “Buffalo in Compound: Alberta” (1970). In the poem, tourists stand safely but nervously near their vehicle and behind a wire fence. With “hands raised / for shields / against the sun, which is / everywhere,” they watch a herd of grazing bison.38 In awe of the god-like creatures, the speaker-as-spectator glimpses the animals in profile and from behind, outlined in blinding light, as the herd retreats to the shade of the trees. Atwood’s poem venerates the animals yet also highlights their paradoxical containment as they are under human control yet elude the speaker’s gaze and understanding. In Berger’s view, zoos (or, in the case of bison, Canada’s national parks) are living monuments to animals’ disappearance and marginalization from everyday life. Visitors “proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting and then move on to the next … Yet in the zoo the view is always wrong. Like an image out of focus.”39 One only has to reflect on the repeated bison incidents that have occurred in Yellowstone National Park, where tourists have been charged, to appreciate — 136 —

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how society’s misconstrued perceptions and sense of control have in a sense dematerialized the animals, positioning them as mere spectacles worthy of a selfie.40 While bison roaming and breeding freely within Canada’s national parks (such as Banff National Park and Elk Island National Park in Alberta, and Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan) is a positive step towards renewed bison ecology and reconciliation with First Nations and Métis peoples, the animals’ containment within parks nevertheless indicates ongoing colonial legacies focused on controlling the land. To challenge such distorted and dominating views, a satirical representation of the bison-as-tourist-attraction appears in Ojibway playwright (from the Curve Lake First Nation) Drew Hayden Taylor’s play The Berlin Blues (2007). In the play, the character Trailer is hired by German entrepreneurs to create a musical adaptation of Dances with Wolves for their new amusement park, OjibwayWorld. Underscoring the notion of animals as actors in the profit-driven tourism industry, Trailer hires “practically every working unionized buffalo” for the musical’s stampede scene.41 Tellingly, the majority of the herd is “from a farm owned by a White person.”42 In OjibwayWorld, even pemmican – the staple of the Plains – has been transformed into amusement park fare, a novelty that the German entrepreneurs have researched to exacting standards making sure that the “berry/buffalo mixture” is correct.43 When Trailer asks Donalda (a fellow resident of the Otter Lake Reserve) what she knows about buffalo, her humorous response, “They have great wings,” prompts audiences to think about what may be their own experience with “buffalo” as a food: chicken wings. This misconstrued notion of buffalo foodways subtly points to the ongoing ramifications of colonization and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.44 Not surprisingly, Trailer’s own diet consists primarily of Kraft Dinner. Donalda’s pointed joke also highlights settler-society’s tendency to perceive all Indigenous peoples as the same, ignoring distinct cultural and linguistic groups. Plains bison habitat did not extend into Ontario and the region of Otter Lake Reserve, but the German entrepreneurs have conceived of OjibwayWorld as a conglomeration of Indigenous cultures. Taylor’s instructions to represent the bison via puppetry (something that reviewers of past productions often praise for its comic effect) further underscores Berger’s argument about the physical and cultural marginalization of animals from everyday life to the point that they become pure spectacle, having been “totally transformed into human puppets” and seemingly — 137 —

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without their own needs and agency.45 To counter such a transformation, the members of Trailer’s newly amassed herd begin interacting among themselves, talking in code, and looking at Trailer with new significance. Ultimately, the ill-conceived theme park is destroyed when the bison stampede “like a wall of hairy death and bad-smelling destruction, cutting a path of devastation across the park.”46

Consuming Bison Just as settler narratives of the past and present have imaginatively cleared the Plains of bison, contemporary news reports from across the country often categorize bison foodways in conspicuous ways, relegating bison meat to the margins of Canadians’ kitchen tables. For instance, a CBC article from 2016 highlights the growing popularity of “exotic meats” sold at Toronto’s Kensington Market or prepared at restaurants, listing bison alongside wild boar, kangaroo, and ostrich. 47 Similarly, an article entitled “Eating the Bizarre in Czar, Alberta,” a roadside diner situated in the heart of buffalo habitat, lists bison alongside shark, crocodile, and python, suggesting that this native species is somehow foreign to the western Plains.48 The diction in these recent news reports is not so different from the language used in a 1961 cookbook Remarkable Recipes of Sweetgrass Buffalo published by the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Featuring French- and British-inspired recipes from chefs of prominent hotels and restaurants, the cookbook opens with an introduction that frames these buffalo dishes as “a taste thrill from the 19th century” and “an unusual eating experience out of the history books.”49 The cover features a man dressed in his nineteenth-century finest, suggesting that these “remarkable recipes” are more about taste – exploring the novelty of bison rather than promoting it as a mainstay. This messaging contrasts sharply with the Indigenous, Winnipegbased restaurant the Feast Café Bistro, which opened in late 2016 and showcases bison throughout its menu. Patrons have a bevy of choice from the “Bison Banny” (poached eggs on bannock with bison sausage) for breakfast, to “Back to Bison Cheddar Burgers,” “Manitoban Poutine” (with shredded bison meat and gravy), and bison tacos for lunch and dinner. In a post entitled “Getting Back to Our Roots” on the restaurant’s — 138 —

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website, owner Christa Bruneau-Guenther of the Peguis First Nation mentions visiting her local bison farm and making an offering to the animals. She writes: “When I started Feast, I had so many questions, but one thing was for certain, I wanted to ensure Bison was a prominent part of my menu. Not only because of its deeply rooted connection to indigenous people and to this province (It’s our official animal after all!) but also because of its many great attributes.”50 Clearly, these contrasting ways of framing bison meat – from the exotic and bizarre (by the Canadian news media and federal government) to the deeply rooted (by an Indigenous restaurateur) – point to the conflicted colonial history responsible for the animal’s near extinction and that history’s ongoing influence on the narration of this contemporary foodway. Regardless of these divergent representations of bison foodways, the fact remains that, within the wider meat industry, bison is a “niche product.”51 In 2010, the total number of bison slaughtered in North America was ninety-two thousand, which represents “less than one day’s beef production in the U.S. alone.”52 Another way of putting the industry in perspective is to compare the 119,314 Canadian bison raised on farms and ranches in 2016 with the 11.58 million cattle and calves documented in 2018.53 For restaurateurs, such as the owner of the Feast Café Bistro, the bison’s niche status poses challenges to her desire to reconnect her community to Indigenous Plains culture via food: “When bison is $8.49 a pound, compared to beef, which is three bucks a pound, it’s tough. Like I don’t take a salary [she laughs] and probably never will.”54 This niche status is clearly reflected in Todd Babiak’s Edmonton novel The Garneau Block (2006), in which bison meat is described as the meal of choice for the financially privileged and political elite. A staunch Conservative, David Weiss dines with fellow riding association presidents at the upscale Hardware Grill on Jasper Avenue, where he manages a last-minute reservation by mentioning that the premier will be attending the lunch to discuss policy. From David’s perspective, a gourmet meal of bison steak ought to be Edmonton’s standard fare: Somewhere, he knew, a chef was wrapping fancy bacon around a hunk of bison and drizzling blueberry sauce over it … This is what vexed him about Edmonton: the city’s tragic habit of voting against its interests of settling for grilled tofu when it could have bison with — 139 —

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fancy bacon and blueberry sauce. Calgary had a better airport and more head offices than Edmonton simply because its citizens voted as a Conservative block. In the nine years since he joined the party, David Weiss had come to see himself as a walking and talking Calgary. If he hadn’t joined, he would be a plain old Edmonton – needlessly complicated, unsure, artsy, and angry.55 Whether bison meat is framed as an exotic offering at Toronto’s Kensington Market, a way to connect Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) patrons in Winnipeg with healthy and culturally relevant foods, or the exclusive meal of wealthy politicians, these descriptions point to the transformation of this Indigenous foodway and one-time colonial staple. After all, this so-called “exotic” animal once fuelled the fur trade to such an extent that George Colpitts notes in his introduction to Pemmican Empire that an American visiting the Red River Colony in 1870 described pemmican as “‘the national dish so to speak, of a population composed of many nationalities; and like everything else in this peculiar country, it is a wonderful mixture.’”56 While the bison industry of today has ambitious goals to grow its market share and its livestock, the prominence of beef in North America and the higher cost of bison meat suggest that bison will, for the foreseeable future, remain more of a novelty or special treat than a mainstay in many Canadians’ diets, despite the bison’s long history as a staple for both Indigenous and colonialsettler communities. While bison meat may be an unfamiliar or special treat to some, when we turn to Canadian literature and history, narrative accounts of bison foodways from Indigenous and settler writers reveal the bison’s omnipresence with respect to health, community, spirituality, and trade. Across time and cultures, bison foodways not only structured meals and day-to-day activities but also informed languages and ways of thinking. The ways in which bison fostered healthy Indigenous communities is brought to life in the story “Obsidian Stone Wiya” (2017) by White Bear First Nation artist Joely Bigeagle-Kequahtooway. In the story, a young hunter, who has inherited her grandmother’s obsidian stone for cutting through hides, learns about her people’s profound connection to their buffalo brothers and sisters as she witnesses and prepares for the hunt. The young woman relates an intergenerational, spiritual, and material relationship between the bison and the Cree: — 140 —

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We relied on the buffalo for life – they sustained us. We needed the buffalo to nourish and carry us forward for future generations. Each hunter knew their place in the hunt, and we laid tobacco down when a kill was complete in order to honour the buffalo’s sacrifice and their life with one of our most valued medicines. Our community was large and filled with strong men and women, so we hunted in waves. One buffalo could feed 50 people. We would make buffalo pemmican, mixing meat with berries and animal lard. The pemmican would last us through the winter.”57 This description of a robust community is in keeping with historical studies of the bison economy. For instance, Daschuk points to archaeological research that suggests prehistoric communities on the Plains were semisedentary and large in scale (one thousand people), and benefited from “large surpluses of food that were traded (often for corn and other crops) or stockpiled for future use.”58 Daschuk also notes that “studies of skeletons have shown that, in the mid-nineteenth century, peoples of the plains were perhaps the tallest best nourished population in the world,” until the loss of the bison and subsequent starvation brought rampant outbreaks of disease, such as tuberculosis.59 Bigeagle-Kequahtooway’s storyteller-hunter recounts her gratitude for the bison’s sacrifice, underlining this foodway’s role in her people’s survival and health. The bison’s tripe, tongue, and liver “were saved for the babies and the sick Elders,” and the nose was given to the healers for medicines and ceremonies.60 Significantly, Bigeagle-Kequahtooway concludes her bison narrative in the present tense, sharing the fact that this interspecies relationship is ongoing. The young hunter declares: “We will always be one with the buffalo … No force alive in the universe will separate us, for as long as the wind blows, the river flows, and the sun shines. I am a buffalo hunter.”61 When we shift to settler writers, their accounts offer additional insights into the daily prevalence of bison foodways and their cross-cultural reach. Writing during the time of the animal’s near-extinction in his 1891 essay “The American Bison: Its Habits, Method of Capture and Economic Use in the North-West, with Reference to its Threatened Extinction and Possible Preservation,” Charles Mair attempts to translate the different modes of preparation and dietary customs for his settler-readers through food analogies, making what is unfamiliar commonplace. Dried meat from — 141 —

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6.2 Buffalo meat drying, White Horse Plains, Red River, 1899

the bison’s thighs and shoulders “was a staple food in the North-West,” Mair writes, and, when one was travelling, was “munched between meals through sheer habit, akin to the gum chewing of Americans. A story is told of a French half-breed guide who astonished a stranger by his performances in this way, and who, being asked by his amazed companion why he never ceased eating dried meat replied: ‘Ah, Monsieur! c’est pour passer le temps!’ (it is for pastime [or for passing the time]).”62 Mair refers to the bison’s marrow-fat as “the plain Indian’s butter” and provides a basic recipe for its preparation: “It was prepared by breaking all the bones, and boiling them in water till all their oil was extracted. This was skimmed off, boiled again and clarified, and then poured into buffalo bladders, where it hardened into a rich golden mass which looked exactly like well-made butter.”63 Mair was also well acquainted with the popular trade in bison tongues, especially since beef tongue was an indulgent treat in the nineteenth century.64 Mair states that cured bison tongue is “delicious” and “much more delicate, indeed, than the domestic [beef tongue], or even the reindeer tongue, — 142 —

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and not so cloying.”65 Providing a step-by-step account of the curing, or pickling, process, Mair adds that tongues for export “were generally cured at the Hudson Bay Company’s posts, and as many as four thousand were treated at [Fort] Carlton in a single year.”66 Writing half a century after Mair, the Canadian-born Arctic explorer, ethnologist, and staunch promoter of a meat-based diet Vilhjalmur Stefansson devotes several chapters to pemmican in his book Not by Bread Alone (1946) and makes similar cross-cultural comparisons of bison foodways, highlighting their adoption by Europeans. Stefansson describes pemmican as “a complete food, maintaining full health and strength indefinitely” – a fact that undoubtedly led explorers and fur traders to make it “their bread of the wilderness, the cornerstone of success in exploring and developing the interior of this continent.”67 Stefansson writes that pemmican resembled “black or brown bread in appearance” and suggests that, during the early 1800s, priests may have used pemmican for Communion when actual bread was scarce.68 While Mair’s and Stefansson’s food analogies of chewing gum, butter, and bread help non-Indigenous readers to understand bison foodways, which at the time of their writing had been decimated, their comparisons also point to the men’s limitations in understanding these foodways since they remain grounded within the settler-colonial system. Just as Atwood’s tourists’ view of the bison-as-spectacle is incomplete, so Mair’s and Stefansson’s food narratives carry their own distortions. Indeed, when Mair turns to the topic of food, he begins with the incorrect assertion that “the flesh of the buffalo was inferior to domestic beef in nutritive qualities” – a statement that underscores his own colonial bias and lack of knowledge.69 As many present-day cooks attest, bison meat is much leaner and healthier than beef.70 Mair also lists the tongue, hump, back fat, and marrow as “the choicest parts of the animal,” describing in detail the texture and amount of meat and fat found on the back and within the hump (with its separate set of ribs).71 In this list, Mair makes no mention, however, of the noses, which Bigeagle-Kequahtooway highlights as being central to medicine and ceremony in her story “Obsidian Stone Wiya.” While Mair and Stefansson have their shortcomings when it comes to cultural relativism, their discussions nevertheless provide a detailed glimpse of a foodway with which many Canadians are unfamiliar despite its central importance to Indigenous peoples of the Plains and — 143 —

