Abstracts

Warren Belasco
A History of the Kitchen of Tomorrow

There's been a lot of forecasting about how kitchens will/should look in the future and an overview of how those visions have evolved over the past 150 years or so might be useful for our own planning, especially as so much of the speculation looked forward to a mindless sort of household where people would not have to devote any effort or attention to food. To a great extent those predictions actually came true!

Diane Bisson
Taste and the polysensory experience of the material environment

In the following presentation, the hospital becomes the backdrop for a discussion on the nature of the relation between taste, nutrition and environment. It addresses fieldwork conducted in the Oncology unit at the Ste-Justine Hospital with children hospitalized for long term periods experiencing loss of appetite. The project focuses on how tableware can modulate taste, and how rethinking the interactive experience of these objects can impact appetite. The hospital environment serves as an exploratory physical framework for a larger scope examination of the sensorial aesthetic experience of material environment in everyday-life and its implication in eating. The theoretical research presented in this paper is part of a broader project on the rituals and experience of dining in domestic and public spaces. The project examines the meaning of the meal by exploring concepts such as pleasure and taste. It investigates how people interpret the sensory play at work between food and its plates, and between food and its environment. It also explores the emotional and social dimensions of people's relationships around the table.

The aesthetic experience of taste is defined here as a system of interrelations between, thought, action, perception, affect, and material environment, configured by subjective and cultural interpretation. The sensory and phenomenological dimensions at play through the act of eating in the hospital room suggests that we reconsider our views on the concepts of comfort and familiarity, and that we reconsider the role of tableware in improving nutritional practices.

Nathalie Cooke
Spreading Controversy: The Story of Margarine in Quebec

If spices were pivotal to the earliest centuries of Western civilization, then another food substance has proved to be focus of culinary (or perhaps, more accurately, chemical) creativity, contrivance and competition during the past two centuries. Despite such a charged history, involving inflated rhetoric reminiscent of liquor prohibition debates, some version of this product is more than likely in our home refrigerators at this very moment -- whether those refrigerators are in Canada, the United States, Australia or New Zealand.

Invented in 1869 in response to a challenge issues at the Paris Exhibition of 1866, this substance addressed the problem of rising costs of animal fats during the rapid urbanization of turn of the twentieth century. By 1886, however, there were laws restricting its production and sale in the United States. As well, laws restricted any coloration, and taxes were applied even to uncoloured product. In Canada, restrictions were tougher still. With the exception of the war years, 1917-1922, this substance was banned entirely between 1886 and 1949.  Quebec still bans coloured additives, and Ontario has allowed coloration only since 1995. In Quebec, debates continue to rage about the future of this product and its appropriate classification. Between 2005 and 2007, for example, sales jumped by 488% in Canada since it was redefined as a “confection.”

Source of heated controversy, this edible product proves serves as a lens through which I will address issues at the heart of this workshop on Domestic Foodscapes: the balancing the interests of food producers and consumers; the shaping of consumer taste; the impact of distinctive national and provincial food policies on consumer and corporate behaviour; and the dazzling flexibility of a constructed food product.

Liz Driver
Culinary Landmarks

Culinary Landmarks is a definitive history and bibliography of Canadian cookbooks from the beginning, when La cuisinière bourgeoise was published in Quebec City in 1825, to the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of more than ten years Elizabeth Driver researched every cookbook published within the borders of present-day Canada, whether a locally authored text or a Canadian edition of a foreign work. Every type of recipe collection is included, from trade publishers’ bestsellers and advertising cookbooks, to home economics textbooks and fund-raisers from church women’s groups.

Laurette Dubé
The Social and Emotional Landscape of Home Vs Away-from-Home Meals and Their Influence on Eating Pattern: An experience sampling study with non-obese adult women 

