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Editor’s Introduction

Renée Desjardins

Introduction de l’équipe éditoriale

Renée Desjardins

Feeding Food Studies: Undergraduate and Graduate Student Research, Writing & Art

Holly Morgan and Barbara Parker

Nourrir les études sur la nourriture : recherches étudiantes de premier et deuxième cycles, art et écriture

Holly Morgan and Barbara Parker

An Exploration of Discursive Framings of Body Weight in Obesity Canada and the Association for Size Diversity and Health’s Websites

Rachel Waugh
Body weight discourse varies based on which researcher you speak to. This can be confusing for those new to the field of weight science, especially for students or early career researchers. Organizations like Obesity Canada have student-led “Student and New Professional” groups which discuss higher-weights as “obesity” with students in healthcare related fields. Medicalizing body weight and labelling obesity as a chronic disease differs from Health At Every Size® or the work that fat studies scholars are doing. This can create turmoil for students, unsure of where they fit in these discussions of weight. This research paper was completed as part of an undergraduate directed study to explore discourse as a method to analyze body weight paradigms. First, discourse is explored as a method, then the medicalization of body weight is questioned. Viewpoints like those of Obesity Canada, Health At Every Size®, and fat studies scholars are explored and compared. A discourse analysis was completed to compare and contrast Obesity Canada and the Association of Size Diversity and Health’s websites. Findings indicate fatness can be framed differently, dependant on positionality (e.g., healthist or sizeist) and ideologies present on online websites.

Pig’s Feet: An Autoethnography of Weight-Based Discrimination

Amber Saville
Using autoethnography, this paper examines my experiences in public school and a medical encounter as these were shaped through my disability and an eating disorder. I explore themes of fat stigma, fat shaming and weight-based discrimination. Autoethnography is a research method that connects and critically reflects on personal narratives with wider cultural and social phenomenon. Through writing about my own embodied experiences, I employ the concept of healthism, which contends that individuals are responsible for their own health. Health is broadly understood in the socio-historical contexts of the childhood "obesity epidemic" and the thin ideal. Through my analysis I show how weight-bias and fat stigma lead to fat shaming and healthcare avoidance.

Roots and Returns: An Afropolitan Reading of Food in Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread

Sara-Ann Strong
Food, food related imagery, and food vocabulary are integral to Francesca Ekwuyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread (2020). Beyond the edible items enumerated in the title, the narrative features numerous scenes of meals, kitchen prep, restaurants, culinary schools, and feasts, not to mention recurring imagery associated with the tastes and smells of food. This essay begins with Afropolitan conceptions of movement and class throughout the African diaspora to illuminate the way that food relates to plot, characterization, theme, and symbolism in Butter Honey Pig Bread. After establishing the premise that food is distinctly multidirectional in Ekwuyasi’s novel, this essay suggests that food operates to complexify the protagonists’ experiences of time and space by blurring the lines between youth and adulthood and between Canada and Nigeria. The main points of this essay offer an exploration of food’s ability to address the tension between the characters in their home through the sites dedicated to food such as the kitchen and the garden. Food divisions in the novel also gesture to the inherent privilege of the Afropolitan and the tensions within Afropolitanism. Food embodies these tensions as much as they defy them, temporally and spatially. In Butter Honey Pig Bread, sites of painful memories such as gardens and slaughterhouses are awaiting the creation of a memory that acts as a balm to the wound the pain creates. Ultimately, food in Butter Honey Pig Bread is a vehicle that simultaneously displaces and returns its passengers—the protagonists—home, wherever and whenever that may be.

The Strawberry Girl

Shawna Guenther
I wrote this piece when I lived in Saskatchewan and visited my parents in Halifax. With the increasing distribution of GMO fruits and vegetables in megastores, this story brings us back to the most important source of food in Canada: the local small farming community.

The Taste of Salt

Dylan Sammon
While depleting cod stocks, backroom politics, two world wars, an occasional natural disaster, and the unforgiving tug of modernity all contributed to the decline of Newfoundland’s outport villages, none of those factors could erase the rich culinary traditions that came from outport kitchens. What follows is a story that speaks to that decline, to the people who lived through it, and to the recipes they created. In 1970s Nebraska, rolling blackouts are causing disruptions in the local correctional facility’s execution schedule. Simply put, the electric chair won’t work if there’s no power. This breakdown plays to one death row inmate’s favour, however, as an institutional technicality allows him to get a different last meal for every night that he is due to be executed. The inmate’s name is Cupid Dawes, and his meal choices end up revealing a long-lost culture that (through taste) reignites his love of life and home and helps him come to terms with both his past and his present. Luckily for us, the local paper’s death-row correspondent is on hand to witness it all, even acting as a messenger between Cupid and the angry prison chef who must manage the inmate’s progressively more specific meal requests.

Gentrified Foodways in North End Halifax

Megan White
The North End of Halifax has been subject to gentrification for decades. While much of the discourse about gentrification focuses on housing, this Petite Madeleine examines a less discussed type of gentrification, the gentrification of access to cultural foodways. The literature reviewed focuses on Black foodways, the forced displacement of Africville residents, and the how the foodscape of the North end has been influenced by white ways of eating. Told from the perspective of a North End resident who is a dietetic intern at the North End Community Health Centre, this paper highlights the inequalities in access to cultural foods stemming from racial marginalization, social exclusion, and how the preservation of foodways are used as resistance to systemic racism.

Foodways as Highways: Using Food as Cultural Escape

Jack Chi
This digital art piece draws inspiration from my own experiences attempting to navigate the interconnectedness of food, culture, and queerness, as well as two pieces examining immigrant food experiences. Anita Mannur’s “Perfection on a Plate: Readings in the South Asian Transnational Queer Kitchen” relates queerness and food in an analysis of the film Nina’s Heavenly Delights, and Tulasi Srinivas’s "’As Mother Made It': The Cosmopolitan Indian Family, ’Authentic' Food and The Construction of Cultural Utopia” focusses on the unique experiences of the children of immigrants. In this piece, the girl flees heteronormativity in favor of queerness; simultaneously, she flees traditional Chinese foods in favour of Canadian fare. It is representative of the internal conflict experienced by immigrants and children of immigrants as they are torn between cultures, and the intrinsic links between food and culture. The girl strides across the chasm on a path of shattering plates, using food and foodways to deny her Chinese cultural identity. Though she takes this path willingly, she still weeps for the culture she is forced to leave behind. The relationships between culture, food, and queerness are undeniable but complex, and exploring these relationships is a journey unique to each individual. This art piece highlights the way in which food can serve as a cultural escape and attempts to represent my personal experience as the queer, rebellious child of an immigrant.