During the last decade, Japanese cuisine has become firmly rooted in Canada. The once unusual sounding dishes such as sushi, tempura, and edamame are now familiar to most Canadians. Indeed, Japanese restaurants make up a substantial portion of Toronto’s diverse foodscape, yet little is known about how this culinary culture is understood, how the constructed image is created, and the identities that are produced through its production and consumption. This dissertation aims to unpack the constructed identities of the cosmopolitan and the “Oriental Other” contained within Japanese culinary circuits in Toronto, while also examining the connections, constructions, and negotiations concealed within the Japanese restaurants’ cultural landscape. It seeks to highlight the processes of racialization, Whiteness, and the articulation of difference that are interconnected and interdependent on the production and consumption of Japanese food in Toronto’s restaurants. Through this process, cultural differences are mapped out, allowing Japanese cuisine to become an accessible and readily available place to search for cosmopolitan identity making and the performance of Otherness. To this aim, in-depth interviews were conducted with residents of Toronto and chefs of Japanese ethnic origin. Both groups emphasize the relations between food providers and consumers, authenticity strategies, and their imaginative geographies of Japanese culinary culture but had remarkably different interpretations on how these constructions are practiced, articulated, and ultimately understood. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2008-03-24 15:40:29.811

This thesis examines the historical and contemporary roots of food apartheid in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, while employing a Black Food Geographies approach to highlight and interpret the lived experiences of people in the Delta. This work draws on interviews and participant observation in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to decenter popular narratives around food insecurity and region and instead center the ideas and opinions of people directly impacted. The thesis highlights Black Deltans’ experiences and understandings of food and foodways to provide a nuanced picture of how residents interpret, negotiate, and challenge the region’s unequal food geographies in light of a longer history of food apartheid

The original contribution of this thesis is through its conceptualisations of human more-than- human encounters on the allotment that break down the boundaries of subjectivities. This work extends knowledge of cultural food geography by investigating how people engage with the matter of the plot and learn to grow food. The conceptual tool by which this occurs is set out as processes of visceral learning within a framework of mattering. Therefore this work follows the material transformations of matter across production consumption cycles of allotment produce. This is examined through processes of bodily adaptions to the matter of the plot. The processes of growing your own food affords an opportunity to focus on the processes of doing and becoming, allowing the how of food growing to take centre stage (Crouch 2003, Ingold 2010, Grosz 1999). Procuring and producing food for consumption is enacted through the human more-than-human interface of bodily engagement that disrupts dualisms and revealing their complex inter-relationships, as well as the potential of visceral research (Roe 2006, Whatmore 2006, Hayes-Conroy 2008). Therefore, this is an immersive account of the procurement of food and the development of food knowledge through material, sensory and visceral becomings, which occur within a contextual frame of everyday food experiences. This study is contextualised in the complexities of contemporary food issues where matters of access, foodism and sustainability shape the enquiry. However the research is carried out at a micro-geographies lens of bodily engagements with food matter through grow your own practices on allotments. Growing food on new allotments is the locus of procurement reflecting a resurgence in such activities following from the recent rise in interest in local food, alternative food networks (AFNs) and food as a conduit for celebrity in the media (Dupuis & Goodman 2005, Lockie & Kitto 2000, Winter 2003). Moreover, the current spread of the allotment is examined as transgressing urban/rural divides and disrupting traditional perceptions of plot users. This allows investigations into spaces where community processes can unfold, providing a richly observed insight into the broadened demographics of recent allotment life.

The current global food system is market-driven and depends on the exploitative commodification of our basic need to eat. It has been consistently condemned for its incapacity to account for justice, sustainability, welfare, and health. Developing alternative food system strategies is a necessary step towards creating a more sustainable and just reality. By conducting a comparative analysis using semi-structured interviews and virtual mapping between a rural area and an urban city in Ontario, Canada, the relationship between food geographies and the development of diagnostic (problem-oriented) and prognostic (solution oriented) framings within the corporate food regime is explored. Considering the influences of socio-geographical context (i.e. urban or rural), and the impacts of cognitive and physical food distancing adds new perspective and considerations to the existing literature. The results found that the urban participants had more robust diagnostic and prognostic framings than the rural participants. They also found that the impacts of food distancing were represented by the participants differently; The urban participants experienced more significant cognitive and physical distancing, but were mostly worried about the impacts of cognitive food distancing, whereas the rural participants were mostly focused on the impacts of physical distancing and were less affected by both types of distancing.

