This is an assignment where you identify the argument and the supporting evidence in a scholarly text journal article and assess how clear and convincing it is.

So the conflict in a nutshell. Food is cultural. It's not simply natural. We're not squirrels. We don't just eat what's on the ground. Food is cultural for human beings and it reflects our ethnic and family identity. And that's true for everybody. And some people will be more aware of it than other people, ethnic minorities will be more aware of that than majorities in a given place. Ethnic minorities historically especially, but arguably currently also faced pressure to eat Canadian and often this pressure is intergenerational. And you will see in the movie, Hold the Ketchup that the intergenerational nature of that, that the children are the source of some of the pressure to eat more Canadian. Non-European foods when they are consumed or offered to European descendent majority societies like Canada and the United States, they are often presented as exotic or dangerous, sort of playing up stereotypes of that culture. And indigenous food issues are tied to questions of land and questions of sovereignty. And so you can't really distinguish between what's a conflict about food and what's a conflict about kind of everything about the land and about territory. And we'll talk about that at the end. So Canadian Food. Most Canadians eat a mixture of culturally specific foods, foods that are descended from their grandparents, descended from their ancestors potentially from another continent that they immigrated from, a mixture of that and commercially processed food. And the distinction between those things will be more clear for people who belong to an ethnic minority. Theyll be aware of the fact that they eat curry at home, and when you go to the supermarket, there is curry, but most of the food is food to appeal to a non South Asian diet. Again, assimilation policies and immigration rules, until the 1970s, explicitly favoured British culture, explicitly favoured immigrants from Britain or from places that were seen as, as culturally close to Britain: North western European. And so that influenced the ways that people celebrated their food ways or didn't celebrate their food ways. And 20th century innovations, the development of packaging, mass production of food, refrigeration in people's houses, and supermarkets, suburbanization the whole way we spatialized food. All of this has reinforced the dominance of certain foods. So for instance, hamburgers and hot dogs and bread and so on are mass produced and are available quite cheaply, as opposed to other foods that are not as available. So it reproduces, that commercial aspect reproduces the cultural dominance of British and Western Northwestern European descended peoples. So in, in this context, non British foods are coded as ethnic. Coded as kind of belonging to another category. Sort of like if you imagine a plain white sheet versus a, versus a colored sheet, it's kind of there's a tendency to try to categorize things as food versus ethnic food. And so non British foods are considered sort of more exciting and more interesting, but not a sort of normal thing that somebody would eat. There was a major influx after the Second World War of nonBritish European immigrants. Many of them from Southern Europe or from Eastern Europe.

Some displaced by the Second World War, some arriving for more economic reasons. But that changed the foods available in North America. So some foods began to sort of crossover. When my mom was growing up in the 50s. Spaghetti was pretty exciting. Having spaghetti and putting garlic in it made you a kind of a very, as a Scottish descended person, that made you very adventurous if you made a meal that had garlic in it. So these things begin to kinda cross over and they become absorbed in kind of half-hearted ways. Or they become commercially available. Making pizza at home isn't that common, but ordering pizza from restaurants becomes very common, starting in the fifties and sixties and is now kind of ubiquitous in North America. And after 1970, when immigration reforms are put through that for the first time. Develop a system, the point system which, which tries to develop a way of evaluating potential immigrants that doesn't prioritize British background. And it's arguable whether it was completely successful at that. But a number of non-white waves of immigration arrived after 1970 that again changed the composition of food ways. So things like jerk chicken becomes widely available in Toronto, curry becomes widely available in Toronto. So those immigration policies have an immediate effect on on the food that's available. And around this time arising out of the bilingualism and biculturalism commission, we start to see the embrace of a multicultural identity in Canada. So an explicit recognition of Canada's ethnic diversity as a kind of identity as opposed to as a kind of a fact. Ethnic diversity was a fact of Canada before the 1960s and 70s. But it was something that people sort of had accepted as a necessity that there had to be some Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans and a handful of South Asians and a handful of people from China. Then after 1960s and 1970s, this becomes a kind of, at least officially, becomes a point of pride that Canada is ethnically diverse. Which potentially changes the way people think about food, or potentially doesn't. So Orientalism. Orientalism is a term that was not necessarily coined but adapted by Edward Said in his book called Orientalism to talk about a particular way that Europeans talked about the East, the Orient primarily in the 19th century. But he argued that this way of thinking about the Orient, in this way of constructing an idea of the Orient was in a world dominated all the arts for, for several hundred years and was useful in the development of an empire and the conquest of Asian cultures and Middle Eastern cultures. And this was the construction of the other. So defining european by referring to this eastern other that was mysterious or violent or irrational. And all these things, these negative