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to the nation’s colonial history. Both men make abundantly clear that, throughout the fur trade and the early settlement of the west, pemmican was indispensable, even though, as Stefansson admits, finding detailed commentary can be difficult, with so few preserved diaries or published records. Within Canadian literature, reflections on pemmican can also be sparse. For example, explorer Henry Kelsey (1667–1724) – whom Stefansson points to as “the first [European] to observe the making of pemmican from buffalo meat” within what is now known as Canada – provides only a vague description in his exploration narrative.72 In entries dated late August 1691, Kelsey mentions a buffalo hunt and the processing of the carcasses on the subsequent day: “we lay still for y women to fetch home / Meat & dress it.”73 Historically minded twentieth-century writers similarly chronicle pemmican’s material significance but with minimal detail. Consider E.J. Pratt’s long poem “Towards the Last Spike” (1952), which mythologizes “rivalries / … / Over the pelts, over the pemmican”74 and documents how Lord Selkirk’s Scottish settlers of the Red River Colony (in what is now Manitoba) “Survived the massacre at Seven Oaks, / The ‘Pemmican War’” of 1816, when the Métis killed the governor and twenty men after the North West Company had its supply of pemmican disrupted.75 The unrest to which Pratt briefly alludes began when the governor of the Colony issued the Pemmican Proclamation in 1814, which forbade the export of pemmican – a regulation that severely affected Métis fur traders who depended on the preserved meat for their long journeys. While Pratt’s alliterative yoking together of “pelts” and “pemmican” signals to readers the interdependency of the fur trade and bison foodways, these fleeting references within his long poem fail to do justice to the complexity of this relationship. Colpitts’s historical examination of foodways in Pemmican Empire goes much further in understanding the provenance of the animal, to the point at which “the bison became indistinguishable from the pemmican upon which all depended” as well as the socio-economic implications of this “emerging food-exchange.”76 In contrast to brief literary nods, Mair’s and Stefansson’s discussions of the fur trade offer some clarity by touching on the nutritional, practical, and economical aspects of pemmican as well as its culinary variations and uses. Both have high praise for what Mair calls “the famous pemmican” and “the device of the plain Indians … from time immemorial.”77 With respect to nutrition, Mair observes that pemmican was an irreplaceable, high-quality — 144 —

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6.3 Pemmican bag, 1965

staple: “Its value as compared with fresh meat was in the ratio of four to one, eight pounds of the latter being the customary daily ration, which was all eaten, whilst two pounds of pemmican were sufficient.”78 A single sack of pemmican “weighed about 100 lbs, and double sack being over twice that weight,” and these sacks were incredibly dense.79 In terms of practical considerations, Stefansson notes that pemmican was “much more compact and so much lighter” than other provisions, which meant fur traders would have more room in their canoes to “carry bigger pay loads.”80 He further observes that “pemmican is among the most preservable of foods” and could remain “in good condition after ten, twenty and more years, without any preservative, such as salt, and without protection from the rain of summer other than that given by the leather covering” – a bag made from bison hide and sewn with sinew and sealed with tallow.81 Pemmican’s imperviousness to the elements, particularly water, was of the upmost importance for those travelling long distances by canoe or York boat, especially since, as Colpitts marvels, pemmican “could offer an astounding 3,200 to 3,500 calories per pound.”82 As for pemmican’s varied preparation, Mair and Stefansson diverge slightly when it comes to outlining differences in degree. Whereas — 145 —

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Stefansson identifies four main “grades or sorts” of pemmican (winter, summer, plain, and berry) and also mentions “‘fine’ pemmican,”83 Mair does not differentiate by the season of processing and describes only three variations. According to Mair, the first type of pemmican (what Stefansson calls “plain”) “consisted of nearly equal quantities of tallow and dried meat, the latter being pounded on bull hides with stone hammers, axe heads or flails”; the second, which Mair calls “fine pemmican,” was made from “the siftings of the dried meat” and “marrow-fat … instead of tallow”; and the third, “‘berry’ pemmican, the most highly valued of all, consisted of these two and a due proportion of saskatoon berries, of choke-cherries, if the other could not be had.”84 Pemmican was not only consumed on its own (without cooking) but also used as a central ingredient in other dishes. Stefansson briefly mentions robbiboo (pemmican soup thickened with flour) and richeau (fried pemmican).85 According to the cookbook From Pemmican to Poutine: A Journey through Canada’s Culinary History (2010), the French called the soup “boueau, meaning ‘mud water,’” whereas the English called it “rubbaboo,” which “is a contraction of two words: ruhiggan which was an Algonquin word for beat meat and ‘burgoo,’ which is an old British term for stew.”86 Whatever its mode of presentation, pemmican was a treasured foodway, which Stefansson reveals by noting that many fur traders and explorers became pemmican “addicts” and were often “glad to be on the road again for they would once more be eating” this staple.87 Quoting from Douglas MacKay’s The Honourable Company: A History of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1936), Stefansson observes that the wealthy retirees of the fur trade, who founded the exclusive Beaver Club in Montreal in 1785 and socialized every couple of weeks over glasses of Madeira wine, once “feasted on pemmican that had been brought expensively by canoe and man-packing a distance of two thousand miles … ‘Pemmican … was brought from the Saskatchewan to be served in the unfamiliar atmosphere of mahogany, silver and candle glow.’”88 While both Stefansson and Mair appreciate pemmican’s high nutrition, cross-cultural reach, and economic value among First Nations, the Métis, and Europeans, in the end, each concludes that this foodway is no more. Mair writes that the last bison pemmican was “probably eaten on the banks of the Saskatchewan in 1882,” adding that a beef variety is occasionally made by the Métis.89 In a footnote, Stefansson similarly mentions that American conservationist William Temple Hornaday, who wrote The Extermination — 146 —

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of the American Bison (1889), believes that “the last buffalo pemmican (in appreciable quantity) was sold at Winnipeg in 1883.”90 Their claims that bison pemmican is gone are, of course, false. One only needs to consult recent cookbooks to locate pemmican recipes.91 Tellingly, however, bison is not always the feature ingredient of these pemmican recipes, perhaps revealing that, as a healthy alternative to beef, bison meat is usually marketed to Canadian consumers through popular mainstays of the North American diet: burgers and steaks.

Bison Returning/Pemmican Returning In direct contrast to settler narratives that “vanish,” contain, or exoticize bison and bison foodways as novelties from the past, Hubbard argues that First Nations and Métis peoples of the Plains see the bison as vital teachers in the present and future through interspecies dependency and generational kinship. Even when Indigenous narratives recount the decimation of the bison, this relationship remains constant. For example, in Spirit of the White Bison (1985), Métis writer Beatrice Mosionier tells the story of Little White Buffalo who grows up on the western Plains during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Told from the point of view of the bison, Mosionier’s narrative traces a relationship between an Indigenous man named Lone Wolf and Little White Buffalo amidst the destruction of the herds, the starvation of Lone Wolf ’s people, and settler expansion. The relationship between animal and human is one of mutual respect and care, with Lone Wolf even burying Little White Buffalo’s sire, Great Bison, when he is shot by white hunters. Little White Buffalo appreciates that Lone Wolf ’s people “hunted us for food as we hunted new grass for food. It was simply part of a lifecycle.”92 In contrast, the new hunters, which Little White Buffalo calls “murderers,” kill “indiscriminately” and wastefully, and “never came with their women and children” to harvest the animals.93 Lone Wolf and Little White Bison eventually die together on the Plains and journey to the spirit world, with the white bison stating, “My spirit would return again in the future to walk with those who were gentle, but strong.”94 In her introduction, Mosionier recalls the transformative experience when she first sat down in her kitchen to write Spirit of the White Bison: “With no plan in mind, I began typing, and, almost immediately, I became the little white — 147 —

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bison. I saw what she saw, felt what she felt, and heard what she heard … It was as if white bison had been waiting all this time to tell me her story.”95 Having grown up in foster homes and with “no Aboriginal teachings,” Monsionier attributes her inspired connection with Little White Buffalo to “blood memory, also called ‘bone memory.’ It’s a collective memory that passes down through generations, and it’s not written down or taught.”96 In addition to stories of animal-human kinship across the generations, Hubbard notes that many traditional stories tell of bison originating from underneath the ground or water, and others also speak of the animals’ cyclical disappearance and return.97 In the oral traditions of the Aaniiih (a people who were historically misnamed the “Gros Ventre” by the French and who lived near the rapids of the Saskatchewan River before relocating to what is now Montana), one story tells of the bison disappearing into a hole in the Sweet Grass Hills. A group of men follow the bison into the hole and to a beautiful land; upon the men’s return, one is given the power to bring the dead back to life through a ritual that involves placing a buffalo robe over the body.98 For Hubbard, these stories of return are key to the bison’s continued importance as “sites of learning.”99 “By engaging in a cycle of retreat and re-emergence, the Buffalo’s agency in the acts of leaving and returning,” Hubbard writes, “can clear space for a spirit of renewal for plains Indigenous people.”100 This renewal is especially evident in Marilyn Dumont’s book of poetry The Pemmican Eaters (2015). As a kind of “re/turning point” bison narrative, Dumont’s book cuts across the temporal and spatial divisions of colonialism and creates a composite space that simultaneously looks backward and forward in time. In an interview about her poetic craft, Dumont states that she is “certainly writing back to the history that [she] learned, but … is also … creating a new history too. The interesting thing about stories is that we think we write story based on something that’s happened in our past – it is a process of recollection. But it’s interesting what happens, because when we write stories we create worlds.”101 This process of “writing back” and “creating” new histories and futures is central to The Pemmican Eaters as Dumont situates her title within her Métis heritage, affectionately and proudly proclaiming her people’s identity – and in particular their relationship with the bison and pemmican – in much the same way as she and other Métis writers have redefined the term “half breed.”102 In an interview, Dumont states how offended she felt upon — 148 —

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hearing that Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, had publicly referred to the Métis as “‘the miserable halfbreeds, the pemmican eaters’” because, as Dumont adds, “the fur trade would not have existed without the pemmican … The so-called westward expansion and settlement of Canada would not have existed without the pemmican.”103 From the prime minister’s point of view, the First Nations and Métis peoples of the Plains stood in the way of so-called progress – that is, the expansion of the railway, European settlement, and an agrarian economy in the west. MacDonald’s intended slur “pemmican eaters” – like the British referring to their French adversaries as “frogs” – undertakes what Michiel Korthals argues food metaphors often do: “organize humans into different groups, [and] distribute in an unequal way status … by incorporating different appeals to the body and senses.”104 As Rudy Wiebe notes in an essay written from the point of view of Métis leader Louis Riel, Canada’s first prime minister “no doubt had never eaten any [pemmican], his delicate, sensitive stomach far better accustomed to other much more easily absorbed food and drinks.”105 To further appreciate the fact that MacDonald’s pejorative use of the term was out of touch with pemmican’s honoured history, one only has to consult Stefansson’s footnote explaining the fact that “the ‘pemmican-eater’ was the veteran of the fur country. A ‘pork-eater’ was a greenhorn, a newcomer, one who did not know the ropes.” In addition to making this distinction, Stefansson references other positive connotations through the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces pemmican’s figurative use as a noun (first documented in 1870) as signifying “extremely condensed thought, or literary matter containing much information in a few words.”106 Moving past the prime minister’s derogatory phrase, Dumont’s title The Pemmican Eaters instead signals renewed significance, expressing a transformational return of the bison within the twenty-first century. In this context, traditional hunting practices appear within the present-day sharing of a recipe in Dumont’s poem “How to Make Pemmican.” Step one informs the reader, “Kill one 1800 lb. buffalo,” and the tremendous work of processing this staple comes alive, with each line offering instructions: gut, skin, butcher, dry, pound, mix, and so on.107 In an interview, Dumont reflects that today, when you contemplate killing an eighteen-hundredpound (eight-hundred-kilogram) animal, or for that matter two to three hundred at once, “you just realize the work … the minds, the strong minds, and the strong backs that they [the Métis] had to have to go and hunt those — 149 —

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animals.”108 If readers have never made pemmican (or not this quantity), they are left to imagine the skills and time required to “Pound 1000 lbs. of dry meat.”109 Clearly, Dumont’s speaker carries her experience from the past, through the present, and into the future in a continuous sharing of knowledge. Written in the simple present of imperative verbs, the recipe communicates the hopeful practice and tasty pleasures of making pemmican, summed up in the final line: “Bury in a cache for later mmmh.”110 According to Darra Goldstein, exploring food’s sensual aspects through “the texture of writing, the sound of words” is one of the most potent ways literary fare distinguishes itself from the ways in which foodways are represented and studied by other disciplines.111 The expression of pleasure – “mmmh” – on the page and within the mouth is Dumont’s way of heightening the impact of the food voice and readers’ appreciation for the connections between bison, nourishment, cultural identity, and language. The inextricable relationship between bison foodways and language is made explicit in the poem “These Are Wintering Words,” in which Dumont explores her people’s mother tongue, the Michif language. The word “Michif ” means Métis, and this oral language “is one outgrowth of long contact between Cree and Ojibwe speakers and francophone traders. Their offspring – the Métis – are said to have created the language on the Plains in the early 1800s by blending varieties of French and Cree – French Michif (or Métis French) and Plains Cree. Historically, the Michif language was spoken mainly by Métis bison hunters at their wintering camps.”112 In her poem, Dumont represents Michif figuratively through pemmican: the “wintering words” of the French and Cree/Salteaux “sliced thin, smoke-dried, pounded fine, folded in fat and berries.”113 Here, multiple cultural origins and languages coexist (most Métis spoke several languages, including Michif) through complex grammar combinations that traverse and describe the land in search of bison. Together, these languages form a new mother/bison tongue that is both spoken and savoured: FrenchCreeOjibway different tongues buffalo, a delicacy source language right from the cow’s mouth mother 114 of all in-group conversation … In The Pemmican Eaters, the famous adage “you are what you eat” means much more than cultural tastes and food preferences. Dumont’s poems — 150 —

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continually express a linguistic, spiritual, and even inter-species relationship between the Métis and the bison. The poem “Les Animaux” presents the bison as les animaux, the brothers that have left us to another plain.115

they have moved

The animals’ absence is sensed through the empty spaces, or silent pauses, that fall within the middle of several of the poem’s lines separating “us” from “they” as well as through images of physical amputation and phantom pain endured by Métis leader Gabriel Dumont, one of Marilyn Dumont’s ancestors. And although the Prairies seem mute, the collective voice spoken in Dumont’s poem “Li Bufloo” – which is Michif for “bison”116 – repeatedly claims kinship with the animal, relating a belief in an eventual return: “when will Gabriel call us out? / our great heads swiping side to side.”117

Bison Protests In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, bison-inspired visions continue to shape re/turning-points narratives as means of satirizing the inequalities of Canadian society in a range of contexts. In her critical-creative essay “A Brief Anatomy of an Honest Attempt at a Pithy Statement about the Impact of the Manitoba Environment on My Development as an Artist” (1970), Adele Wiseman (whose parents were Russian Jewish immigrants from Ukraine) ironically reflects on “The Manitoba Way” of creating new communities by imposing racial inequalities, segregation, and cultural prejudices on new immigrants as well as on First Nations and Métis peoples.118 Giving her essay the alternative title “The Bison’s Revenge,” Wiseman satirically notes that those in power during her childhood – Winnipeg’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority – were themselves fearful of going the way of the bison when faced with ethnic newcomers.119 Wiseman writes, They had so recently conquered, and now they were afraid that they too would be overrun, and their footprints obliterated. And we were hard on them, let’s face it. We forced them to withdraw to restricted — 151 —

