What's to Eat?

"What's to Eat?" serves up twelve preliminary answers to initiate and nourish the discussion of food in Canada. How Canadians procure, produce, cook, consume, and think about food creates a cuisine, and a nation of immigrant traditions producing 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. Through a close examination of our shared past and by taking notice of something that often goes unnoticed, "What's to Eat?" explores how we can better understand our own food practices to create both a sustainable and healthy future and a renewed sense of the pleasures afforded by the daily meal in Canada. Contributors of this title include: Shelley Boyd (McGill University), Nathalie Cooke (McGill University), Victoria Dickenson (McCord Museum, Montreal), Gary Draper (retired, Saint Jerome's College, University of Waterloo), Elizabeth Driver (Campbell House Museum, Toronto), Margery Fee (University of British Columbia), Sneja Gunew (University of British Columbia), Jean-Pierre Lemasson (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Catherine Macpherson (McCord Museum, Montreal), Marie Marquis (Universite de Montreal), Sarah Musgrave (Concordia University), Rhona Richman Kenneally (Concordia University), and Andrew F. Smith (New School, New York).