Social context and emotions are both well-established factors in one’s food choice and diet. This paper reports the results of an experience sampling study in which we compared home versus away-from-home meals in terms of their social context, emotional antecedents and consequences, as well in terms of the influence these have on eating pattern. We examined 160 non-obese adult women six times a day over ten observation days, for a total of 3950 meal episodes being observed (24.69 per participant). We found that home meals were more often consumed alone and were associated with more stable eating patterns for both quantity and quality than away-from-home meals. While emotional antecedents of the eating pattern at a given meal did not differ between home and away-from-home, the emotional consequences of eating patterns were more powerful in home meals. Consumption of home meals healthier than the person’s baseline meal was associated with more intense positive emotions and less intense negative emotions; no such effects were observed for away-from-home meals. Preceded by more intense positive emotions, meals eaten with others, by comparison to meals taken alone, were associated with larger variability of meal composition and larger meal size, with no difference being observed in this regard between home and away-from-home meals. More positive emotions and less negative emotions were reported after meals eaten with others, with these consequences being particularly powerful for away-from-home meals. Compared with meals eaten alone, the eating pattern of meal eating with others had stronger emotional impact, with healthier meals taken with others resulting in more positive emotions and less negative emotions compared to the person’s baseline meal; no difference was observed between home and away-from-home meals in this regard. The implications of the results for more sophisticated approaches to promote healthy and pleasurable eating are discussed.

Dorothy Duncan

The places and spaces where food was, and is, preserved, prepared, served and consumed have been centres of influence in individual, family and community life for centuries. The dining halls of the fur trading posts with their domestic kitchens and outbuildings were the ancestors of our modern dining rooms with their stark preparation areas. The self sufficient settlers who learned to clear the forest, plant, harvest, preserve, share and consume the foods that they produced provided the foundations for the Slow Food Movement and the One Hundred Mile Diet.  Have we come full circle?  Can anyone predict the future?
 
Nothing More Comforting: Canada's Heritage Food guides us through a Canadian year as First Nations and newcomers developed the skills of survival as they hunted, fished and foraged for food.  From those humble beginnings an incredibly complex culinary heritage has evolved, shaped by Canada's diverse geographical regions, fluctuating climate, and the many cultural groups that have settled here. In addition, legends, beliefs and superstitions have been part of our culinary and medicinal heritage for centuries resulting in a bountiful legacy of food and beverages that is truly Canadian.

Canadians at Table:  Food, Fellowship and Folklore is an introduction to the diverse culinary history of this vast land we call Canada.  As we move along an historical path from First Nations to fur traders to early settlers and eventually waves of newcomers,  we learn how our ancestors constantly adapted, compromised and invented recipes with a surplus of some ingredients  or a scarcity of others. This is an overview of one of the most unique and fascinating food histories in the world that is constantly changing to serve Canadians from coast to coast to coast.  

Charlene Elliott

The past decade has witnessed an exponential increase in the number of supermarket food products specifically created for and targeted at children. These supermarket products offer a new category of consumables (i.e., fun foods) and encourage a particular style of eating.  

Fun foods are “regular” foods (i.e., not junk food or confectionary), which emphasize foods’ play factor, interactivity, artificiality and general distance from ‘regular’ food. One key theme in all fun food marketing and packaging is that food is ‘fun’ and eating is ‘entertainment’. This paper probes the impact of fun food on children’s eating styles and dispositions towards food. Assessing the significance of ‘entertaining eats’ for children, the paper details how these products reveal both the changing nature of domestic foodscapes and the extension of entertainment space into the heart of the kitchen.  

Rachel Engler-Stringer
Using ‘Collective Lifestyles’ to Study Cooking Practices and Food Security in Low-Income Women in Montreal, Canada 

Over the course of the last century the quantity of pre-packaged, pre-prepared foods available in the North American context has increased dramatically. Little research has been conducted on what “cooking” means to people considering the broad availability of literally thousands of such foods. Low-income populations may be particularly affected by a societal shift towards the use of increasingly prepared foods in meals due to more nutritious and higher quality prepared foods also being more expensive. The food security of low-income populations may be threatened as they are faced with limited budgets with which to purchase prepared foods. A participatory research project with a group of young low-income women in Montreal has been undertaken to examine cooking practices and food security status in a low-income population using a framework that includes social structure, social practices and agency to explain how health outcomes may come to be differentially distributed. In this mixed-method study the participatory research team has used focus groups, photography of meals and semi-structured interviews to characterize ‘collective lifestyles’ with regards to cooking practices in this population. Data analysis is on-going and preliminary results will be discussed.

Roger Haden
Educating taste: the new limits of contemporary connoisseurship

This paper explores the contemporary experience of sensory taste as one always situated within specific technological and cultural contexts. In particular, with reference to cooking and eating at home, it describes how taste is influenced by factors such as ideology, changing culinary, chemical, biological, and media technologies, the globalization of foodways and products, and broadening consumer “tastes.” Assuming  that these factors contribute to an ongoing reconfiguring of taste as both physiological and cultural sense, consideration is given to how, as an aspect of this process, taste’s relationship with knowledge is also affected. But for better or worse? What kinds of knowledge inform the experience of taste? What effect does knowledge as such have on the sensed experience of taste?