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living zones, restricted beaches, restricted clubs, restricted Medical School; it is humiliating and belittling to be restricted, even voluntarily, on your own territory. Can you imagine how the bison must feel, huddled down there in their potholes, listening to our noises up above, and remembering all those glorious years of thundering over their own free prairie?120 Wiseman’s satirical inversion of the privileged waSP society having to isolate itself from the broader population (like the bison contained in Canada’s parks) speaks to the anti-Semitism faced by Jewish Canadians during the 1920s and 1930s when confronted with quotas at universities, restrictions in professions, and exclusion from public spaces. In another use of the bison to question both historical and contemporary inequalities, the late Cree and Dene writer Marvin Francis critiques Canada’s globalized, late-capitalist consumer culture in his City Treaty: A Long Poem (2002). The poem “mcPemmicanTM” satirizes what Francis views as the urban world’s “fast-food, throwaway culture” and, especially, the commoditization of Indigenous cultures.121 In “mcPemmicanTM” Francis’s “re/turning-point narrative” evokes not only the starvation and displacement of Indigenous Plains peoples during the signing of treaties (the TM in the poem’s title stands for “treaty manuscript”) but also the present-day impoverishment of Indigenous peoples within urban Canada: let the poor intake their money take their health sound familiar chase fast food off the cliff speed beef deer on a bun122 The line “chase fast food off the cliff ” highlights the destruction of Indigenous foodways and the bison’s replacement with unhealthy alternatives (at the time of settlement: insufficient rations doled out by government agents to subjugate Indigenous peoples through a policy of starvation; in the twenty-first century: inexpensive fast food sold by powerful multinational corporations to impoverished communities). In an essay reflecting on the culture shock he experienced when living on his own in Winnipeg, Francis writes: — 152 —

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The scramble for housing, food and so much more, gives the city that hard edge. You cannot go fishing or hunt. Sewers clog the Red River, while an Aboriginal does not carry a gun downtown as a rule, ducks or no ducks. One difficulty that Aboriginals face in the integration in the city is a direct result of a hierarchical, consumer-driven society, because if you do not fit some demographics, maybe living in a low-income neighbourhood means you end up shopping for food in smaller outlets, thus usually more expensive … Transportation on a city bus with heavy [groceries] sucks, and cabs are expensive, so if you do live downtown you find yourself depending too often upon take-out food and junk food.123 In response to Francis’s poem, Warren Cariou concurs that “fast food chains are shown to be natural extensions of welfare policies and the systemic marginalization of urban Native people; those with little money often have no choice but to eat at McDonald’s.”124 Clearly, Francis’s satire of capitalist greed creates another kind of re/turning-point bison narrative as “mcPemmicanTM” defamiliarizes fast-food, making it the hunted target that is chased off a cliff. Moreover, Francis defiantly exposes the unjust legacies of colonialism and treaties by rephrasing the present-day language of (corporate) Canada: “how about a / mcTreatyTM / would you like some lies with that?”125 Of these lines, Carriou concludes, “for Native people, treaties have never had the value that they were purported to have, because the most powerful parties – colonial governments and corporations – have re-interpreted them or ignored them at their whim, converting them into lies.”126

Conclusion “Re/turning-point narratives” of the bison traverse cross-cultural perspectives that coalesce in a composite space marked by both devastation and renewal. While settler narratives have often worked to naturalize ecological warfare, First Nations and Métis writers recognize the present and future possibilities of the bison’s return. As much as foodways depend on regular practice for their continuation, they also rely on story to create plots that renew and transform rather than terminate. Whether it be Charles Mair advocating for bison sanctuaries in the late nineteenth century, Cassidy — 153 —

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McFadzean revisiting her hometown’s landmarks via Google Street View, or Marilyn Dumont sharing a pemmican recipe in the twenty-first century, writers will continue to play important roles in changing perspectives and reimagining the Plains into a more inclusive space – something that can only be achieved by recognizing the integral relationship between First Nations and Métis peoples, the land, and cultural foodways. Reconciliation necessitates revisiting relationships with the land. In the case of Saskatchewan writer Sharon Butala, she was partially responsible for the reintroduction of a bison herd near the town of Eastend in 2003. In 1996, Butala and her late rancher husband, Peter Butala, sold and gifted approximately 13,100 acres of original grasslands to the Nature Conservancy of Canada on which the reintroduced bison continue to live. The Butalas hoped to preserve one of the last remaining stretches of native grassland in the province and to restore a central part of Plains ecology: “‘There are a lot of us who dream of the way the West was before settlement,’ says Sharon Butala, ‘When we look out, we don’t see big tractors plowing up the grasslands. We see phantom bison.’”127

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CONCLUSION PERHAPS AN ORANGE WIT H YO U R T E A?

Canadian Literary Fare explores the way Canadian literary writers delve into the nuances of our food history – the way in which the food voices of some of our most iconic and popular foods (including pemmican and Kraft Dinner), as well as our food landscapes (natural as well as urban), tell layered stories of Canada’s past and present. Theirs is a textured, evocative, and granular food history that troubles the overwhelmingly positive, and admittedly appealing, portrayals of the bounty of Canada’s tables and the inclusiveness of its foodways. In this conclusion, we look to two food items originally sourced from elsewhere and prized accordingly for their exotic connotations but that nevertheless have come to be very closely associated with Canada’s foodways in our popular culture and literature. The first is tea, largely imported from India and China, and only much more recently grown in limited quantities on Canadian soil.1 Some may even remember a popular advertising campaign run by Red Rose Tea over a period of twenty years: two conversationalists bemoan where Red Rose tea is sold: “Only in Canada, you say? … Pity.”2 The second is Mandarin oranges, first exported to Canada’s west coast to bring Japanese immigrants a taste of home and quickly embraced by Canadians who welcomed a touch of colour and citrus flavour in the darkest of seasons. This concluding chapter finishes with a meditation about why and to what effect writers bring these two exotic food items together, as when, for example, Suzanne feeds the speaker of Leonard Cohen’s iconic poem “tea and oranges / that come all the way from China.”3

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C.1 Ladies at tea, oranges, and cookies, circa 1900

That oranges were, indeed, paired with tea is evident in this photo, taken in 1900 by Sally Eliza Wood in Knowlton, Quebec, where residents at that time were predominantly English speaking, the area having been settled by United Empire Loyalists. McCord Museum’s notes on this photograph point out that oranges at the time were expensive, “that only a wealthy few could afford to buy regularly,” while most Canadians purchased them only as a Christmas treat. The two women pictured here, dressed in their finery, and posing for the professional photographer beside a tea table replete with cut glass or possibly even crystal holders for their oranges, displayed their ability to purchase the precious fruit commodity outside the Christmas season. However, their studied expressions, all the more rigid because of the extended time required for an interior photograph to be taken during that period, are very much at odds with the tone of moments when tea and oranges come together in literary settings. In our literature, tea and oranges together prompt conversation, — 156 —

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a sense of community and mindfulness. Compared with the literary food voices we have explored so far in this study, which sound notes of caution, the chord struck by the coming together of tea with oranges is positive and positively harmonious.

A Literary Cup of Tea A cup of tea serves, in literature as in life, as a source of comfort and a moment of pause for a beloved social ritual: relaxed conversation. Eileen Reynolds writes in an article on literary tea scenes for the New Yorker: “Do you have favorite tea scenes in the novels by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or the Brontë sisters? We started to make a list, only to find that tea is everywhere. Which important plot twists don’t involve tea? At teatime, would-be lovers exchange longing glances; mothers choose suitors for their daughters; and rivals trade veiled insults in polite, singsong tones.”4 In nineteenth-century Canadian writing, women aim to deter their menfolk from excessive consumption of alcohol, and tea is an excellent alternative. In 1835, Widow Fleck writes: “Now, husbands all, take my advice, / From liquors keep you free; / But never grudge, with your own wife, / To take a cup of tea.”5 The Widow Fleck also sings the praises of tea to encourage conversation between women in her Poems on Various Subjects and, in particular, in a poem composed as an argument in favour of a good cup of tea. “It is the same with womankind- / With all, as well as me; / There’s nothing gives them such delight, / As a dainty cup of Tea.”6 At its most basic, there is a difference between a good and a bad cup of tea. For example, in Gabrielle Roy’s 1962 story, “Sister Finance,” one nun does the shopping for her sisterhood, with her young cousin accompanying her, and they stop at Eaton’s cafe counter for a break. Sister Jeanne orders tea and exclaims: “‘That’s very good tea … And what’s more, it tastes like tea … well,’ she concluded, as she perceived the astonishment on my face, ‘that’s not as queer a remark as you might think: few people either know how or bother to make good tea … Eaton’s are hard to beat for tea.’”7 And whereas Roy’s story praises the department store Eaton’s for its tea, Ethel Wilson immortalizes the pleasure of a cuppa at the Hudson’s Bay Department store. In her novel, The Innocent Traveller, Aunt Topaz loves her “elevenses” at the Bay,8 a nice cup of tea, which seems so much nicer — 157 —

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than just having an informal cup of tea alone at home. Nevertheless, Aunt Topaz keeps a formal tea service ready to go in case anyone pops in.9 Consequently, while it may seem that a good cup of this warm beverage promises to be universally appealing, upon closer scrutiny tea actually serves to channel ways in which the food voice can define sharp differentiations between communities. Even for settler colonials there are nuanced debates: How does one “take” tea? White or black? Does one pour milk in the cup before or after the tea? Sugar – one lump or two? Lemon or honey? Despite its most apparent colonial associations, tea appears in multiple contexts as an important vehicle for self-representation through the food voice. For instance, the story “Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway” by Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor suggests that tea drinking is a sign of indigeneity. “All Indians drink tea!” explains a young Indigenous girl, who feels that Taylor’s refusal of tea is proof that he can’t be Ojibway.10 In the opening of Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl, the poem’s titular “White Judges” condemningly scrutinize every aspect of Dumont’s upbringing, including the Métis family’s meals, as a marker of their difference: “At supper / eleven of us would stare down a pot of moose stew, bannock and / tea, while outside the white judges sat encircling our house.”11 Similarly, in Emily Carr’s The Book of Small (1942), racial and cultural differences are signalled by how individuals take, or in this case drink, their tea. In the prose sketch “A Cup of Tea” set in the late nineteenth century of Carr’s childhood, an Indigenous couple launch their canoe to help bring a struggling Chinese sailor ashore, and this act of generosity, together with a shared sense of community over the appreciation of a cup of tea, profiles an emerging alignment of food voices. The group first shares a quiet, if somewhat awkward, meal of fish soup until the woman serves the Chinese man some tea: “The woman poured tea into a tin cup and passed it to the Chinaman … Bowing to the woman, he raised the steaming liquid to his lips, made a kissing sound into the tea and sluiced its warmth noisily into every corner of his mouth before the great gulps gurgled down his throat. The woman nodded. ‘Uh-huh!’ she said, and smiled.”12 That a cup of tea denotes comfort in such a fundamental way also makes it an effective vehicle for writers who want to look below the surface, to complicate the calm and serenity a cup of tea seems to offer by exposing the also problematic racial and cultural politics inherent in its production. For — 158 —

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example, Jim Wong-Chu reflects on the colonial legacy of tea in his poem “Recipe for Tea,”13 such that, in Canada, tea (at least of the imported and blended varieties, as opposed to the indigenous tree bark and bush teas of Canada, including Labrador tea) has largely come to be associated with settler-colonial foodways, despite its being grown and produced in Asia, far outside England and Canada. The speaker objects to the way it has been transformed by the English: “brought it back / bastardized it / made it mud / drowned in heavy cream / two, three teaspoons / of colonial sugar.”14 And the colonial legacy of tea, a beverage so influential in North American lore and history, seems so easily overlooked. “The best known tea party / was in boston,” Wong-Chu’s speaker remembers bitterly, “the tea was chinese / but none invited.”15 Some recent works of Canadian literature also reference tea, but this is no longer Red Rose, made from a tea bag that is “available only in Canada”; rather, the tea itself opens up for the reader and fictional character a wider world of flavours and possibility. For example, over steaming mugs of chai tea, a signature drink that each Kenyan home prepares slightly differently, the troubled protagonist of Heather Clark’s 2019 novel Chai Tea Sunday confides in her host mother, Mama Bu, and finds understanding, love, and, eventually, strength.16 In her debut novel, Chocolate Cherry Chai, Taslim Burkowicz entices her readers to take a “journey of the senses.”17 Although the novelist is based in Surrey, British Columbia, and the novel’s protagonist ultimately settles in British Columbia as well, the fictional narrative takes readers on a journey through time by tracing the central character’s matrilineal roots to Uganda and, before that, to India. The journey is one of the imagination. Maya Mubeen, the novel’s protagonist, seems able to empathize with and even inhabit the body of her foremothers, transported by the magical properties of a very special drink – chocolate cherry chai – and the ritual of its preparation. Like the eponymous drink, Burkowicz’s narrative is flavourful and richly evocative. Within the novel, the delicious chai tea brings together an unlikely group of women: Maya and her grandmother Nargis, known as “Nanima” to her family, who speaks only Gujarati; Eileen from Alberta; the widowed Lily; and Kulvinder, whose vow of silence is ultimately broken by chocolate cherry chai tea and the community of women the drink consolidates. As the women bridge the distances between cultures and languages by sharing their stories, it becomes clear that they have much in common. What transforms an ordinary — 159 —

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C.2 Two leaves and a bud: women plucking tea leaves, Varguvarrai Tea Estate (now a Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company), 2005

cup of tea into a magical one? One answer would be to detail the additional ingredients: “2 squares of Hershey milk chocolate,” for example, and “2 sliced up maraschino cherries, with a few drops of juice.”18 And even for this magical elixir, Burkowicz gives a full account of the ingredients and method of preparation.19 Although there is time and care involved, be prepared for a treat. As one of the ladies at the Seniors’ Centre describes it, in a comment that reminds us of nineteenth-century writers who proposed tea as a powerful alternative to liquor, the resulting tea is “better than a sloe gin fizz on a hot summer’s day …!”20 And While Burkowicz’s readers are not privy to recipes for the mouth-watering dishes served throughout the novel, they are included in the community formed and nurtured by the sharing of chocolate cherry chai. — 160 —