As knowledge about the constellating set of environmental and social crises stemming from the neoliberal global food regime becomes more pressing and popularized among US consumers, it has brought Indigenous actors asserting their political sovereignty and treaty rights with regards to their homelands into new collaborations, contestations, and negotiations with settlers in emerging food politics domains. In this dissertation, I examine solidarities and affinities being forged between Coast Salish and settler food actors in Puget Sound, attending specifically to how contested sovereignties are submerged but at play in these relations and how settler desires for belonging on and to stolen Indigenous lands animate liberal and radical food system politics. The dissertation presents my ethnographic fieldwork in South Puget Sound over a period of 18 months with two related Coast Salish food sovereignty projects that brought Indigenous and settler food actors into weedy collaborations. One was a curriculum development project for Native and regional youth focused on the revitalization of Coast Salish plant landscapes, knowledge, pedagogies, and systems of reciprocity. The other was a campaign to counter the introduction of genetically engineered salmon into US food markets and coastal production facilities across the Western Hemisphere, which I situate within longstanding salmon-centered social and political struggles in Coast Salish territories in the context of Indigenous/settler-state relations. Throughout these engagements, I identified how multicultural, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist food movement frameworks share in common with neoliberal nature privatization schemes modes of disavowing the geopolitics of Indigenous sovereignty within the US settler state. The research reveals patterns in how Coast Salish food actors push back against the ways settler food actors are plugged into settler colonial governmentality. These insights, in turn, helped to make legible how inherited liberal mythologies of the nation-state and legal orders rooted in the doctrine of terra nulliuslimit the stakes of food system work in terms of inclusion and equality, and miss their collusion with structures that unmake the human-land relationships that Coast Salish people define as existential and (geo)political. In my analysis, I engage Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism to complicate Marxian, Deleuzian, and Foucauldian analyses of North American alternative food politics, while doubling back to consider the ways the disavowal of ongoing Indigenous dispossession functions across these literatures and the social practices they influence, ultimately to consider how food-centered scholarship, environmentalism, and politics in North America stand to be transformed by what I argue is a Coast Salish ‘politics of refusal’. This project is unique in attending to how settler colonial theory, Indigenous critical theory, and Indigenous politics in North America enrich and complicate the literatures provincializing the Nature-Culture divide, as well as a largely Marxian and antiracist critical food studies literature. It contributes to settler colonial studies as a project of redefinition for the study of US politics and society while specifically bringing that interdisciplinary project into the ambit of North American critical food studies scholarship.

Since its invention nearly 150 years ago, margarine has proven itself adaptable to multiple ingredients and techniques whilst continuing to mimic the fatty tastes familiar to eaters in Northern Europe. In this thesis I argue that it this malleability that makes margarine a useful subject with which to explore constructions of eating-well. This thesis examines the ways in which margarine is done, why it is done in the ways that it is, and explores how such doings frame possibilities for eating-together-well. Eating-well has become something of a social obsession in the UK in recent years. Individual eating practices have become framed as a responsibility of care for personal and societal health, for agricultural workers, animal welfare and for the future of the planet. Nonetheless, it is commonly believed that although deeply personal, food habits are culturally and socially engrained, and as such are hard to change. This empirically led thesis, examines the knowledges and practices of producers and consumers, and establishes habit formation as a typical response by both producers and consumers to becoming overwhelmed with incompatible knowledges and information, compelling them to choose, prioritise and juggle ‘moral’ values. Yet, I demonstrate that such habits only remain stable until disrupted by an event which overflows and troubles this settlement. Building on this, this thesis then examines the possibilities offered by the creation of micro-events for encountering, knowing, and relating with, margarine matters anew. In this way, this thesis investigates the values, norms and power relations entangled with the presentation and enactment of margarine and its constituent parts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods, examining both what these framings do, and how they are maintained. In approaching margarine matters in this way, this thesis offers three key contributions to the area of food geographies. Firstly, I demonstrate how commodity frameworks shift political problems in to a technical and administrative realm and close down spaces of critical thought and political intervention. Secondly, I establish that ‘strange encounters’ are events which can add to understandings of the more-than human world-making of food knowledges, practices, and habits. Thirdly, I determine that the novel methodological approach of ‘playing with our food’ is a productive technique with which to prefigure and rehearse more nuanced ethical understandings of eating-well as a relational doing that is excessive to consuming-well.

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