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?: Entrées in Canadian Food History, a new volume edited by Professor Nathalie Cooke of McGill University, serves up twelve preliminary answers to initiate and nourish the discussion of food in Canada. The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and McGill-Queen's University Press invite you to celebrate the official Montreal launch of What's to Eat? on Wednesday, October 7, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.
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.
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.
WHO: The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and McGill-Queen's University Press
WHAT: Book launch: What's to Eat?: Entrées in Canadian Food History
WHEN: Wednesday, October 7, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
WHERE: The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, 3463 Peel St.