The notion of gastronomic connoisseurship provides an historical reference point for the discussion of these questions, since it highlights sensory taste’s active role in knowledge creation and takes for granted the importance of taste/knowledge is the mindful precursor to pleasure. Contemporary “taste-makers” like Jamie Olivier underscore these links between taste, knowledge, pleasure and education by confirming taste’s role as a sensory mode of engagement not only with favour and food, but with knowledge and the world.  

David Howes
Wine Sense

This paper begins with a description of the ancient Greek symposion (meaning: the moment when people drink together, after the meal is over). The tone of a symposion was dictated by the proportion in which the water and wine were mixed (such as 3:1 or 5:3) in the krater (or wine jug), and the mixing of  water and wine was complemented by a mingling of all possible pleasures: visual, olfactory, acoustic, kinaesthetic. The paper then critiques the contemporary practice of wine-tasting, which is shown to be far too centred on the palate and largely oblivious to the socio-cultural (as opposed to mere agricultural, or "terroirist") dimensions of viniculture.

Alice Julier
“Things Taste Better in Small Houses”: Food, Hospitality, and Domestic Space 

Despite Queen Victoria’s comment above, middle and upper class westerners seem hell-bent on acquiring palatial-sized homes, as the square footage of new and renovated houses goes upward every year. Nowhere is this more apparent than in rooms for eating and socializing together, such as kitchens and dining areas.  The question, however, is how people actually make use of this space.  This paper maps the experience of domestic hospitality among contemporary Euro-white and African- Americans.  Using qualitative interviews and participant observation, I examine the ways in which people’s everyday experiences go beyond the dichotomous notions of family/friend and public/private when they invite people to partake of a shared meal in their home.   I examine events such as potlucks, barbeques, dinner parties, looking at how people make choices about who to invite, the foods to serve, and the structure of the event, with a particular eye towards how such choices are shaped by class, race, and gender.  In this paper, I focus on the relationship between domestic hospitality and the built environment of the domestic household.  Sobal and Warnick (2007) schematize a number of micro-scale food environments including the kitchenscape, the tablescape, and the platescape. Such spaces are continually re-constructed: cleaned, shaped, adapted, and reconfigured to accommodate different kinds of sociable life events. Questions include: who cleans the bathroom before a party? Which rooms are open to guests or not? Is the kitchen a gathering space or workspace?  To what extent are the outdoors transformed into domestic realm?

JoAnne Labrecque

Gender differences in attitudes toward convenience foods: a multicultural study

This study examines gender differences in consumption frequency, perception of health value and pleasure associated with two categories of convenience foods--snacks and ready meals & side dishes --among young university students in French and English Canada, the United States and France.  In total, 376 women and 324 men replied to a self-administered questionnaire that includes general questions on attitude toward health and specific questions on consumption frequency, perception of health value and pleasure attributed to products in both categories.  Variance analysis brought to light differences in gender within each cultural group. 

Overall, perceived health value of ready meals & side dishes, while slightly negative, is less negative than for snacks, whereas greater pleasure is attributed to snacks.  For all cultures combined, men attribute a less negative health value to snacks and ready meals & side dishes than women do, and derive more pleasure than women from ready meals & side dishes, whereas women enjoy snacks more than men do.  Lastly, young people enjoy certain health products as much as they do products rich in fat and salt. 

Jordan LeBel and Rhona Richman Kenneally
Beyond nostalgia: What memories of childhood foodscapes can teach us about “mindful eating”

We report the results of a survey in which participants (fifty-three undergraduate students) were asked to describe and draw, in as much detail as possible, the kitchen of their childhood. Participants were also prompted to comment on the use of technology, interaction patterns, family-relevant preparation and consumption rituals, and other details of their childhood foodscapes. Participants also completed the Food Involvement Scale (Bell and Marshall 2003) and the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (van Strien et al. 1986), measuring restraint, emotional eating, and situational eating. Participants’ drawings revealed the following themes: the centrality of the kitchen as a prime domestic foodscape inasmuch as it was the principal site of eating at least the main meal of the day (usually dinner); the repeated articulation of the significance of the main meal as a family-based activity that, oftentimes, was completed without distractions such as television; and the importance of the kitchen table as the most concentrated component of the domestic foodscape, being the site of the main daily meal for approximately half of the participants. Participants with the most vivid and detailed recollections were also more likely to report greater involvement with food and cooking and exhibited different preferences for lifestyle activities.

