"Eat the World": Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants

Abstract

This article examines intercultural contact in Quebec City’s ethnic restaurants. The results of this multisited inquiry show that ethnic restaurants have developed rapidly, representing microspaces of intercultural encounter and exchange, places where people can see, touch, and consume the cuisine of the "other." More specifically, this article explores the ways in which eating reduces difference and distance; how it evokes cultural and geographical appropriation. Ethnic restaurants represent deterritorialized "ethnosites" in which the foreign is made familiar and the global miniaturized. They provide the opportunity to "taste" difference and to "eat" exotic cultures from faraway places without leaving home. In the same way that the bourgeois restaurant of the 19th century was a site for the consumption of the nation, through the presentation of regional cuisine, the ethnic restaurant has become in postcolonial societies a place for the consumption of the world.

There's something fishy about that sushi: how Japan interprets the global sushi boom

“…While it is debatable whether Japanese pop culture overseas does or does not further Japanese national interests as the government hopes, the assumption that anime, manga or otaku aesthetics are essentially and originally Japanese often goes unquestioned. Similar assumptions about the link between culture and national/ethnic identity also exist in the field of food in transnational contexts, where ethnic food is often examined as a site for the construction of diasporic identity (Roy 2002, Turgeon and Pastinelli 2002, Thomas 2004, Oum 2005. Our study of sushi offers a different perspective, as it questions the essentialised notion of a national culture, implicitly challenging the idea that the expansion of food cultures is always linked to diasporas.…”

Ouverture ostentatoire à la diversité et cosmopolitisme

“…Ainsi, pour Cook et Crang (1996), la consommation interculturelle représente non seulement l'appropriation d'une autre culture, mais aussi l'appropriation d'un espace et d'un territoire. Dans une étude sur la consommation dans les restaurants ethniques, Turgeon et Pastinelli (2002) font remarquer que les individus ne s'identifient pas seulement à une culture à partir des nourritures qui lui sont propres, ils peuvent également s'identifier à elle en adoptant sa manière de manger ou même en s'appropriant délibérément la nourriture qu'un groupe rejette de manière explicite (en exprimant des dégoûts). Ainsi, si la nourriture était traditionnellement un élément distinctif des cultures nationales (clams du Massachusetts, pasties du Michigan, crawfish de la Louisiane, sirop d'érable du Québec, etc.…”

Food and cultural omnivorism: a reflexive discussion on otherness, interculturality and cosmopolitanism

“…For discussing the perspectives we present international studies developed at the intersection between food omnivorism and cultural omnivorism (Cappeliez & Johnston, 2013;Germann Molz, 2007;Jonas, 2013;Turgeon & Pastinelli, 2002;Warde, Martens & Olsen ,1999).…”

“…The pursuit of variety of consumer experience is a feature of particular social groups and that some specific component practices express social distinction. Turgeon & Pastinelli (2002) understand that, just as the new restaurants of the nineteenth century and their menus that united regional cuisines dishes made possible to know and consume a new idea of national, the twenty-first century ethnic restaurants also help to consolidate a post-colonial world. Ethnic restaurants represent deterritorialized places where diners can get to know other cultures on familiar ground, a microcosm of intercultural exchange.…”

“…Locals can also engage to the possibility of connecting to Otherness, through the consumption of ethnic restaurants, as analyzed by Turgeon and Pastinelli (2002), with an intercultural exchange through ethnic food and its cultural codes. This is similar to the pragmatic mode proposed by Cappeliez and Johnston (2013), for those individuals that experience ethnic food because of personal connections, and close social networks.…”