Settler gastrocolonialism on display: Zoe Tennant, ‘Terra Nullius on the Plate: Colonial Blindness, Restaurant Discourse, and Indigenous Cuisines’, in Shelley Boyd, Dorothy Barenscott (eds), Canadian Culinary Imaginations, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler gastrocolonialism on display: Zoe Tennant, ‘Terra Nullius on the Plate: Colonial Blindness, Restaurant Discourse, and Indigenous Cuisines’, in Shelley Boyd, Dorothy Barenscott (eds), Canadian Culinary Imaginations, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

06Jul24

Excerpt: On any given night in a Canadian city, it is possible to eat at restaurants offering a wide variety of cuisines – from Moroccan to Vietnamese, from French to Sri Lankan. However, it is almost impossible to go to a restaurant that serves Indigenous cuisines. In Canada, there are foods that are considered “Indigenous” (taas guz, whipped soapalillie, and roe-on-kelp, to name a few), but one is hard pressed to find these dishes on a menu. French gastronomic writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s oft-quoted “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are” – better known as “you are what you eat” – sums up the basic tenet of the social science of food: that what we eat and the way we eat reflect wider cultural, social, and political processes. What if we were to flip this? What does it mean when a cuisine is not consumed? Cultural anthropologist Carolyn Morris, writing about the absence of Maori cuisine in restaurants in New Zealand, argues that restaurants are signifiers of the public visibility of cuisines and are indicators of capital. According to Morris, “the public culinascape can be read as a map of the field of race relations.” What do Morris’s remarks suggest about the culinary field, the restaurant culture, and the state of settler colonialism in Canada?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed