Telling Stories of Food, Community and Meaning Lives in Post-1945 North Bay, Ontario

"Telling Stories of Food, Community and Meaningful Lives" uses the memories of nearly seventy women who lived in northern Ontario during the post-1945 period. These women represent a diverse cross-section of the population including English- and Franco-Ontarians, European immigrants as well as Anishinaabe and Metis peoples. Although northern Ontario has been understood as a white and masculine space, this project provides a corrective narrative by uniting the food stories of Euro-Canadian and Indigenous women to consider cross-cultural perspectives, inter-relationships as well as complex racial, colonial and religious dynamics. This project largely argues that women from diverse backgrounds used food to negotiate the physical, cultural and ideological spaces they inhabited. For these women, food and its related activities became a critical site for identity formation and a sense of belonging but also a source of fear, loneliness, exclusion and discrimination.;Each chapter is organized to examine a facet of women's food experiences. Chapter 1 analyzes how the North and northern Ontario impacted the availability and cost of food, and the strategies women used to ensure they obtained food including berry-picking, hunting and fishing. In chapter 2, I combine women's memories and cooking literature to consider the ways women learned to cook as well as the imaginative, transformative and healing elements of preparing dishes. Chapter 3 discusses the complex connections between food and family relationships, as episodes of familial happiness were recalled alongside those of struggle, neglect and abuse. Chapter 4 looks at the consumption of food-related items and technologies as the fulfillment of creativity, desires and cultural norms as well as a symbolic movement away from the pains and struggles of their past. And finally, chapter 5 investigates the community building and interactions centered on the making, eating and sharing of food.