Harvey Levenstein
Revolution in the Kitchen

In this presentation, Professor Levenstein will explore changes in middle class kitchens and cooking in twentieth-century North America.

Marie Marquis
Descriptors of children's food practices in Québec

The medical approach to paediatric obesity usually emphasizes food consumption and physiological conditions likely to be associated with obesity. The objective of this paper is to analyse children's food practices in Québec from a different perspective inspired by Poulain (2002) according to whom food practices can be studied under five dimensions:  temporal dimension, structural dimension referring to food ingestion, spatial dimension, food selection and social dimension at meal time. Based on data specific to Quebec's children, the manuscript will illustrate how the study of food practices anchored to these five dimensions offer a more comprehensive understanding of children's behaviour and food environment.  More precisely, breakfast, meal duration, consumption rate, food consumption distribution throughout the day, food used as healthy habit indicator, family cooking skills, food preferences, food places inside and outside the home,  children's financial and cooking autonomy , parental food behaviour, family meal context will be used as descriptors. The article will suggest a checklist to be considered to document children food practices.

Janet Mitchell

The influence of dietary guidelines and cookbooks on ‘mindful’ eating 
At the beginning of the 20th century both in North America and New Zealand domestic scientists began to influence attitudes towards food. Emphasis on science in the kitchen initiated a demand for more efficient kitchens and simpler, more nutritious meals. Nutritious meals based on prescriptive eating however are difficult to introduce into a household but cookbooks as a vehicle that communicates about food have the potential to do this. They are a source of information about ingredients, food preparation, technology, serving sizes, and may encode nutritional and other beliefs.

This paper examines dietary prescriptions and their influence on cookbooks. Edmonds Cookery Book, a New Zealand (NZ) cookbook used in most NZ households was used as a source of data. Like America’s Joy of Cooking it has undergone many revisions since it first publication in 1907. This paper examined nutritional information and dietary prescriptions issued to NZers between 1970 and 1999 and related these to revisions of the cookbook. The cookbook showed an unconscious awareness of dietary prescriptions but ultimately the influence of a cookbook on domestic meals may be dependent on the knowledge and food choices of the cook.

Pauline Morel
Eating Out: The Influence of the Outdoors on Canadian Domestic Foodways

Canadian historical foodways, much like our art, are marked by wilderness. From the pemmican of the First Nations, to the bannock and split pea soup intended to refuel workers for continued labour in fur-trading posts, military garrisons, lumbering, mining, and railway camps, the “out ovens” and chuckwagons of Prairie settlers, and the elaborate picnics and camp meals of the growing leisure classes, food history in Canada is marked by a tradition of eating in the outdoors. Some of these traditions of eating in the open air are still very much alive today, with épluchettes and sugaring-off parties in Québec, chuckwagons in Alberta, and oyster and clam bakes in the Maritimes. This paper looks at the historical precedents and present implications of when food is taken out of the home, fridge, freezer or pantry and consumed away from the dinner table. This paper will feature a selection of several photographs from the McCord collection that portray historical practices and transformations linked to the preparation and consumption of food in the open air, and lead to a discussion of the influences of the past on the present implications of eating outdoors. The increasingly scientific approach to food, beginning with the rise of the scientific cookery movement at the turn of the past century and continuing with today’s technological advances in genetics, agri-business, and food processing as well as changing patterns of diet and employment, has contributed to the binary opposition between the modern food system and nature. However, instances when food is taken outdoors sustain a connection between what we eat and where we are, express commensality, and are possibly part of the way Canadians define themselves through their foodways.

Jessica Mudry
Mmmmm, high in omega-3s, just like mom used to make:
Scientizing our foods and the changing experience of the family dinner 

One would be hard-pressed to peer into their pantry and miss the enumerated health claims printed on their food packaging.  No carb! High in protein!  Only 3 grams of fat per serving!  In this paper, I explore the development of this quantified and scientific manner of talking about food and how scientized foods have helped make our domestic spaces into quantified laboratories.  Quantities like calories, fat grams, points and portions allow our family meals to be measured as well as encourage us to refigure our idea of a “good” meal.  The paper will attempt to answer these kinds of questions:  How does the quotidian family dinner change in the face of a scientized meal?  What does the scientized kitchen look like if its inhabitants are concerned with eating omega-3's, or folic acid, or counting their carbs?  In this paper I propose that domestic traditions and family histories are diminished in the face of this quantitative rationality and objectivity.  This, ultimately, changes the entire nature of the domestic foodscape.  Our kitchens become much more about numbers, and much less about history, geography, tradition and, perhaps, taste.

