This episode of the Food Matters podcast series features Taylor Wilson, graduate of the Master’s in Development Practice Program at the University of Winnipeg. Taylor discusses how Indigenous knowledges can help us to look at the Canada Food Guide and our food consumption differently. What can we learn from food guides and practices informed by Indigenous knowledges? Taylor suggests ways we can reconsider our relationships to the foods we eat and how we might think differently about what and how we feed ourselves.
Podcast episode host: Allison Norris
Interviewee: Taylor Wilson
Podcast theme music: Laura Bruno
Script editor: Kathy Dobson
Script editor & project manager: Myriam Durocher
Transcript
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AN: If you attended public school in Canada in the last 70 years, chances are, at some point, either during gym class or health class, your teacher showed you the Canada food guide – or as it was first called, “Canada’s Official Food Rules”. Back then it was a type-written list of familiar categories like fruits, vegetables, meat, and cereal and breads. Since then, the “food guide”, so named in 1961, has undergone a series of makeovers, including category shifts, color charts, rainbows, even a happy sun licking its lips as it shines on the delicious options for each of the food groups. The most recent food guide, released in 2019, takes shape as a dinner plate, full of options dietitians and consultants have deemed healthy food. These options are proportioned according to how many servings of each you should consume in a day, half of which are mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, a quarter of which are proteins, and the rest whole grains. There’s also a big glass of water to wash it all down.
The food guide’s focus on healthy foods and eating habits is the document to which many people turn when they want ‘get in shape’ and professionals consider when advising someone who wants to make a dietary change or even just trying to learn how to ‘eat healthy’. And that’s what first caught Taylor’s interest as well.
TW: Going into my master’s, I was on a big health kick. Just trying to figure out what is kind of the best diet for me, and how do I eat healthier, and just be healthier. And the Canadian Food Guide came out. And I immediately was like, Okay, this makes no sense to me.
AN: Taylor couldn’t access the recommended foods in their community of Fisher River Cree Nation.
TW: I was out home, in my home community, and when it came out, and I was like, Well, if I go shopping at my local grocery store, this is going to be so hard to comply with. And I understand that the Canadian Food Guide is guidelines, suggestions, recommendations, but at the same time, because it’s such a largely popular document that’s used across Canada, and the implications it has, for people who don’t have access to the things that they’re recommending, is huge, and it has a great impact on how you view, your living situation, your culture, and all of these different things when it comes to food, because food is such an important part of who we are, and our everyday lives.
AN: And so Taylor decided to make the 2019 Canada Food guide the focus of their master’s research.
TW: I think, as I did more and more research, it was it was really affirming in terms of the direction that I was going, but also it was a little bit disheartening, knowing that these things were the realities of a lot of people in terms of when they’re accessing the food guide… And it also really opened my eyes up to a lot of different things that I hadn’t considered as well, that are really concerning, like agricultural policy… the historical impacts of how the government has made decisions on food… I need to be considering history, I need to be considering Economics… my focus really grew rather than kind of honed in on this something. Which is what I find research does it allows you to hone in on things. But it really opened up this wider, bigger picture that we need to be considering.
AN: In their Food Matters conference presentation Taylor talked about the relationship between institutions, specifically colonial institutions, and the food guide. I asked Taylor to elaborate.
TW: The first food guide that was ever created in Canada was geared towards rationing in the war at the time in 1942. If you think about 1942, what was the culture like in Canada? There was residential schools and experimentation on children to understand nutritional recommendations, and a lot of those nutritional recommendations ended up in the Canadian Food Guide. And so you have to piece together this huge puzzle of the history of Canada to really understand why the food guide is so heavily rooted in colonialism.
AN: Taylor talks about the surprise that some have at the entangled histories of colonialism and the food guide. Toward the end of her research into the food guide, some wondered if it was possible to decolonize the food guide at all.
TW: There’s the saying that I absolutely love – the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so maybe it’s a little insane to think that having a decolonized version of the food guide is going to be any different. And rather, it’s time to kind of take a new route in terms of looking at the way we present: what does health mean? What does healthy food mean? How do we connect to healthy food systems and all of those different things, maybe it’s time to look at them from a different lens.
AN: Even though, as Taylor points out, the food guide is issued in dozens of languages, including some Indigenous languages, the food content remains the same. So how does a perspective different from a Eurocentric food guide look? Taylor suggests we all need to think about where the food is coming from and who is impacted by what we’re eating.
TW: …recently, I had a conversation with somebody about avocados and how right now, they’re super popular. They’re extremely healthy for you like healthy fats, all of these different things, but if you go to places where they grow avocados and avocados are a cultural staple or a traditional food, it’s super expensive to purchase avocados, like a day’s worth of salary to purchase an avocado where they’re grown. But also, it’s becoming so much of a market there that it’s becoming more popular to, you know, grow and sell avocados illegally than it is to like grow drugs in those areas. And so, you have to, like really think about these healthy foods that are being recommended, how are those impacting other people? And so we need to really think about localizing our food systems a little bit more. And that’s where this Indigenous or traditional knowledge comes in. Because it’s all about thinking about how you are impacted by the system that you’re in, but also how you impact that system. And so by incorporating Indigenous knowledge, and the local harvesting, caring for the local environments, all of these different things, you’re really starting to understand your impact and by understanding that impact you learn how to take care of where you live, right? It goes beyond health, and you start thinking about all of these different things, because I started thinking about an avocado and here I am thinking about: What system am I in? How is that impacting all these other people?
