Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation

This year we celebrate a decade of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation (CFS/RCÉA), having published our first issue in May 2014. The management team thus takes a moment—in the space on an editorial—to look back across the history of the journal and toward its future. They collectively reflect on the journal’s ethos, its range of publications, as well as its continued efforts to promote rigorous scholarship done differently.

From the state of the journal to the state of the field, Chartrand et al. offer us an exploration of food studies—begun during a plenary session at the eighteenth annual assembly of the Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS)—as a broth that can only be enriched (not spoiled as the old adage would have it) by many participants bringing diverse ingredients.

This issue is its own enriched broth. Keira Loukes uses a decolonial feminist lens within a political ecology community of practice to think through Indigenous food sovereignty in Treaty 9 territory (Northern Ontario). Overend et al. consider the unexpected lessons—unlearning and re-learning and being uncertain—that came out of a collaborative research project on urban berry foraging with their home institution’s Indigenous Learning Centre. Braun et al. explore how professionally and managerially employed women in agriculture in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta negotiate farm femininity—this in an industry characterized by rural hegemonic masculinity. Li et al. offer up a review of food asset maps in Canada and find in them a marked tendency to reinforce the values of a settler-colonial food system. Pentz et al. set out to identify and classify the various explanations given for food price changes in Canada, and to evaluate the scientific rigor of these explanations. Song-Nichols takes us through a method for historical menu analysis. These documents, he writes, can be read as maps, giving shape to those who author them and those who read from them (and doodle on them, as the case may be).

On the heels of the Federal Government’s funding commitment toward a national school food program, we offer up two responses in the form of a commentary and a research article. Zhang et al. recognize the timeliness of this commitment amidst rising food costs and chronic disease. Niimi-Burch et al. turn their attention to mothers who, at present, remain primarily responsible for packing school lunches. Bloomfield provides a review of Dana James and Evan Bowness’ book, Growing and Eating Sustainably: Agroecology in Action, and we conclude the issue with our latest installment of the Choux Questionnaire. Take a look to find out what kinds of gardens make Greg de St. Maurice happiest, and what it is about composting that he dislikes.

Our cover image is of red currants, grown and purchased in Southwestern Ontario. Like this issue, they are sweet and tart and toothy, too.

Photo by Alexia Moyer