attributes that were supposed to define through that define the European, Asian, and Middle Eastern culture is often represented as absolutely different from European culture kind of, all the terms are reversed. And often, you see this in popular films. Often represented as, as the personification of evil kind of thing. The trope from the, 1980s on, I would say maybe even from the seventies on, it's a very common thing in American action films to have some vaguely Middle Eastern person be extremely erratically violent. Or a Chinese person B, be very mysterious, or very violent. And all these things are kind of reproducing the idea of the the east, the Eastern other as being mysterious and different. And even positive ideas can be orientalist. As for instance, one common Orientalist idea was / is that women in Asian society are very meek, whereas women in European society are very pushy. And so this idea that Asian women are much more friendly and much less argumentative. This arguably is a positive trait. But it reinforces the idea of the culture being negative or being in need of conquering. For instance, the incursions in the Middle East in the last 20 years since 9/11, often have a sort of implication of the nature of masculinity in Middle Eastern society as being fundamentally extremely toxic by design. So all these things kinda feed the same idea. And Saids main point is that this all presumes a norm. It presumes something that is normal from which these other things are deviations. You know, you have a man and then you have an Asian man. And the Asian man is different from the man. You have a woman and then you have an Asian woman. So that these things define, through opposition, define what the person is. So connecting it to food and Mosbys article in particular, Chinese food is often seen as exciting and different. It's sort of, you know, you're doing something, you're an adventurous person because you're eating Chinese food or you're doing something fun because youre eating Chinese food as opposed to, you know, you can go to a restaurant or you can go to a Chinese restaurant. And so these are sort of coded along these orientalist ways. And Mosby talks about this in great detail. The fears of Chinese culture and ideas, all these negative ideas of Chinese culture, become focused on MSG, monosodium glutamate, as if there is a kind of scientific basis behind this. But in fact, MSG is widely used in a whole bunch of other products not used in Chinese food. And so the, the association between the bad health aspects of MSG and Chinese food restaurants, Mosby argues, is more an expression of cultural fear and sort of a paranoia and these ideas of the other, than about anything scientific. Similar health concerns or panics have been associated with spicy food, with eating raw foods, raw fish eating, eating sushi and so on. So all these ideas of something that is, is, is different. It's kind of exciting if you're feeling adventurous, but also potentially unwise, you know, the idea that you eat a bunch of spicy food and you'll be very sick or eating spicy food all the time isn't healthy for you and so on. And these represent, again, represent the idea of the foods that are, that come from other cultures as being exotic and different and not, not just food. Food always has another resonance. And this is a way of policing, policing food habits. For instance, Korinek and Iacovetta talk about people being evaluated, recent immigrants being evaluated on their, the success of their homes and questioning whether children are getting something good for breakfast, and what is good for breakfast is coming from a very British Isles centered perspective. So are they getting warm, wet cereal for breakfast, which is the norm in Scotland and Britain, or are they, if they're eating rice for breakfast. These kind of cultural attitudes persist and it's a way of excluding people, even in a context of multiculturalism. Still excluding people on the basis that their food doesn't conform to what's considered safe in, in a non-scientific, cultural kind of way. So when we talk about decolonization, decolonizing food, we're talking about a context in which Canada was, was settled by mostly Europeans, settled settlers under the terms of treaties. That implicitly - the nature of a treaty is it recognizes the sovereignty of the other, right? You don't have a treaty between individuals. Treaties are between nations. So there's an implicit recognition of sovereignty in the notion of treaties and a core aspect of all treaties that were signed in North America was the right to continue to use the land for food. In particular hunting and fishing is often directly written into the language. And this was a really key issue for indigenous people in terms of sharing the land, that you can use the land your way, but we can still use the land our way. We can still hunt and fish, and we can still move from one place to another based on what kind of harvesting needs to happen or what kind of tending of crops or that kind of thing are happening. But colonization, which happened legally under the terms of the treaties, violated the treaties over and over again because it pushed deeper into these territories and kind of filled up the territory's with other uses. So for instance, you sign a treaty in an area where there are going to be a certain number of people living and farming and so on. And it's very easy to make that work with hunting and fishing happening throughout the territory, throughout the throughout the land that's covered by the treaty. But if settlement intensifies or if industrial processes happen, if natural resources are being harvested and off the land, you know, if you cut down all the trees, you can't very well hunt and fish. If you cut down all the trees, if you poison the rivers, you can't fish. So there was more and more pressure on the state, from corporations and from settlers, to control the movements and activities of Indigenous peoples. So game laws were passed and people were not allowed to hunt and fish out of season, are not allowed to hunt and fish commercially. So there's a whole long history there.