In the twenty-first century, food is media - it is not just on plates,
but in literature and on screens, displayed in galleries, studios, and
public places. Canadian Culinary Imaginations provokes new conversations
about the food-related concepts, memories, emotions, cultures,
practices, and tastes that make Canada unique. This collection brings
together academics, writers, artists, journalists, and curators to
discuss how food mediates our experiences of the nation and the world.
Together, the contributors reveal that culinary imaginations reflect and
produce the diverse bodies, contexts, places, communities, traditions,
and environments that Canadians inhabit, as well as their personal and
artistic sensibilities. Arranged in four thematic sections - Indigeneity
and foodways; urban, suburban, and rural environments; cultural and
national lineages; and subversions of categories - the essays in this
collection indulge a growing appetite for conversations about creative
engagements with food and the world at large. As the essays and images
in Canadian Culinary Imaginations demonstrate, food is more than
sustenance - as language and as visual and material culture, it holds
the power to represent and remake the world in unexpected ways.