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These recent tea narratives, in which the food voices that speak out to extend the community, are far removed from those in earlier works of Canadian literature, in which cups of tea provided solace but, just as much, established boundaries of social class and culture, and obfuscated Canada’s troubled pasts. For instance, in L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 classic Anne of Green Gables, the orphan Anne Shirley, an outsider to Avonlea, must learn to perform predetermined scripts for both hosting and attending tea if she is to become an accepted member of her community. After countless culinary and behavioural mishaps, Anne finally experiences the thrill of hardearned acceptance when Mrs Barry hosts the orphan to heal past grudges and to express gratitude for coming to her youngest daughter’s aid in a moment of crisis: “We had an elegant tea. Mrs Barry had the very best china set out, Marilla, just as if I was real company. I can’t tell you what a thrill it gave me. Nobody ever used their very best china on my account before. And we had fruit-cake and pound-cake and doughnuts and two kinds of preserves, Marilla.” 21 If tea in Montgomery’s early twentieth-century world signalled the expectations of conformity, in 1945, F.R. Scott lampooned the Canadian literary establishment for its outmoded conservatism through the gendered imagery of tea: The cakes are sweet, but sweeter is the feeling That one is mixing with the literati; It warms the old, and melts the most congealing. Really, it is a most delightful party. Shall we go round the mulberry bush, or shall We gather at the river, or shall we Appoint a Poet Laureate this fall, Or shall we have another cup of tea?22

A Literary Orange As we have seen, one form of literary shorthand for a character’s transformation involves new and different food choices. But what kinds of foods signal literary turning points? Just as cups of tea provide turning points in — 161 —

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the lives of protagonists in novels by Heather Clark and Taslim Burkowicz, for example, so too does Canadian literature provide evocative examples of the transformative potential of foodways in the form of Japanese oranges. First imported to Canada (and particularly the western provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in the late 1800s, this popular wintertime fruit regularly appears in the nation’s literature symbolizing the potential for other worlds of experience when characters are faced with frigid or dreary environments. For Canadian writers, the fruit’s exotic origins, material qualities (vibrant colour, globe-like shape, etc.), and associated seasonal traditions have provided abundant food for thought for the depiction of transformative experiences or a yearning for them. During late fall, boxes of Mandarin oranges become widely available in Canadian grocery stores in anticipation of the holiday season. Fall ends. Winter takes hold. And these cheery imports beckon to shoppers who long to brighten cold, grey days. Mandarin oranges, also known in western Canada as Japanese oranges, were first introduced to Canada in the late 1800s by way of Japanese immigrants. The Oppenheimer Group, a produce and provision company based in British Columbia since 1858, first imported the fruit in 1891 to provide Japanese workers with a taste of their original home.23 Gift baskets were initially sent to Japanese immigrants by family members to celebrate the New Year.24 The interchangeable use of the terms “Japanese” and “Mandarin” may cause some confusion, especially since Mandarin is a Chinese language. But there are many varieties of Mandarins (citrus reticulata) grown across the world and imported to Canada, including those shipped from Japan. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Anglicized name for the fruit stems from the Swedish term mandarin apelsin (Chinese orange) and was likely inspired by a “comparison of the fruit’s colour with the yellow silk robes of mandarins.”25 The Portuguese were the first to apply this term to individuals “of the senior grades of the former imperial Chinese civil service.”26 The fact that the Mandarin words for “gold” and “orange“ rhyme may also help to explain why oranges are a symbol of “wealth and good fortune in Chinese culture,” the fruit “shared generously with friends and family during Chinese New Year.”27 Once a taste for Mandarin oranges was established in Canada, there was no turning back. Consumers cherished this delectable fruit, which quickly became a popular, annual import. Indeed, the Japanese orange’s festive associations are uniquely Canadian because many American states have long — 162 —

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restricted the importing of citrus.28 Shipped across the Pacific Ocean to the Port of Vancouver in the early 1900s, crates of Japanese oranges used to travel across western Canada on “Orange Trains” – “boxcars painted orange to herald their arrival.”29 The tradition of holiday oranges is well established by the time Gabrielle Roy’s novel The Tin Flute is published in 1945. Set in Montreal at the beginning of the Second World War, the story includes a hospital scene in which a young boy, Daniel, instantly recognizes the custom when he receives an out-of-season orange: “But an orange was not a juice. How could you drink it from a glass? It was a fruit that made you think of Christmas. It was a fruit you found it in your sock on Christmas morning, something you ate section by section, making it last as long as possible … How strange it felt to receive an orange now! It wasn’t Christmas, it wasn’t even winter … but still there he was, holding a round, soft, juicy orange in his fingers.”30 Sadly, Daniel is too ill to enjoy his unseasonal orange, letting it fall to the side of his hospital bed. Certainly, in both Canadian and American literature, the rarity of Christmas oranges often draws attention to the daily hardships endured throughout the rest of the year.31 For Alice Munro, growing up on mink farm in rural Ontario, the backdrop of her early short story “Boys and Girls,” the scent of oranges, as well as those of pine and mink hides, are what she remembers as Christmas smells that were “reassuringly seasonal.”32 And in her autobiography HalfBreed, Métis author Maria Campbell recalls her people’s impoverished existence living on road allowances in Saskatchewan. After spending months away from home trapping in order to provide for the family, Campbell’s father would return on Christmas Eve as his own version of Santa Claus with “a sack full of fur on his back.”33 On Christmas morning, the children’s stockings would be “plumb full and overflowing with nuts and candy canes, oranges and apples – the only ones we ate all year,” Campbell adds upon reflection.34 Today with globalized trade and the extended growing seasons because of the geographical range of producers, a variety of easy-to-peel Mandarins (tangerines, clementines, satsumas, etc.) are readily available throughout the year in grocery stores across Canada.35 But the larger boxes of Japanese oranges, often with each orange wrapped in paper, still appear around the holidays, sustaining this western Canadian tradition. Indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, “more than 99.5 per cent of mandarins shipped to Canada [were] sold in the four western provinces,” with western — 163 —

C.3 Christmas mandarin oranges being unloaded from the ship, SS American Mail, 1949

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C.4 Japanese orange crate

Canada being “Japan’s largest overseas … market.”36 The Oppenheimer Group identifies this most expensive Japanese Mandarin as “‘the Cadillac’ of brands” with its “balance between sweet and tart.”37

Glowing Globes: Canadian Literary Mandarins Just as the Mandarin orange first enchanted late nineteenth-century Canadian consumers as a seasonal novelty, the fruit also inspired writers in Canada and, indeed elsewhere,38 as a symbol of other worlds. One of the earliest Canadian poems in which this wintertime fruit assumes a central symbolic role is Louise Morey Bowman’s “Oranges,” which appears in her second book of poetry, Dream Tapestries (1924), for which she was awarded the Prix David in Quebec.39 A Modernist poet, Bowman (1882–1944) captures the transformative effects of this citrus treat as she describes an austere, seemingly lifeless New England village during the colourless month — 165 —

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of November. Tracing Bowman’s career, Wanda Campbell notes that the New England setting featured in “Oranges” can be readily explained by a series of factors: Bowman originally submitted her poem to a contest in the United States; she had once studied in Massachusetts; and her grandmother was a Puritan.40 While these American influences are clear, Campbell adds that the circumstances depicted in “Oranges” could easily “[resemble] turnof-the-century Canada” with its restraining social mores and rigid piety.41 In terms of turning points, Bowman’s poem reflects shifting social norms and attitudes in a modernizing world; the oranges are central to expressing these changes. In “Oranges,” the New England townspeople faithfully sing hymns about mortality. Meanwhile, Death itself seems to occupy the town’s stark streets and porches. All is staid and lacklustre until the village store beckons with its “different air” – a kind of sensual music brimming with life and scents “from wild rich worlds beyond.”42 The storekeeper is “a man of vision and breadth of mind.”43 His wares include great works of literature, coffee beans, spices, cones of sugar, coarse salts, fabrics, and oranges: Great balls of golden wonder … round, perishable globes … Here a ripe pyramid most carefully laid […] See how the oranges have caught up all the light! What joyous tones they hold Of vivid, bold, Hot colour! They glow like balls moulded of molten gold.44 More than warding off winter, the vibrant orange pyramid offers the conservative community a sense of other realms. The burning “tones” create a change in both hue and timbre as the villagers’ morose hymns and Sunday church bell give way to a new synesthetic experience. Indeed, the storekeeper’s bell, placed above his door, chimes continually throughout the week marking customers’ desire for another world, one that produces those orange, “perishable globes.”45 — 166 —

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In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Mandarin oranges were undeniably transformative, a turning point for Bowman’s villagers. These memorable first impressions clearly left their mark on the nation’s literary foodscapes. The famous prairie writer Sinclair Ross, for instance, uses Mandarin oranges to shape his small-town Saskatchewan settings. In his 1939 short story “Cornet at Night,” a young farm boy named Tom feels intimidated and out of place during his first solo trip into town. This experience of independence within the wider world is clearly indicated when he enters a Chinese restaurant: its “pyramids of oranges in the window and the dark green rubber plant with the tropical looking leaves … and the dusky smell of last night’s cigarettes,” signalling “the orient itself.”46 Later, when Tom travels back home with Philip, a musician whom he meets at the Chinese restaurant and hires to help with the harvest (instead of the strong farmhand Tom’s father had requested), a single note from Philip’s cornet – “gleaming in the August sun like pure and mellow gold” – upsets the horse and cart and causes all of Tom’s groceries, including oranges, to fall to the ground, the precious fruit disappearing down a badger hole.47 Just as Bowman’s poem connects oranges with life’s sensual “music,” Ross uses the citrus to foreshadow the story’s conclusion: the musician’s quick departure after failing to stook the wheat. Young Tom is left with the memory of Philip’s one impromptu performance in the family’s bunkhouse, the music, like those lost precious oranges, transcending his prosaic prairie life: “A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once.”48 Oranges carry an abundance of meaning for Ross as the fruit also assumes a prominent role in his 1941 novel As For Me and My House, 49 which documents a couple’s barren marriage during the dustbowl of the Great Depression. With Christmas being “a bleak season in a childless home,” the protagonist, Mrs Bentley, tries to make her domestic life more festive.50 But in a diary entry dated December 24th, she admits that holiday treats fail to bridge the emotional distance between her and her husband: “I polished a bowl of apples and set out another of oranges; and then called Philip for coffee and Christmas cake. But it wasn’t very successful – our appetites and spirits keep abreast. It’s easier when I take the coffee in to him, and then come away and let him have it by himself.”51 Later, during a frigid day in February, Mrs Bentley draws upon the orange’s other meanings, such as those traced by food writer Clarissa Hyman — 167 —

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in her global history of the fruit. Hyman notes that artists have long associated the orange with fertility, “bare bosoms and zesty enticement,” such as Botticelli’s Venus, “surfing modestly on a scallop shell to a shore lined with orange trees.”52 Setting similar erotic symbolism in motion, Mrs Bentley stuffs an old grain sack with oranges and hay (to insulate the fruit) and sends the parcel with her husband to give to Judith, the pregnant woman with whom Mrs Bentley suspects Philip is having an affair. When Philip returns, it’s clear that Mrs Bentley’s underhanded “gift” has had the desired effect: “And Judith?” I asked at last, pouring myself out another cup of tea to drink with him. “How was she? Didn’t she send a message?” It seemed as he looked up at me that something in his eyes broke. “Next time,” he said, “you’d better not send the oranges.” … “She cried when I told her they were from you – all afternoon, one in each hand, as if that could help.”53 In a lyric set twenty years later than Ross’s short story and novel, in the urban environs of Montreal’s Old Port during the 1960s, Mandarin oranges continue to make a sensual impression when tea is served with this fruit, which has been shipped “all the way from China.” Here “you” listen to the magical voice of Leonard Cohen in his famous song “Suzanne” and see his muse, Suzanne Verdal, dancing along the St Lawrence River. Cohen claims that Verdal “fed [him] a tea called Constant Comment, which has small pieces of orange rind in it, which gave birth to the image.”54 But Verdal remembers their encounter differently: “We had tea together many times and mandarin oranges … I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak. And I would speak about life and poetry and we’d share ideas.”55 Sylvia Simmons’s biography of Cohen merges the two versions. Verdal here recalls having sourced “ jasmine tea or Constant Comment and little mandarin oranges and lychee nuts from Chinatown,” which is only a short distance from the Old Port.56 This last detail gives added dimension to Cohen’s description of the journey undertaken by the little fruit: “all the way from …” is at once nearby Montreal Chinatown and faraway China. Cindi Bigelow – the current Ceo of the American-based Bigelow Tea Company, which has produced Constant Comment since 1945 – naturally believes Cohen’s — 168 —

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version of events. And, as for the Mandarin oranges, one cannot help but sense Cohen’s grounding in Canadian foodways and the long tradition of oranges infusing a note of exoticism into the Canadian culinary palate. Of course, Cohen’s music and celebrity have since touched these oranges with their own kind of enchantment. Following Cohen’s death in 2016, mourners living on the Greek island of Hydra have been leaving oranges, tea bags, and messages of remembrance on the doorstep of Cohen’s onetime home.57 But can a Mandarin orange become too much of a good thing? Just as Canadian writers prompted closer scrutiny of tea, its origins, and its connotations and implications, so at the close of the twentieth century Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) asks us to think further about the fruit’s multiple personalities. In Goto’s novel, teenage Muriel eats an entire box of Mandarin oranges and lies down, satiated, under the Christmas tree. “I am replete,” says Muriel. “I looked it up in the dictionary and that’s exactly how I felt.”58 But her initial satisfaction, as we will see, is short-lived. “If you eat too many Jap oranges,” Keiko and daughter Muriel discover, “your skin turns yellow.”59 Yellow skin for Muriel is as entertaining as having “red shit from eating too many beets.”60 It is something to be marvelled at, laughed at, and shared. Muriel shares this phenomenon with her mother: “Look Mom! … Lookit my hands.”61 Keiko tries desperately to remove the yellow stains on her daughter’s arms with an SoS pad, muttering, “Yellow, she’s turningyellow she’sturningyellow she’s – .”62 For Keiko, the orangeinduced stains are the site of an explicit racial qualification. Ever the wordsmith, Muriel enjoys her snack while critically considering the name of the fruit and its authenticity: “Jap oranges – funny how they’re called Jap oranges.”63 She muses: “When they are technically called Mandarin oranges and Mandarin isn’t even a place but a Chinese Language. Funny how words and meaning twist beyond the dimensions of logic.”64 For Muriel, her snack is a delicious social construct. The effects of eating so many oranges (yellow skin) are the result of too much carotene in her system. For Keiko, who does not separate “Jap” from orange, this snack reveals the eater’s inherent, essential difference. It is significant that this “inherent, essential difference” as perceived by Keiko is also a temporary physical condition. Muriel’s carotene levels will eventually subside. During frigid winters, Canadians’ love of Mandarins is understandable. Who can resist that glowing fruit when the world around you has turned to — 169 —

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black and white and is covered in snow and ice? And, as for the particular Christmas tradition of Japanese oranges, journalist and senator Paula Simons notes that the fruit is “a modest testament to Western Canada’s multicultural heritage … Today, they are as much as part of our shared culture as perogies and butter tarts.”65 As for Canadian writers, the fruit has become much more than a symbol of the winter holidays. Oranges communicate a range of desires: for passion, fertility, racial identity, and other worlds of sensorial and cultural experience as well as for the taste of home for Japanese immigrants to Canada. The next time you purchase a box of Mandarin oranges at a Canadian grocery store, relish them one segment at a time. These lyrical oranges are bound to delight.