AN: How often do you think about these things when you buy or consume food? When was the last time you considered the relationships and networks that bring food into your neighborhood, home and body? Taylor discusses how these relationships could be expressed in Indigenous food guides. And how food guides can even open spaces for reconciliation or empower Indigenous communities.
TW: By connecting the idea of a food guide, and connecting the idea of reconciliation, together, we’re really beginning to think about a lot of the different relationships that we have with people… a lot of people, they don’t see these effects, because they’re in their own little bubble, but by thinking about, okay, how do I open up my relationships? How do I build new relationships? And then we begin to connect with one another on deeper levels, and begin to really understand how my food choices are affecting somebody else… There’s this area of Winnipeg, where it’s almost impossible to buy healthy food. If you go into those areas the produce choices are horrible, or a lot of areas of Winnipeg have community gardens, but in this specific area, you don’t really find them.
An Indigenous focus Food Guide, or a food guide created by Indigenous people, it really gives them that sense of autonomy. This idea that’s been thrown around of self-governance, because they get to look at what they have in their traditional territories and really consider, this is what we have: What are our goals? What do we want to see in the future for our local food systems for local food cultures? All of these different things. And create some community plan, an idea, a hope for a future of better traditional food systems in their local territories.
And the thing is, what that also includes is the non-Indigenous communities that are surrounding them, because we understand we don’t just live in a bubble. We have to interact with the communities, the non-Indigenous communities that surround us. So that includes, buying and trading with them, it includes food sharing with them, because a big thing with Indigenous cultures is this idea of food sharing. And it’s not just about profits, it’s about, okay, I have more than I need: Here, have this, I care about you, because you’re my neighbour, it’s a lot of things that you do see, but you don’t see on larger scales.
Engaging in a traditional food system, or engaging in a local food system is about, just being a good neighbour. It’s ‘I’m going to care for my yard, and if I can, I will help you take care of your yard’. ‘I have all this excess of food, and I don’t want it to go to waste, and I’m not concerned about the fact that it cost me so much, because, I’m wasting money anyways, if I just throw it out. So here have it’. It’s thinking about those kinds of things. With the way things work, right now, it’s very, like, ‘I gotta think about me’, ‘I gotta think about the costs that I’m incurring’. But when you take it out of that, and just try to be a good neighbour, that’s really what it’s about.
AN: And being a good neighbour might a lot easier than anyone thinks, if they actually take the time to think about it.
TW: What I really hope people take away from this research is taking the time to think about where their food is coming from, and who it’s impacting, and what decisions that they can be making on a daily basis to make some of their decisions be less of a negative impact on other people.
AN: This reminds me of the interview with Katie Konstantopoulos and Koby Song-Nichols, also part of the Food Matters conference materials, who also recommend taking up some of these questions, particularly as settler and settler descendants. Larger questions about what we consume maybe not be new, but they are becoming more frequent and urgent. As Taylor mentioned, sometimes thinking about the piece of fruit in your hand or your grocery cart gets you thinking about the larger systems and leads to feeling somewhat helpless within them. Taylor has a suggestion.
TW: Start small and start with what you can do. And try not to get overwhelmed, because these systems are huge. And I don’t really want to put that pressure on the individual, but there are things that we can be doing as individuals to make better decisions around our food systems.
AN: It seems like a lot to chew on, but somehow Talyor makes it seem both possible and impactful.
TW: The more people that make these good decisions around our food systems, the kind of more widespread it’s going to become, and the more, eventually, it’ll kind of trickle upwards to these bigger systems, and have other people thinking about it.
AN: And for Taylor, this journey goes back where it began.
TW: I started in my own community, and I’m hoping to kind of bring it back to my own community in terms of seeing them create their own version of a food guide. And I’d love to see other communities across Canada, across North America, engaging in their own food systems and creating big plans.
AN: But it doesn’t stop there.
TW: …people are freaking out now about food prices and, and how that’s gonna be a big deal in the near future. And so, really, really thinking about getting a little bit more local, and I’m looking forward to seeing what that looks like. I can’t picture it because there’s so many things that could come into play for that. But I’m looking forward to hopefully one day seeing it and being in awe of it, because I would really love in my lifetime if that was something that happened.
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AN: My many thanks to Taylor Wilson for sharing her research with us.This podcast was brought to you by Carleton University. I’m Allison Norris and I was your host for this episode. Thank you to Kathy Dobson and Myriam Durocher, project managers and editors for this series. And to Laura Bruno for creating the theme music. You can find more Food Matters podcasts, articles and interviews on the Food Matters website. Thanks for listening!