What's to Eat?
Entrées in Canadian Food History
What do and did we eat? What do our food stories tell us about who we are or were? What's to Eat? serves up twelve preliminary answers to initiate and nourish the discussion of food in Canada.
Description
How we as Canadians procure, produce, cook, consume, and think about food creates our cuisine, and our nation of immigrant traditions has produced a distinctive and evolving repertoire that is neither hodgepodge nor smorgasbord. Contributors, who come from the diverse worlds of universities, museums, the media, and gastronomy, look at Canada's distinctive foodways from the shared perspective of the current moment. Individual chapters explore food items and choices, from those made by Canada's First Nations and early settlers to those made today. Other contributions describe the ways in which foods enjoyed by early Canadians have found their way back onto Canadian tables in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Authors emphasize the expressive potential of food practices and food texts; cookbooks are more than books to be read and used in the kitchen, they are also documents that convey valuable social and historical information.