Perhaps an Orange with Your Cup of Tea? Before pairing tea with oranges, let us detour to today’s more commonplace pairing of tea with lemon. And, surprisingly, given this is a more routine pairing of citrus accompaniment with tea, there are very few literary references. Lemons do make a notable appearance in a beloved poem by Robert Kroetsch, “Sketches of a Lemon.” Kroetsch’s sequence of twelve short lemon-focused poetic sketches in turn became the subject of twelve short commentaries by well-known Canadian literary critics and writers, compiled by Nicole Markotic in her book Robert Kroetsch: Essays on His Works (2017). Various conclusions emerge from discussion of the lemony sketches: that the sequence nods to other poetic meditations on particular items, such as blackbirds or two pears (Wallace Stevens); oranges (Gertrude Stein, Francis Ponge); blackberries (Francis Ponge); plums (William Carlos Williams); apples or, particularly, russets (Margaret Avison). And, further, that Kroetsch’s sketches distinguish themselves by being decidedly more postmodern, self-deflating, even playful. Aritha Van Herk chides her fellow writer: “poets do dream of groves, apple and peach trees (if the bears don’t get them), but lemons? Hah.”66 Or, as Gary Geddes adds in his “A Rum Analysis”: “This is not one of his best poems, but it’s no lemon either.”67 So, while we would like to have been able to serve lemon with tea for our readers here, Canadian literary menus overwhelmingly favour serving oranges with tea. Indeed, Kroetsch himself muses on oranges in his fifth sketch on lemons: — 170 —

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5 What about oranges? At least an orange Looks like an orange. In fact, most oranges Bear a remarkable resemblance To oranges.68 While Kroetsch comments on the uniformity, even prosaic predictability, of oranges, perhaps their recurring presence and symbolic resonances with all their subtle variations in Canadian literary fare are suggestive of a longing for moments of wonderment, and, as we shall see, that alchemy seems to involve their pairing with literary teas. That is, while tea and oranges function as narrative turning points in their own right, when they are brought together in poetry, their symbolic resonance extends beyond the secular – daily food and drink – to contemplation of life’s big issues. One of the best-known instances of a pairing of oranges with a warm beverage in a way that prompts readers to grapple with metaphysical contemplation comes in yet a different poem by American poet Wallace Stevens, whose musings on blackbirds and two pears inspired Robert Kroetsch. This poem containing oranges is entitled “Sunday Morning.” It opens with a woman at home sipping coffee, rather than taking her place at church, as so many others might have done on a Sunday morning in 1915 North America: Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug, mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.69 We have inherited different versions of this poem, the first slightly shorter because of stanzas removed at the suggestion of editor Harriet Monroe, and another in 1923, with the original stanzas included.70 Although one seems to assert the poignant beauty that is part of a knowledge of life’s impermanence more insistently than the other, both prompt the reader to question life’s mysteries in an increasingly secular, — 171 —

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even post-sacred, world. And the woman in this poem surely shares with her readers her feeling for “The need of some imperishable bliss,”71 and, at the same time, knowledge and appreciation of “Sweet berries [that] ripen in the wilderness;”72 and the pigeons that make “Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”73 We pause to contemplate this poem because it sets the stage in many ways for the underlying symbolic pairing of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” which includes (as previously highlighted), oranges paired with tea rather than coffee, savoured not alone in a formal peignoir on a Sunday morning but, rather, by two communing in a place near Montreal’s Old Port, on the St Lawrence River. In Leonard Cohen’s poem “Suzanne” one can hear lingering echoes of Stevens’s urgent interrogations. Both poets write in the North America of the twentieth century, questioning, probing the legacy of religion: Stevens in 1915, just as the First World War was dawning; Cohen in 1966, as the war in Vietnam waged. Cohen’s speaker seems to want to trust Suzanne. We are told it is perhaps because she is “half crazy”: Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river, you can hear the boats go by you can spend the night beside her. And you know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there … And you want to travel with her, you want to travel blind74 Surely, too, it is because the musical quality of the lyric, so different from Stevens’s more highly structured pentameter lines, entices Cohen’s speaker, and his readers, to follow. But then again, the speaker – or is it we, Cohen’s readers, as implied by the consistent use of the second person pronoun “you” – also wants to trust Jesus, despite his being “broken / long before the sky would open, / forsaken, almost human.”75 Cohen draws us into the spell, in a way that Stevens — 172 —

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won’t allow. Stevens, by phrasing a rhetorical question, suggests that the world’s bounty of perishable beauty is not enough: Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?76 For Cohen’s speaker and readers, though, the magic nourished by tea and oranges allows a vision of beauty that does hold out the possibility of fulfilment for the beholder: as she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers, there are heroes in the seaweed there are children in the morning, they are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever while Suzanne holds the mirror.77 As with other foods showcased in this study’s exploration, literary tea and oranges signal the very human desire for meaningful connection. Although Canadian foods may be distinctive – a function of the place of their origin, preparation, and consumption – we repeatedly see how they function to signal a desire for, and a means to enable, commensality. And in this way, surely our close analysis of the way food claims its own distinctive voice and narratives in Canadian literature affords insights into the stories told by the many compelling food voices elsewhere. In particular, our contemplation of Canadian literary fare begins with scrutiny of the way literature holds a mirror to Canadian foodways and, in providing detail and focused attention, gives voice to the textures and tensions of Canada’s pasts and present. Indeed, this study asserts that Canada’s diverse literary food voices offer non-verbal narratives that accompany – sometimes to amplify, to trouble, or even to complicate – the narratives overtly charted by the very literary texts that host them.

— 173 —

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Long, “Learning to Listen,” 119. Pittet, “Food Voice Annotated Bibliography,” 135. McGee, Writing the Meal, 1. Long, “Learning to Listen,” 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid. Ibid. CHAPTER ONE

1 Parts of this vignette were originally presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 2015 and subsequently appeared in the published proceedings. 2 Tomson Highway Gets His Trout. 3 Hoffman, “Political Theatre in a Small City,” 196. 4 Däwes, “I Don’t Write Native Stories,” 154. 5 Highway, Ernestine Shuswap, 54. 6 Ibid., 35. 7 Ibid., 33–4, emphasis in original. 8 Gora, “From Meat to Metaphor,” 107. 9 Ibid., 93, emphasis in original. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 34. 12 Ibid., 28, emphasis in original. 13 Ibid., 38. 14 Ibid., 60. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 35–6. 17 Ibid., 55. 18 Ibid., 57. 19 Ibid., 57–8.

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20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 88. Kilgour, Communion to Cannibalism, 15. Highway, Ernestine Shuswap, 91. “Alice Munro,” bc Booklook. Some additional examples, apart from the short stories discussed in this vignette, in which maple syrup functions as a marker of a regional setting and socio-economic circumstances include “A Friend of My Youth,” “Half a Grapefruit,” and “Trespasses.” For instance, in “A Friend of My Youth,” the story takes place in the Ottawa Valley, where the wood on houses turns black, not grey, because of “something in the air,” and where “maple syrup has a taste no syrup produced elsewhere can equal” – which is suggestive of a distinction of taste that is both rural and informed by the darker aspects of the domestic environs in which Munro’s characters reside (4). In addition to Atwood’s The CanLit FoodBook, see also Judith Choate’s A Reader’s Cookbook, which targets book clubs with the aim to “amplify” texts through “literal tastes” tied either to a story’s setting or to a writer’s country of origin (7). In the chapter “Under a Maple Sky – O Canada!,” Choate includes a recipe for Maple-Walnut Bread with Maple Butter alongside a passage from Alice Munro’s short story “Friend of My Youth.” Atwood, CanLit FoodBook, 55. Munro, “Maple Mousse,” 55. Shapiro, Feast of Words for Lovers of Food and Fiction, 47. Munro, “Spelling,” 235. Ibid. Ibid., 247. See Mark Hay’s article on the shift in the class status of gelatine dishes across the centuries and especially during the latter half of the twentieth century, when fridges became widely available. Munro, “Sunday Afternoon”, 163. Ibid., 164. Ibid. Cooke and Lucas, Catharine Parr Traill’s the Female Emigrant’s Guide, 110; Traill, Female Emigrant’s Guide, 106. Resnick, Labyrinth of North American Identities, 37. Bonisteel, “Butter Tarts,” emphasis added. Gillman, “Butter Tarts in North America,” 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 53, emphasis in original. Ibid., 54. Drew Hayden Taylor, @TheDHTaylor, Twitter, 10 July 2021, 1:05 p.m. Munro, “Royal Beatings,” 19. — 176 —

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Skrypuch, Hunger, 42 Ibid., 43. Ibid. Ibid., 44. Margoshes, “Gift,” 81. Ibid., 81. Thrice, “Yippee a Chivaree,” 33. Cooley, By Word of Mouth, 21–3. Ibid. Butson, “Butter Tarts,” 47. Barber, “From an Ajax, Ont., Coffee Shop,” R2. Moore, “Beloved Fredericton Grocery Store.” Coady, “Introduction,” 4, emphasis in original. Ibid., 5. In Speaking in Cod Tongues, Lenore Newman notes how regional tastes sometimes become synonymous with national ones: “Trends formed in Ontario diffuse to the rest of the country; consider Penfold’s donut as discussed in chapter six. Though they aren’t entirely a national food, their ubiquity in Ontario almost assures their continued spread. Another interesting example is Canadian bacon, which is an unsmoked wet cured pork loin rolled in yellow cornmeal, though historically dried yellow pea flour was used. Also called peameal bacon, this supposed ‘Canadian food’ is found almost exclusively in Southern Ontario” (137). See Cooke and Lucas on Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide for references to the “1 lb of salt pork” that was required by “American Law” for passengers of fourteen years or older as provisions for the ocean voyage (42). Traill’s brother, Major Strickland, also describes his provisions for settlement as consisting of “a parcel of groceries, a half barrel of pork, and a barrel of flour” (48). Maharaj, “Bitches on All Sides,” 18. Ibid., 19. Kaslik, “A Review of: Victory Meat.” Maharaj, “Bitches on All Sides,” 19. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 20–1, emphasis in original. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 13. — 177 —

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76 In the story, Ramjohn sometimes uses the plural form, but, on occasion, he also uses the singular form. 77 Maharaj, “Bitches on All Sides,” 15. 78 Ibid., 11. 79 Ibid., 23. 80 Ibid. CHAPTER TWO

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Wah, Diamond Grill, 11. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 44. Wah, Waiting for Saskatchewan, 7. Lam, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, 58. Ibid., 4. Choy, All That Matters, 92–3. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 94. Nash, “From Spaghetti to Sushi,” 15–16. See Cho’s Eating Chinese, and Cooke and Boyd’s “What Is ‘Restaurant Literature’?” for further discussion pertaining to small-town Chinese restaurants in Canada and their menus. Sterling, “Many Origin Stories.” Hui, Chop Suey Nation, 188. Ibid. Ibid., 101–2. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. Gordon-Walker, “Process of Chop Suey,” 34. Thien, “Simple Recipes,” 3. Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., 13. Enright, “Wok’s Happening.” Ibid. Thien, “Simple Recipes,” 13. Ibid., 9. Ibid. — 178 —

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 19. Visvis, “Beyond the ‘Talking Cure,” 53. Robinson, Monkey Beach, 86. Ibid., 92–3. Ibid., 145. For further discussion of food and residential schools, see Maracle and Mosby, “Mush Hole.” Robinson, Monkey Beach, 271–2. Ibid., 308–9. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 109–10. Robinson, “Interview with Eden Robinson.” See Vikki Jensen’s article “Wild about Eden Robinson” in which Robinson ref lects on her celiac diagnosis and her strict gluten-free diet, which has greatly improved her health and energy. Jensen wrote her article after visiting Robinson in Kitamaat in 2006. “Trickster Trilogy.” Bannock is not straightforward when it comes to its categorization as Indigenous food as some First Nations, such as the Haudenosaunee, point to its ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, lard, baking soda) as the “five white gifts” that caused dietary diseases and signalled lost access to traditional food sources: “You are literally eating the trauma of the generations when you eat fry bread. It might sustain you in the short term, but in the long run it’s completely unsustainable. And it takes away from the integrity of our traditional culture. It was the survival food that has become known as the Native American food. But what does that mean? If anything, for Haudenosaunee people, it should be boiled cornbread. We have to acknowledge the role that fry bread played, we can thank it and then we can move on” (Maracle and Mosby, “Mush Hole”). Matheson, “Eden Robinson Returns.” Robinson, “Salmon Eaters,” 4. Ibid. Phillip, “Burn Sugar,” 405. Ibid. Ibid., 411. Ibid., 405. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Phillip, “Absence of Writing,” 88. Phillip, “Burn Sugar,” 406. — 179 —

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 407. Ibid. Ibid., 408. Ibid., 409. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 410. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 411. Ibid., 411. Murray, Maid as Muse, 15. Phillip, “Combustible Spaces,” 161. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 167. CHAPTER THREE

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Traill, Studies of Plant Life in Canada, 127–8, emphasis added. Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 377–8. Ibid., 377. Traill, Female Emigrant’s Guide, 142. Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 376–7. Ibid., 376. Boyd, Garden Plots, 65–75. Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 375. Boyd, Garden Plots, 114. Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 376. Ibid., 377. Sanchez, Teeth of the Lion, 6. In The Teeth of the Lion, Anita Sanchez identifies the Puritans arriving in 1620 as being the first gardeners in North America to plant dandelions, which quickly took root as an invasive species that thrives in diverse conditions: “A botanical survey of New England in 1672 reported them as well-established plants” (10). In addition to the Puritans, Sanchez points to the Spaniards and the French as also having introduced the plant to California, Mexico, and Canada, respectively (10). — 180 —

