Decrying the cultural appropriation of poutine
CANADA'S EMBRACE OF QUEBEC DISH AMOUNTS TO CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, ACADEMIC SAYS IN AWARD-WINNING PAPER
Thousands of academics have gathered in Toronto this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from whether poutine is a form of cultural appropriation to the ampersand as a symbol of gentrification. In this weeklong series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research.
Canada’s embrace of poutine as a national dish amounts to cultural appropriation — contributing to a creeping “Canadization” that threatens to absorb Québécois culture, a Quebec academic argues in a new study.
Nicolas Fabien-Ouellet, a Montreal-born graduate student at the University of Vermont, will present his paper, “Poutine Dynamics,” at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Ryerson University this week.
In an interview ahead of the presentation, he stressed he isn’t claiming that eating, cooking or adapting the dish is cultural appropriation. (In fact, a particularly inspired section of his paper calls for a change in thinking about poutine — to look at it more as a food category, like soup, rather than a singular dish — to encourage further twists on the classic recipe.)
The problem for Fabien-Ouellet is poutine’s status as “Canadian.”
He points to poutine festivals across the country and polls that rank it as among the best of Canadian dishes. But poutine is a Québécois creation, not a Canadian one, he insists — and suggesting otherwise ignores that poutine “has been used as a form of stigma against a minority group that is still at risk of cultural absorption.”
Fabien-Ouellet points to the darker history of poutine — long before it became a Canadian culinary darling — when Quebecers grappled with the “poutine stigma.”
The dish was invented in the 1950s, but only started its rise to prominence in the past 10 years or so, helped along by inventive Quebec chefs and a youth nightlife culture that appreciated poutine’s virtues as a post-bar snack. In the in-between years, the rest of Canada (and France) snickered at the inelegant mix of fries, cheese curds and gravy, and used the dish to reinforce stereotypes of Quebecers as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” FabienOuellet said.
It also went through an uncomfortable phase in the early 2000s of being the stand-in for “junk food” in Quebec conversations about healthy eating.
“Every time we talk about junk food in the media in Quebec, it’s almost certain a poutine image that will come up,” he said.
Some in Quebec actually felt shame about poutine: “an embarrassing culinary invention that evokes an old complex of Quebec people’s inferiority.” And that sense of shame persists in some older Quebecers.
“My parents and grandparents, when I talked about my work on poutine, they were saying, ‘Oh poutine? Why do you even talk about that?’ ” Fabien-Ouellet told the National Post.
“Poutine has been used at times to tarnish Quebec culture and undermine its legitimacy of self-determination as a nation,” Fabien-Ouellet writes in the paper, which was published in CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures.
On Monday, his research will receive the Canadian Association for Food Studies’ Student Paper Award at the Congress at Ryerson.
Quebec youth in the past decade have embraced the dish — as if saying, “the prohibited ‘junk food’ that has long been used to bash our culture is now our pride,” Fabien-Ouellet writes. But the uptick in poutine’s popularity has also seen a “Canadization,” which he describes as the “appropriation into Canadian food culture expression and construction of national identity.”
That Canadization of poutine was on display in spring 2016, when the White House served a poutine-inspired canapé — smoked duck with red wine gravy and cheese curds on top of a wafer — at a state dinner for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Barack Obama, still U.S. president at the time, said he wanted “our Canadians friends to feel at home.”
“The dish should be, ideally, labelled explicitly as a Québécois dish,” Fabien Ouellet writes, “and not a Canadian one to further underscore the cultural context to which it actually belongs.”