Introduction Food Identities in Québec

Although it may seem insignificant, and is often reduced to a mere biological and nutritional act, “eating” is a symbolic act that is embedded in the diversity of cultural behaviors (Farb and Armelagos 1985; Goody 1984). It is through distinctive modes of acquisition and production (gathering, agriculture, fishing, breeding), through the choices of specific methods, procedures and techniques of culinary and traditional processing, which can go so far as to give rise to signature products and dishes, or through consumption behaviours and particular forms of social interaction and sharing, that foods nurture as much as they represent a vision of the world and a relationship to the world, a culture (Mauss 1967; Collin-Buffier and Laurioux 2008; Turgeon and Pastinelli 2002). In all these respects, and even more, since it is invested with the strength of the act of incorporation, which consists in making a substance alien to oneself one’s own body and adopting its qualities (Rozin 1994), eating is at the heart of the shaping, affirming and even asserting of individual and communal identities (Bruegel and Laurioux 2002). At the beginning of the 19^th century, wasn’t it Brillat-Savarin, author of La Physiologie du goût (1825), who asserted, in an aphorism that has become an often-used formula today: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Since then, the work of ethnologists, anthropologists, historians and sociologists has largely focused on this dimension of foods as indicators of identity, attempting to define, through a cross-disciplinary approach, a vague and shifting notion of identity, which refers as much to singularity as to multiplicity, to tradition as to creation, to construction as to transmission. Food is therefore both a means of identification with a group – whether familial, social, territorial or national – whose members share language, skills, beliefs, values and customs, and a matrix of relationships with otherness, with the Other who doesn’t eat like us and doesn’t share our culture. It is thus in the tradition of the numerous studies carried out in recent years on food identities, but rare in the case of Québec, that we have decided to examine in this issue the question of Québec’s food and culinary identity. This question can be framed in a variety of ways and addressed from a variety of perspectives. The one that comes up most often is whether there is such a thing as a Québec food and culinary identity. And if so, how should it be addressed, defined and characterized? There are three intuitive answers to this question, but they are obviously unsatisfactory because they are based on commonly-held beliefs. The first would be to set forth a litany of key foods or typical, trademark recipes, folkloric icons whose production process certainly deserves to be described in more patchwork fashion, like Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire or, in a different style, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Instead of wine, coffee or steak and fries, we can already imagine the chapter titles: poutine, of course, tourtière, bannock, sugar pie, maple syrup, the Montreal bagel, smoked-meat, cranberry, gourgane, Chanteclerc chicken, different types of game. The list goes on. A second common ground might involve the braiding of a cultural mat to feature the main “influences” that have built Québec’s culinary distinctiveness, a broad narrative today more or less agreed upon and centered on the four sources of traditional Québec cuisine and food: Aboriginal cultures (the use of maple, corn, smoked meats and fish and indigenous plants, pumpkin), French culture (which introduced wheat bread and farm-raised meats), British and Irish culture (which popularized tea, beer and potatoes) and, …