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13 Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 377. 14 In the context of Canadian literary fare, dandelion coffee is far from a culinary relic as it also appears in speculative fiction that takes place in the near future. In Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, for instance, the last human survivors on earth serve dandelion coffee at breakfast. The beverage is so popular in their post-pandemic world, where climate change has destroyed the coffee bean industry, that this community harvests all the dandelions in sight – repeating its same unsustainable behaviours from the past (Boyd, “Ustopian Breakfasts,” 168–9). During her book tour for The Year of the Flood (the second novel in the MaddAddam trilogy), Atwood shared an illustrated version of a dandelion coffee recipe (by Abbey Huggan) on her promotional blog, signalling to her twenty-first-century followers that, in an era of climate crisis, they, too, need to pay heed to ingredients that are abundant (Atwood, “Dandelion Coffee”). 15 Roy, Tin Flute, 57. 16 Ibid., 90. 17 Ibid., 17. 18 Ibid., 119. 19 Ibid., 121. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 200–1. 23 Ibid., 204. 24 Ibid., 41. 25 Ibid., 73. 26 Ibid., 110. 27 Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here, 46. 28 Ibid., 435. 29 Ibid., 101–2; and 439–40. 30 Ibid., 47. 31 Casteel, “Jews among the Indians,” 786. 32 Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here, 38. 33 Ibid., 122. 34 Ibid., 97. 35 Ibid., 526. 36 Ibid., 233. 37 Ibid., 528. 38 Ibid., 117. 39 Ibid., 556. 40 Ibid., 245. 41 Ibid., 42. 42 Ibid., 108. 43 Ibid., 258. — 181 —

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Ibid., 48. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 555. Ibid., 557. Ibid. Clarke, Whylah Falls, xi. Ibid., xxx. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid. Moynagh, “Mapping Africadia’s Imaginary Geography,” 71. Graham (Jarvis) Cromwell of Weymouth Falls, about thirty minutes from Digby, Nova Scotia, was shot and killed in 1985. Jeffery Wade Mullen was acquitted by an all-white jury, claiming self-defence although Cromwell was shot from six feet (two metres) away. “Speaker after speaker complained, ‘Graham was on trial, not Mullen’” (Clarke, “Birmingham of Nova Scotia,” 20). Ibid., 75–6. Clarke, Whylah Falls, 104. Ibid., 161. Peters, Castillo-Prentt, and Fraser-Marsman, Africville Kitchen, 27. Clarke, Whylah Falls, 119, emphasis in original. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Taylor, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, 40, emphasis in original. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 289. Ibid., 288–9. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 93, 242. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 106–7. — 182 —

NOTES TO PAGES 6 1 –74

82 Ibid., 26. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 168. PART TWO

1 Crawford, “Foreword,” vii. 2 Baird, “Foreword,” viii. 3 More than other excellent works on Canadian commercial food venues – Steve Penfold’s Donut and Janis Thiessen’s Snacks come quickly to mind – Cho’s is distinguished by her consideration of the Chinese restaurant itself and in its literary and conceptual representations. CHAPTER FOUR

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Atwood, “Margaret Atwood,” 316. Ibid. Rock, McIntyre, and Rondeau, “Discomforting Comfort Foods,” 167. Ibid., 167. Coupland, Douglas, Souvenir of Canada, 10. Koehn, “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation,” 353. Ibid., 350. McIntyre, Poems of James McIntyre, 5. Ibid., n.p. Ibid., 67. Chapman, “Manufacturing Taste.” Chapman also notes that, in 2004, Canadians only exported 19 million pounds (8.6 million kilograms) of cheese and imported 55 million (25 million kilograms). McIntyre, Poems of James McIntyre, 71–2. Chapman, “Manufacturing Taste.” “Elkhorn Cheese in Tins – 8 Varieties.” “Get Your Share of Business,” 8. Ibid., 8. “There’s Only One Kraft Cheese.” Chapman, “Manufacturing Taste.” “Cheese Roast in Place of Meat.” Mink, “James Kraft.” “Mellow Cheese Food,” 44. “My Children Adore This Cheese Food,” 35, emphasis in original. Koehn, “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation,” 352. — 183 —

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48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

“Lady Vanishes,” 53. Moubarac et al., “Processed and Ultra-Processed Food Products,” 17. Ibid., 18. Lang and Caraher, “Is There a Culinary Skills Transition?,” 2. Ibid., 6. “3 Quick Tricks with Cheese,” 25. “Delicious Macaroni-and-Cheese,” 54. Pearson, “Speed Freak Food,” 82. Allaire, “You Can Now Put KD Cheese on Everything.” Edmiston, “Serving Your Country.” Ibid. Ibid. Kraft Heinz Canada. MacLeod, “Writer’s Life,” 263–4. Moore, “Parrot,” 75. Coupland, Souvenir of Canada, 11. Coupland, Souvenir of Canada 2, 42. Prokopow, “Coupland’s True North Strong and Free,” 51, 55. Caldwell, “Artist’s Life,” R6. Firstaste@ZanderM66, “Twitter Post,” 19 September 2012. Qtd in Skogan, “Orange Crush.” di Michele, “Life Is Theatre,” 45. Ibid. “Kraft Dinner Officially Changes Its Name to ‘KD.’” Although the traditional phrase “Kraft Dinner” is most prominent in Canadian literature, since 2015, Kraft rebranded itself in Canada as simply “KD,” and, according to a brand director, “The way Canadians refer to Kraft Dinner as KD is as much a term of endearment as when you call a relative or a friend by a nickname” (“Kraft Dinner Officially Changes Its Name to ‘KD’”). Distinct Canada-US idioms are visible in two poems published in the American-based food journal Gastronomica. While Indiana-based writer Terry Kirts repeatedly references the American brand in his poem “Macaroni & Cheese Survey,” Montreal-born-and-raised writer Naomi Guttman (who has lived and taught creative writing for years in New York State), maintains the Canadian expression “Kraft Dinner” in her poem “Supermarket Blues.” Barthes, Mythologies, 142. Ibid., 143. Abrams, “Metonymy.” Skogan, “Orange Crush.” Chapman, “Manufacturing Taste.” Rock, “Kraft Dinner Unboxed,” 194. Ibid., 185. — 184 —

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Rock, McIntyre, and Rondeau, “Discomforting Comfort Foods,” 174. MacEwen, Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen, 269. Ibid., 270. Qtd in Mount, Arrival, 120. Chapman, “Manufacturing Taste.” Leslie, “Sandwich Artist,” 57, 58. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 62. Ibid. Svendsen, “White Shoulders,” 155. Kates, “Dining While at School.” Baker and Erskine-Levinson, McGill University. Coupland, Generation X, 21, emphasis in original. Guttman, “Supermarket Blues,” 78. Guttman, “Feast and Famine,” 78. Scheier, “Single Man’s Song.” Ibid. Lang and Caraher, “Is There a Culinary Skills Transition?,” 21. Fee, “Stories of Traditional Aboriginal Food,” 56. Sewell, “Macaroni Nutritional Genocide?” Guttman, “Supermarket Blues.” Elliott, Mind Spread Out, 93. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 100. Taylor, “Reality of Writer’s Life.” Ibid. Taylor, “White People.” Taylor, Berlin Blues, 27. Ibid. Flis, “City Bp, Everywhere,” 134. “Craft Dinner.” Nichol, Craft Dinner. CHAPTER FIVE

1 2 3 4 5

McLean, “I’m Feeling Lonely.” Duncan, Imperialist, 43. Ibid., emphasis added. Ibid., 43–4. Ibid., 44. — 185 —

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 106. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 62, 173. Taylor, Stanley Park, 45–6. Lynch and Watkins, “Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market.” Maracle, “Goodbye, Snauq,” 119. Groesbeck et al., “Ancient Clam Gardens.” Barman, “Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity,” 26. Maracle, “Goodbye, Snauq,” 118. Ibid., 121. Matas, “Squamish Band Settles Claim.” Maracle, “Goodbye, Snauq,” 124–5. Ibid., 125. “False Creek (Snauq), beneath Burrard bridge Plaque is on lamppost on the bike route/pedestrian walkway underneath the south end of the Burrard Bridge” – excerpt from “Literary Landmarks, Lee Maracle,” an online interactive map created by author Alan Twigg for the Vancouver Public Library, http://www.vpl.ca/literarylandmarks/map. Purdy, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, 47, 79. Purdy, “Piling Blood,” 13, lines 1–17. Ibid., 13, lines 18–30. Elofson, “BUrNS, PaTrICK.” Ibid. MacEwen, Pat Burns, 106. Ibid. Purdy, “Piling Blood,” 15, lines 65–7. Purdy, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, 128. Maracle, “Goodbye, Snauq.” Harris, Imagining Toronto, 159. Ibid., 156. Wiseman, Old Markets, 45. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 67. Panofsky, Force of Vocation, 76. Hinther, “Oldest Profession in Winnipeg,” 2–13. Gelfant, American City Novel, 11. Rakoff, “Dedication” in Baldwin Street. Ibid., 31 — 186 —

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 175. Kensington Market, “Welcome to Kensington.” Rakoff, Baldwin Street, 128. Ibid., 129–30. Ibid., 49–57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 170. Levitt and Shaffir, Riot at Christie Pits. Rakoff, Baldwin Street, 179. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 204. Gelfant, American City Novel, 11. Cannon, “Crime Books.” Meyer, Bottom Bracket, 10. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 195. Rotenberg, Old City Hall, 8. Ibid., 292–3, 347. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 146–7. Ibid., 214–15. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 142. Davis, Grimoire of Kensington Market. McCauley, “Lauren B. Davis’ The Grimoire of Kensington Market.” Ibid. Gelfant, American City Novel, 11. Corkum, “Alchemy of Magic.” “How Lauren B. Davis Explores Addiction.” Book Box Love, “Books Are a Universe.” McCauley, “Lauren B. Davis’ The Grimoire of Kensington Market.” Davis, Grimoire of Kensington Market, 24. Ibid., 35–6. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 318. Bowen, “Flood,” 71. Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 87. — 187 —

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86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Ibid., 71. Hauch, “Once Upon a City.” Lost Rivers, “Toronto’s First City Hall.” “Happy Hallowe’en.” Playwrights Canada Press, “For the Bravery of Women.” Gillis, “New Details.” Moynagh, “Uses of Cultural Memory,” 194. Clarke, Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, 200. Ibid. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 203. Ibid, 199. Robin, Wanderer, 153. Musgrave, “Taste of Place,” 20. Ibid., 19. Dickner, Nikolski, 283. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 261. Zorn, Five Roses, 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 172–3. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 301. CHAPTER SIx

1 2 3 4

Coulter, Trial of Louis Riel, 57. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 129. Dumont, Pemmican Eaters. Throughout this chapter, we alternate between “buffalo” and “bison,” in keeping with each writer’s preferred term. The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada states: “Although there are no true buffalo native to North America, many — 188 —

NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 0 – 6

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Indigenous peoples, including the Métis, refer to the bison as such” (“Bison Hunting”). Purdy, “Sundance,” 16. Ibid., 17. Ruffo, “Creating a Country,” 34. Ibid., 33. Ruffo is correct in his interpretation of Moodie as this nineteenthcentury writer clearly reproduces the trope of the “Vanishing Indian.” In Roughing It in the Bush, Moodie writes: “Often I have grieved that people with such generous impulses should be degraded and corrupted by civilised men; that a mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them, pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly and surely sweeping them from the earth” (318). However, Moodie’s interactions with her Indigenous neighbours were more nuanced than Ruffo allows. She came to respect their emphasis on reciprocity, and their generosity, which helped her family directly during times of food scarcity. Johnson, “Cattle Thief,” l:20. Ibid., 2:49–52 (emphasis in original). Fee, “We Indians Own These Lands.” Fee, “Stories of Traditional Aboriginal Food,” 55. Belcourt, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects,” 3. Hubbard, “Buffaloes Are Gone,” 70. Ibid., 71–2. Mair, “Last Bison,” 150. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 271. Hubbard, “Buffaloes Are Gone,” 71. “Regina Fair Drops Buffalo Days Theme.” Ibid. City of Regina, “Regina Facts and History.” Cunningham, Pile of Bones. Battis published his Pile of Bones series under his penname Bailey Cunningham. Boyd, “Pile of Bones.” Beatty, “Skeletons in Regina’s Closet,” 67. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains, 67–8. Ibid., 68. Barry, People Places, 116. McFadzean, “Skin for a Skin.” Zelniker, “Regina Woman Calling for City.” McFadzean, “Skin for a Skin,” 44. Government of Canada, “Banff National Park Bison Reintroduction Project.” Ibid. Canadian Bison Association, “Bison History.” — 189 —

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

Belcourt, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects,” 3. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 14. Ibid. Atwood, “Buffalo in Compound,” 138. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 21. Chiu, “Never Approach Animals” Taylor, Berlin Blues, 57. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 67. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 13. Taylor, Berlin Blues, 85. Sagan, “Exotic Meat Demand Rising.” Bremness, “Eating the Bizarre in Czar.” Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Remarkable Recipes for Sweetgrass Buffalo. [Bruneau-Guenther], “Getting Back to Our Roots.” Associated Press, “Bison Meat Business Booming.” Ibid. Government of Canada, “Canada’s Red Meat and Livestock Industry.” Peg City Grug, “Story Behind Feast Cafe and Bistro.” Babiak, Garneau Block, 72. Colpitts, Pemmican Empire, 1. Bigeagle-Kequahtooway, “Obsidian Stone Wiya,” 16. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains, 4. Ibid., 100. Bigeagle-Kequahtooway, “Obsidian Stone Wiya,” 16. Ibid., 17. Mair, American Bison, 104. Ibid. Murray, Taste of Canada; Freedman and Warlick, “High-End Dining”; Chavez-Bush, “When Cow Tongue Was an Essential Thanksgiving Ingredient.” See Murray’s discussion of Paul Kane’s Christmas dinner at Fort Edmonton in 1847, where he dined on boiled buffalo hump and tongue (59–60). See Freedman and Warlick, and Chavez-Bush for their respective discussions of beef tongue being served in upper class New York restaurants and at Thanksgiving dinner via recipes for mince meat pies. Mair, American Bison, 103. Ibid. Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 198. Ibid., 202. Mair, American Bison, 103. — 190 —