Alan Nash
“Let’s order out tonight!” The impact of restaurant delivery on Montreal’s domestic foodscapes, 1951-2001

Since 1951, a series of changes have affected Montreal’s restaurants. These include the influences of globalization on the population’s demand for new cuisine, the connections between immigration and the growing number of “ethnic restaurants”, and the impact of technology on food preparation and delivery. Such changes have also had consequences for the domestic foodscape: ranging from demands for more exotic types of food to more labour-saving menus. Certainly, to the extent that the private and public spheres interconnect, it is clear that domestic and commercial foodscapes play a role in shaping each other.
This paper explores one interesting aspect of these interconnections by considering the development of delivered restaurant meals in Montreal. This phenomenon, made increasingly possible by developments in food preparation and prompt delivery, has played a part in reshaping the city’s domestic foodscape. For example, restrictions of time or talent no longer place a limitation on what can be served at home, and a greater variety of cuisines have become available in the private sphere. By drawing the world of the restaurant into the home sphere – as this study shows – “delivery” has played its part in changing the domestic foodscape.

David Sutton
The Mindful Kitchen, The Embodied Cook: Tools, Technology and Knowledge Transmission on a Greek Island

This paper explores the changing nature of everyday cooking practices on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the Eastern Aegean. It addresses this question: How are cooking skills, practices and knowledges being reproduced or transformed concomitant with changing technologies and changing media through which cooking is learned?  Cooking involves a variety of culturally defined skills, including knowledge of ingredients, tools, recipes (written or oral), and evaluation of the material properties of food through different, often combined sensory modalities. Drawing from a video ethnography, I examine the ways that women move through and share the space of the kitchen, use and adapt their environment  and tools to the multiple social and practical tasks at hand, and retain their power within the family and their reputation in the wider community in the values expressed around properly cooked food. Knowledge of cooking skills, techniques and recipes is imagined to ideally travel seamlessly “from generation to generation.” Alternatively, it is seen as a fixed object, lost to the present, as the younger generation has abandoned “tradition” in pursuit of surface values. Now, with the spread and democratization of cooking knowledge through television and other media, new resources come into play while at the same time larger sociopolitical shifts in Greek society lead to a simultaneous devaluing and folkloricization of traditional knowledge and skills. 

Lucia Terrenghi
Design for Sharing Cooking Experiences: Potential and Challenges of Computing Technologies

The cooking activity has a main impact on people’s relationship to food, people’s knowledge about ingredients and nutrition, as well as food preparation and consumption. What a family member, i.e. a parent, cooks for the other ones has an influence on the whole community in different ways, which go beyond the pure preparation of food. The family environment in which we grow up and experience our “home” food shapes our taste and influences our eating behaviors: what type of food we know, where, when and how we consume it. This paper considers how multimedia and embedded computing technologies can support the domestic learning of cooking, thus considering the family as a community of practice and the cooking process as a sharable activity. Such a vision is exemplified with the Living Cookbook appliance: This relies on the video capture and retrieval of family members’ cooking sessions, so as to enable the creation and sharing of personalized, multimedia cooking instructions. By augmenting the cooking activity with novel social and entertaining aspects, the goal is to motivate cooking and the learning thereof. I report on the implementation and evaluation of the appliance in different settings and with different user groups, and in conclusion I discuss the results in light of their implications for the design of domestic technology.

Amy Trubek
Responsive Cooking: Our Possible Future?

My forthcoming book, The Taste of Place, A Cultural Journey into Terroir makes an inquiry into the connection between agriculture, taste and place by closely examining the French concept of terroir (taste of place). Essentially a cultural category, the taste of place has long been used to make and sell food and wine in France. Why have the French paid so much cultural attention to the taste of place and how can we consider such possibilities for the United States? In this essay, I will focus on cuisine du terroir, or cooking that comes from a region. In the contemporary United States, this type of cooking, which I call “responsive cooking” requires a conscious engagement by a cook with his or her natural environment. Such an engagement changes so much: ingredients, techniques, recipes, tools, and more. How and what do people need to create an American cuisine du terroir, both in homes and restaurants? This essay explores several possible answers.