NOTES TO PAGES 14 3 –7

70 In the cookbook Buffalo Girl Cooks Bison, Jennifer Bain notes that bison meat is leaner than other proteins with “less fat and fewer calories … plus more protein and iron. It’s high in omega-3 essential fatty acids” (6). In The Buffalo Cookbook, Ruth Mossok Johnston similarly promotes bison meat’s lean qualities as one solution to her family’s love of red meat following her husband’s heart attack. Mossok later observes, “Bison are not given hormones, low-level antibiotics, nitrates, or preservatives, deeming them at this date an allergy-free meat” (28). 71 Mair, American Bison, 103–4. 72 Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 181. Stefansson notes that the first written account of pemmican by a European is from the Coronado expedition of 1540–42 in what is now the southwestern United States (180–1). 73 Kelsey, Kelsey Papers, 14. 74 Pratt, “Towards the Last Spike,” 2:613–15. 75 Ibid., l:199. 76 Colpitts, Pemmican Empire, 4. 77 Mair, American Bison, 104. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 213. 81 Ibid., 179–80. See page 188 for Stefansson’s description of the preservation technique through “the principle of mummification” as no moisture or air was able to penetrate the pemmican. 82 Colpitts, Pemmican Empire, 9. 83 Ibid., 189–90. Stefansson observes that “winter pemmican was made in the autumn, a difficult season for drying meat,” and, although it would not keep indefinitely, it lasted during the cold winter months (189). In contrast, summer pemmican “was made in the spring or summer” and, if made well, was non-perishable for years (189). 84 Mair, American Bison, 104. 85 Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 235. 86 Roy and Brooke, From Pemmican to Poutine, 216. 87 Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 260. 88 Ibid. 89 Mair, American Bison, 104. In a footnote on page 254 of Not by Bread Alone, Stefansson mentions that Hornaday “considers the last buffalo pemmican (in appreciable quantity) was sold at Winnipeg in 1883.” 90 Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 254. 91 Roy and Brooke’s From Pemmican to Poutine features a recipe for pemmican with beef jerky and beef suet (or vegetable shortening) rather than bison. Lindsay Anderson and Dana VanVeller’s Feast: Recipes and Stories from a Canadian Road Trip (2017) includes a recipe from Plains Cree Edmonton — 191 —

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92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

chef Shane Chartrand for Pemmican made from either bison or fish, as well as rendered fat or bacon grease. These pan-Canadian cookbooks are aiming to be inclusive in documenting a range of culinary practices. In contrast, some bison-focused cookbooks do not include pemmican recipes. Ruth Mossok Johnston’s The Buffalo Cookbook: The Low Fat Solution to Eating Red Meat (1995) does not include a pemmican recipe and approaches bison as a substitute for beef in response to Johnston’s husband’s heart disease. Jennifer Bain’s Buffalo Girl Cooks Bison (2014) contains recipes for an impressive range of bison parts (meat, testicles, liver, heart, marrow, stock, tongue), but there is no pemmican recipe. Habeeb Salloum’s Bison Delights: Middle Eastern Cuisine, Western Style (2010) focuses on Middle Eastern and North African Arab style cooking by using bison (rather than lamb) as the primary ingredient, so does not include a pemmican recipe. Mosionier, Spirit of the White Bison, 20. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 43. Mosionier, “Introduction,” 1. Ibid., 2. Hubbard, “Buffaloes Are Gone,” 75. Brockie and Cowell, ?O?oooniiih Wooch?ooonoh, 46–57. Hubbard, “Buffaloes Are Gone,” 65. Ibid., 76. Andrews, “Among the Word Animals.” Dumont reproduces her poem “Letter to Sir John A. MacDonald” – a satirical break-up letter that was originally published in A Really Good Brown Girl and that ends with the defiant statement “we’re still here and callin ourselves half breed” – in The Pemmican Eaters. In addition to Dumont’s poem, Métis writer Maria Campbell famously and proudly reclaimed the term in her 1973 memoir Half-Breed by telling readers “what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country” (2). “Marilyn Dumont.” Korthals, “Food as a Source,” 79. Wiebe, “Louis Riel,” 209. Stefansson, Not by Bread Alone, 184. See also 226. Dumont, Pemmican Eaters, 12. “Marilyn Dumont.” Dumont, Pemmican Eaters, 12. Ibid. Goldstein, “Afterword,” 360. Brown, “Michif.” Dumont, Pemmican Eaters, 16. Ibid., 16. — 192 —

NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 1 – 6 0

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Ibid., 14. “Bison.” Dumont, Pemmican Eaters, 11. Wiseman, “Brief Anatomy,” 100. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 101. Francis, “My Urban Rez.” Francis, City Treaty, 6. Francis, “My Urban Rez.” Cariou, “How Come These Guns Are So Tall.” Francis, City Treaty, 6. Cariou, “How Come These Guns Are So Tall.” Bergman, “Buffalo Reborn,” 48. CONCLUSION

1 Many teas, made from Canadian-grown berries, leaves, needles, and herbs that are harvested by hand, are slowly seeping into the national market. Traditional black tea is now grown and harvested at Westholme on Vancouver Island. See Summerfield, “Are Canadians Trading?” For more on the history and farming practices of Teafarm (Westholme Tea Co.) on Vancouver Island, Canada’s first commercial tea producer, see BC Farms and Food, “Teafarm Brews up a New Crop for Canada.” 2 Cuthbert, “Red Rose Resurrects Brand.” 3 Cohen, “Parasites of Heaven,” 70, lines 7–8. 4 Reynolds, “Tea” (empahsis in original). 5 Fleck, “In Praise of a Good Cup of Tea,” 11, lines 13–16. 6 Ibid., lines 5–8. 7 Roy, “Sister Finance,” 40–1. 8 Wilson, Innocent Traveller, 128. 9 Ibid., 129. 10 Taylor, “Pretty Like a White Boy,” 6. 11 Dumont, Really Good Brown Girl, 11. 12 Carr, “Cup of Tea,” 137–8. 13 Wong-Chu, “Recipe for Tea,” 31–3. 14 Ibid., 31, lines 14–19. 15 Ibid., 32, lines 46–9. 16 Clark, Chai Tea Sunday, 76–7. 17 Bolton, “Interview with Taslim Burkowicz,” 1:31. 18 Burkowicz, Chocolate Cherry Chai, 94. 19 Ibid., 95. — 193 —

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

Ibid. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 205. Scott, “Canadian Authors Meet,” lines 13–20. Oppenheimer Group, “Company History.” The Oppenheimer Group is also known as “Oppy.” BC Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation, “Fresh Story.” Oxford English Dictionary, “Mandarin n. 2.” Ibid., “Mandarin n. 1.” BC Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation, “Fresh Story.” In the United States, as well as in Europe, there is a long-standing tradition of giving oranges at Christmas. In an article for the Smithsonian Magazine, Jackie Mansky writes that the ritual of placing an orange in the toe of a Christmas stocking has been around since the early nineteenth century and “may have something to do with the legend of the three balls (or bags or bars or coins) of gold that the Bishop of Myra, the real Saint Nicholas, gave to three poor maidens to use as dowries.” Mansky also notes that, in the early 1900s, the California Fruit Growers Exchange intensely marketed its Sunkist label as a healthy gift during the holidays, which helped to grow consumer demand. Unlike Canadians, therefore, Americans do not associate this holiday fruit with Japan but, instead, with California and Florida, especially since the United States has strict regulations on citrus imports to protect its own domestic crops from pests and diseases. For instance, a December 2017 advisory from US Customs and Border Protection informs Canadian tourists travelling south for the holidays that they will not be allowed to bring their Christmas oranges, or mandarins, with them across the border. See US Customs and Border Protection, “Importation Advisory.” Proctor, “Mandarin Idol.” Roy, Tin Flute, 292. American literature and cinema often highlight oranges (a holiday treat) in the context of difficult economic times. For example, Truman Capote’s short story “A Christmas Memory” (1956), which takes place in the early 1930s, features a young boy and his elderly female cousin scrimping, saving, and gathering windfall ingredients to bake fruitcakes. On Christmas morning, the cousin receives a “sack of Satsumas,” which is “her best present” (224). In a study on the American foodlore of the orange, Jay Mechling points to Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945), in which Wright recalls cherishing a Christmas orange during his impoverished childhood in the South following the First World War (120). Mechling also mentions American films, such as the 1994 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women (1868), which opens with one of the March sisters “treasuring her Christmas orange in the midst of hard times” (121). During the latter part of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries, the orange has lost part of its unique holi— 194 —

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

day charm, especially since it is widely available year-round. For example, in his poem “Seven Photographs of Winter” (2011), the Native American writer N. Scott Momaday reflects that “the Christmas orange is not as indispensable, not as definitive, as it / used to be” and adds, “an orange is an / orange” (68). Neither Momaday nor his children are enthralled by this standard holiday fare. In contrast, Momaday’s father, a member of the Kiowa tribe on the Oklahoma Plains and born in 1913, was amazed at receiving “a beautiful bright ball, of a color that shone like the sun” during his first Christmas – a memory that stayed with him for the rest of his life (68). Munro, “Boys and Girls,” 112. Campbell, Halfbreed, 50. Ibid. Akhtar, “Orange You Glad.” Simons, “Mandarin Oranges a Prairie Tradition.” Proctor, “Mandarin Idol.” One thinks here, in particular, of Francis Ponge’s poetic meditations on oranges, those appearing in four sections of Gertrude Stein’s 1914 poetic sequence Tender Buttons, and the pungent oranges and bright, green wings in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning.” Campbell, Hidden Rooms, 339. Campbell, “Moonlight and Morning,” 82. Ibid. Bowman, “Oranges,” 26, lines 51, 56. Ibid., 28, line 101. Ibid., 29, lines 113–23. Ibid., lines 125–6. Ross, “Cornet at Night,” 42. “Perhaps it was the restaurant itself, the pyramids of oranges in the window and the dark green rubber plant with the tropical-looking leaves, the indolent little Chinaman behind the counter and the dusky smell of last night’s cigarette’s that to my prairie nostrils was the orient itself, the exotic atmosphere about it all with which a meal of meat and vegetables and pie would have somehow simply jarred” (42). Ibid., 46-7. Ibid., 51. The first edition was published in the United States by Reynal and Hitchcock in 1941 and in Canada by McClelland and Stewart in 1957. Ross, As For Me and My House, 266. Ibid. Hyman, Oranges, 98. Ross, As For Me and My House, 274–5. Martyris, “Story.” Ibid. — 195 —

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Simmons, I’m You’re Man, 126. Vassilopoulos, “Greek Islanders Pay Homage.” Goto, Chorus of Mushrooms, 91. Ibid. Ibid., 92. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 91. Ibid. Simons, “Mandarin Oranges a Prairie Tradition. ” Aritha Van Herk, “Lines on Biting into Kroetsch’s Lemons. Again,” in Markotic, Robert Kroetsch, 179. Geddes, “A Rum Analysis,” in Markotic, Robert Kroetsch, 186. Kroetsch, “Sketches of a Lemon.” Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in Poetry 81, lines 1–5. Parisi and Young, “Introduction,” xxx. Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in Poetry 82, line 47. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 29–30. Cohen, “Suzanne,” 70, lines 1–6, 14–15. Ibid., lines 27–9. Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in Harmonium, 89–90, lines 19–22. Cohen, “Suzanne,” 71, lines 42–8.

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INDEx

Abelson, Leonard, 104–5 abjection, 27 Africadia, 57–9 African American Vernacular English or Caribbean demotic, 46 Africville, 4, 48, 57–8; museum x, 58 allegory, 11; political, 14 amisk, 13 apples, 48, 57, 58, 163, 167, 170; and blossoms, 46; cores, 114; crabapples, 100; pie, 57–9; trees, 170 aspic, 19 assimilation, 26, 28, 30, 40 Atwater Market, 120, 124–6 Atwood, Margaret: “Buffalo in Compound: Alberta,” 136, 143; The CanLit FoodBook, 17, 65, 176n25; dandelion coffee, 181n14; feeds her characters, 65; and Kraft Dinner, 68, 89 Avison, Margaret, 170 Babiak, Todd, The Garneau Block, 139–40 Baird, Elizabeth, 63–4 bannock, 31, 39–43, 135, 138, 158, 179n45 Barry, Bill, People Places, 134 Barthes, Roland, 81, 184n49 Battis, Jes, 134, 189n23 Beatty, Greg, 134 beaver, 10–16; Beaver Club (Montreal), 146 Belcourt, Billy-Ray, 131, 136 Berger, John, 136–7 bison, 5–7, 66; in Atwood, 136, 143; in Babiak, 139–40; in Battis, 134; in Bigeagle-Kequahtooway, 140–1;

bison economy, 141; and Buffalo Days, 132–3; buffalo jump, 66; in Butala, 154; in cookbooks, 138, 191n70, 191n91; Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, 138; in Dumont, 129, 148– 50; extermination of, 129–30, 132–3, 146–7; in Francis, 152-3; hunters, 140–1; in Johnson, 131; at Kensington Market, 140; language, 150–1; in Mair, 132, 141–3; in Mosionier, 147–8; narratives, 128–9, 131–3; ossuary, 135; in parks, 135–8, 154; and pemmican, 137, 143–7; as protest, 151–2; in Purdy, 130; and Regina, 132–3, 135; relations, 140–1, 147–8, 150–1; as restaurant fare, 138–9, 190n64; in Ruffo, 130; as staple of fur trade, 141–4; in Taylor, 137–8; as teacher, 147–50; in Wiseman, 151–2 Black cake (Trinidadian) or burn sugar cake, 43–6 Bigelow, Cindi, 168 Bonisteel, Sara, 21 Bowen, Leah-Simone, The Flood and Other Misadventures of the Female Prisoners of the St Lawrence Market, 114–17 Bowman, Louise Morey, “Oranges,” 165–6 buffalo, in comparison with “bison,” 188n4; See bison Burkowicz, Taslim, Chocolate Cherry Chai, 159–60, 162 Butala, Sharon, 154 Butson, Barry, 24 butter tarts, 10, 20–4, 60, 170

INDEX

Campbell, Maria, Half-Breed, 163, 192n102 Campbell, Wanda, 166 Canada Food Guide, 88 cannibalism, 16 Carr, Emily, The Book of Small, 158 Casteel, Sarah, 55 ceremonial meals: apology, 22, 38; Christmas, 43–4, 156, 163–4, 167, 169–70, 190n64, 194n28, 194n31; communion, 80; (Holy) Communion, 16, 143; Indigenous Welcoming Feast, 11, 15; Last Supper, 15; Yom Kippur, 54, 105 Chicago World’s Fair, 70–3 Cho, Lily, 66 Chop Suey Cuisine, 31, 35–6 Choy, Wayson, All That Matters, 34 Christmas. See ceremonial meals Clark, Heather, Chai Tea Sunday, 159, 162 Clarke, Austin, Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit, 117–19 Clarke, George Elliott, Whylah Falls, 4, 48, 57–9 Coady, Lynn, 25–6 Cohen, Leonard, 134; “Suzanne,” 155, 168–9, 172–3 Colpitts, George, Pemmican Empire, 140, 144–5 Cooley, Dennis, “Moon Musings,” 24 Coulter, John, The Trial of Louis Riel, 129 Coupland, Douglas, 70; Canada House, 78–9; Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture, 86; Souvenir of Canada, 78; tweets about Kraft Dinner, 79 Crawford, Lynn, 63 Cree, Indigenous peoples, 10, 128, 131, 134, 140, 150, 152; language, 13, 131, 133–4, 150 Critchley, Laura, and Helen Windrath, Something to Savour, 17 Cromwell, Graham Norman, 57, 182n55 culinary transition, 75–6, 83, 87

dandelion, 48–52; coffee, 47, 49–50, 181n14; seeds to North America, 51, 180n12 Daschuk, James, 134, 141 Davis, Lauren, 111–13 Dead Dog Café, 60 diabetes, 89 Dickens, Charles, 115–16, 157 Dickenson, Emily, 45–6 Dickner, Nicolas, Nikolski, 121–4, 127 Dumont, Marilyn, The Pemmican Eaters, 128–9, 148–51, 154; A Really Good Brown Girl, 158, 192n102 Duncan, Sara Jeannette, The Imperialist, 6, 65, 94–5 Ecclefechan’s tart, 21 Elliott, Alicia, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, 88–9 elysium, in Davis, 112–13; Elysium in Greek mythology, 112 Epic, form, 4; novel, 54; blues ballad, 57 Fee, Margery, 87, 131 fictional food, Canadian authors serving up, 65; fish shop, 122; on Richler’s Franklin Expedition, 55 First World War, 100, 172, 194n31 Five Roses Cookbook, 20 Fleck, Widow, Poems on Various Subjects, 157 food bank, 28, 82 food voice (selected), definition, 3; introduction to, 3–8 foodways, x, xi; adaptation, 47; British immigrant, 34; buffalo, 137–47, 150; Canadian, 5, 7, 10, 36, 64, 91, 155, 169, 173; Chinese, 35; Chinese Canadian, 32; definition, 4; domestic, 77, 95; Haisla, 40, 41; and health, 42; historical, 5; Indigenous, 12, 13, 87, 88–9, 90, 133, 152, 154; literary exploration of, 150; meaning making, 124, 126; of the oppressor, 10, 31;

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INDEX

potential of, 64, 162; settler colonial, 40, 159; signals identity, 60, 70, 78; sustainable, 63; transition, 70, 129, 131, 153; in Wah, 30; in Zorn, 126–7 Francis, Marvin, City Treaty: A Long Poem, 152–3 Franklin, Sir John, 54–5; (doomed) Expedition, 48 Friis-Baastad, Erling, 79 garlic, 31, 36, 37, 54; in moose stew, 59 Geddes, Gary, 170 Gelfant, Blanche, The American City Novel: portrait study of a city, 104; ecological study, 108; synoptic study, 112 Gemeos, Os, 98 Gillman, Gary, 21 ginger, 30–1, 37 ginger ale, 60, 90 ginger beef, 31–6; illustration, 33; origin story, 36 gingerbread, 90, 95 Goldstein, Darra, 150 Gora, L. Sasha, 13 Gordon-Walker, Caitlin, 36 Gotlib, Daniel, 77 Goto, Hiromi, Chorus of Mushrooms, 169 Granville Island Public Market, 6, 96–100 Great Canadian Literary Cookbook, The, 65 Harris, Amy Lavender, 101 Highway, Tomson, 10; Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, 11–16 Hoffman, James, 11 Hornaday, William Temple, 146–7, 191n89 Hubbard, Tasha, 129, 132–3, 147–8 Huggan, Abbey, 181n14 Hui, Ann, 35 hunger: as extended metaphor for Montreal, 47, 52–3; emotional, 83; fuelling plot, 113; and Kraft Dinner,

81, 83; metaphorical, 23, 117, 119; to rise above, 57; to satisfy, 52, 81, 109; as theme, 64; The Hunger, 23 Hyman, Clarissa, 167 Ichiban, 39, 84 iconic fare, 7, 10, 20, 26, 30, 35–6, 77, 155. See also totem food Jean Talon Market, 119–24 Jell-O, 17, 39 Kane, Paul, 132, 134, 190n64 Kaslik, Ibi, 26 Kates, Joanne, 85 Kelsey, Henry, 144 Kensington Market, 6, 101–3, 120, 138, 140; in Clarke, 117–19; in Davis, 111–13; illustration, 102; in Meyer, 108–9; in Rakoff, 104–7 Kilgour, Maggie, 16 King, Thomas, 60 Koehn, Nancy, 70, 74 Korthals, Michiel, 149 kosher, 54 Kraft Dinner, 5, 39, 155; as Canadian idiom, 81, 86, 184n47, 184n48; and Covid pandemic, 77; food voice of, 155; general overview 64–5; history, 68–70, 72–4; illustration, 69, 75; and immigrants, 80; and Indigenous communities, 39, 87–90, 137; marketing, 76–7; and metonymy, 81–2; Pacific National Exhibition, 74–5; and poverty, 82–3; and region, 78–80; as symbol of domestic world, 69, 86–7; and university students, 68, 85–6; versus craft dinner, 90–1 Kraft, James, 72, 74 Kroetsch, Robert, 170–1 Lam, Vincent, “How to Get into Medical School, Part II,” 32–3 Laurier, Prime Minister Wilfred, 11–16

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INDEX

Laurier Memorial, 11–12, 15–16 Lee, Dennis, 65 Leslie, Alex, “The Sandwich Artist,” 83–4 Long, Lucy, 3–4 literary analysis of food (guiding concepts), 4 lyric, 32, 57–8, 168, 170, 172 MacEwen, Grant, biography of Pat Burns, 100 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 65, 83 MacLeod, Alastair, 78 Maharaj, Rabindranath, 10; “Bitches on All Sides,” 25–9 Mandarin oranges. See oranges maple: bread and butter, 176n25; mousse, 17–9; sap, 53; syrup, 10, 16–9, 38, 176n24 Maracle, Lee, “Goodbye, Snauq,” 96–8 Margoshes, Dave, “The Gift,” 23 markets, 6, 65–6, 92ff; as leitmotif, 95; prompt for literary experimentation, 108ff; organizational structure, 119, 122–4, 127; setting for character and action, 122; sites of diversity, 101–7 McCauley, Marcie, 112 McDonald’s, 28, 78, 153 McGee, Diane, 3 McLean, Maria Coletta, 92, 118–19 metaphor (selected), 67; extended, 6, 52, 63–4; food as, 4–7, 149; fry bread, 40; ginger, 30, 36; Kraft Dinner as, 64, 82–3, 85, 87–8, 90; literalizing of, 9; and prejudice, 149; recipe, 16, 31; sexual, 13–14; vehicle and tenor of, 9 metonym: definition, 81; bison as, 6. See also metaphor Meyer, Vivian, Bottom Bracket, 108–9, 111 Michif, 150–1 Montgomery, L.M., Anne of Green Gables, 161 Moodie, Susanna, and dandelion, 48–9, 51; and dandelion coffee, 49–51;

“Disappointed Hopes,” 51; hard scrabble survival, 52; and Indigenous peoples, 130, 189n8; Roughing It in the Bush, 48–52; as transplant to Canada 47 Moore, Lisa, “Parrot,” 78 moose stew, 59, 61, 158 Mosionier, Beatrice, Spirit of the White Bison, 147–8 Moynagh, Maureen: on Austin Clarke, 117; on George Elliott Clarke, 57–8 Munro, Alice, 10; 16–17; “Boys and Girls,” 163; in cookbooks, 17, 176n25; “Friend of My Youth,” 176n24; “Spelling” (Who Do You Think You Are?), 17–19, 22–3; “Sunday Afternoon” (Dance of the Happy Shades), 19 Murray, Aife, 46 Murray, Rose, 63 Musgrave, Sarah, 120–1 Muslim, 25, 29 myth: in Barthes, 81; and Christianity, 16; in Clarke, 48, 57–8 ; in Dickner, 122; and Elysium, 112; and Kraft Dinner, 83, 91; in Pratt, 144; in Richler, 54–5; 57–8 Nash, Alan, 34 Newman, Lenore, 177n60 Nouveau Native cuisine, 60 nutrition transition, 87 ode, 64; in Butson, 24; in Clarke, 57; in McIntyre, 70–2, 77 Ojibway, 21, 48, 89, 137, 150, 158; OjibwayWorld, 90, 137 oolichan grease, 39 oranges (Mandarin), 155–6; in Bowman, 165–6; Christmas, 156, 163–4, 194n28, 194n31; in Cohen, 155, 168–9, 172–3; in Goto, 169; and Japanese immigrants, 155, 162–3; in Kroetsch, 170–1; in Munro, 163; in Ross, 167–8, 195n46; in Roy, 163; served with tea, 7, 157; in Stein, 170, 195n38

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INDEX

Os Gemeos, 98 Peking duck, 38 pemmican, 155; in BigeagleKequahtooway, 140–1; as Canadian, 155; with Communion, 143; crosscultural comparisons of, 143, 147; as delicacy, 146; dishes, 146; in Dumont, 148–51, 154; figurative meaning, 149; in Francis, 152–3; pemmican bag (illustration), 145; “Pemmican Pete,” 133; Pemmican Proclamation, 144; Pemmican War, 144; phrase “pemmican-eaters,” 148–9; in Pratt, 144; preservation of, 191n81; recipes for, 147, 191–2n91; as staple, 140, 144–5; in Taylor, 137; types of, 140–1, 146, 191n83; in Wiebe, 149 personification, 26–7 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, 31; “Burn Sugar,” 43–6; “Making Black Cake in Combustible Spaces,” 45–6 Pittet, Diana, 3 Ponge, Francis, 170, 195n38 pork, 10, 25–9, 177n60, 177n61 Pratt, E.J., “Towards the Last Spike,” 144 Prokopow, Michael, 79 Purdy, Al, “Married Man’s Song” 86; “Piling Blood,” 98–100; “Sundance,” 130 Rachel Street, 103–4 Rakoff, Alvin, Baldwin Street, 104-8, 114 recipe: 7, 63, 65; Africville, 58; in Atwood, 181n14; by authors, 65, 176n25; buffalo, 138, 142, 147, 191n91; Burkowicz’s Chocolate Cherry Chai, 160; butter tart origin, 20; in Clarke, 58; in Di Michele, 80; Dickenson’s black cake, 45–6; Dumont’s pemmican, 149-50, 154; ginger beef origin, 36; in Highway, 15-16; from immigration, 63; Kraft Dinner, 74, 76, 80, 89; in Leslie, 84; metaphor,

31, 84; Moodie’s dandelion coffee, 49–51; Munro’s maple mousse, 17–18; NourbeSe Philip’s burn sugar cake, 45–6; in Robinson, 39; sharing of, 5, 36, 39, 45; simile, 15–16; in Taylor, 89; in Thien, 31, 36–9; Wah’s tomato beef, 31; Wok with Yan, 37; WongChu’s “Recipe for Tea,” 159 residential school, 31, 39–41, 61, 87, 89 Resnick, Phillip, 20–1 restaurants, 65–6, 92, 138–9; Chinese, 34–5, 66, 167, 195n46; Dead Dog Café, 60; at Granville Island, 98; in Lam, 32; in Maharaj, 28; in Meyer, 109; Montreal, 34; in Richler, 56; in Ross, 167, 195n46; in Rotenberg, 110–11; in Roy, 52–3; Silver Inn and ginger beef, 36; in Taylor, 90; in Taylor serving Nouveau Native cuisine 60–1; in Zorn, 126 Reynolds, Eileen, 157 Richler, Mordecai, Solomon Gursky Was Here, 48, 54–7 Robin, Régine, The Wanderer (La Québécoite), 119–21, 124, 127 Robinson, Eden: on bannock, 31, 42; on celiac diagnosis, 42–3, 179n43; Monkey Beach, 39–43; “The Salmon Eaters,” 43; Son of a Trickster, 42–3 Rock, Melanie, 69, 82 Rosenthal, Joe, 104 Ross, Sinclair: As For Me and My House, 167–8; “Cornet at Night,” 167, 195n46 Rossetti, Christina, Goblin Market, 66 Rotenberg, Robert, Old City Hall, 109–11 Roy, Gabrielle, 47; The Tin Flute, 52–4, 163; hunger in, 60; restaurants in, 66; “Sister Finance,” 157 Ruffo, Armand Garnet, “Creating a Country,” 130, 189n8 Rule, Jane, 68 Saint Lawrence Market, 109–10; in Bowen, 114–17; illustration, 115–16

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INDEX

satire, 10, 55, 87–9, 137, 151–3, 192n102 Scott, F.R., 161 Second World War, 17, 47, 52–3, 70, 100, 163 Sewell, Anna Marie, 87–8 Shapiro, Anna, A Feast of Words for Lovers of Food and Fiction, 17 Shields, Carol, 65 Simmons, Sylvia, 168 Simons, Paula, 170 Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk, The Hunger, 23 Snauq, 6, 96–8, 100; Snauq supermarket, 98, 100 soup, 57, 59, 113, 124, 158; corn, 61; Heinz, 75; pemmican, 146; stirring the figurative 60 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 143–6, 149 Stein, Gertrude, 170, 195n38 Sterling, Justine, 35 Stevens, Wallace, 170; “Sunday Morning,” 171–3, 195n38 sweetness: in Butson, 24; in Munro, 10, 17–19; in NourbeSe Philip, 43; in Robinson, 40 Taylor, Drew Hayden, The Berlin Blues, 90, 137; on butter tarts, 21–2; on Kraft Dinner, 89; many food voices, 48; Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, 59–62; “Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway,” 158 Taylor, Timothy, Stanley Park, 96 tea, 95, 111, 113, 124–5; as alternative to alcohol, 157, 160; as Canadian, 7, 155, 159, 161, 193n1; chai, 159–60; and colonialism, 159; as comfort, 157–8; to define social class, 161; “elevenses,” 157; paired with lemons, 158, 170, 170; paired with oranges, 155–7, 168–9,

172–3; and self-representation, 158; store-bought, 50 Thien, Madeleine, “Simple Recipes,” 31, 36–9 Thiessen, Janis, 183n3 Thrice, Mark, “The Chivaree,” 23–4 tomato beef, 31 totem food, 78, 80–1, 90. See also iconic fare Traill, Catharine Parr: on dandelions, 48–9; The Female Emigrant’s Guide, 20, 49–50, 177n61; hard scrabble survival, 52; on Moodie’s dandelion coffee, 49–50; on pork, 177n61; Studies of Plant Life in Canada, 49; as transplant to Canada, 47 Van Herk, Aretha, 170 Varguvarrai Tea Estate, 160 Verdal, Suzanne, 168 Wah, Fred, 30–1, 36; Diamond Grill, 31; restaurants in, 66; Waiting for Saskatchewan, 31–2 Weaver, Robert, 83 Wiebe, Rudy, 149 Williams, William Carlos, 170 Wilson, Ethel, The Innocent Traveller, 157–8 Windrath, Helen, 17 Wiseman, Adele: “A Brief Anatomy of an Honest Attempt at a Pithy Statement about the Impact of the Manitoba Environment on My Development as an Artist,” 151–2; Old Worlds, New Markets, 101–4 Wok with Yan, 37 Wong-Chu, Jim, “Recipe for Tea,” 159 Wood, Sally Eliza, 156 Zorn, Alice, Five Roses, 124–7

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