Cantonese barbecue meat was almost banned in Canada if not for 'the good fight': Vancouver Island professor

Char siu, barbecue pork and roasted duck are all popular Cantonese dishes — which Vancouver authorities attempted to ban when they shut down Cantonese meat shops in Vancouver's Chinatown during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The efforts were part of a movement across Canada to ban the meats.

"The health officer at the time was clearly working at trying to get it banned. There was a big fight," Imogene Lim told Stephen Quinn on CBC's The Early Edition Friday morning.

In the end, business owners and activists prevailed.

"The Chinatown merchants came out in full force, there were allies in the community. We are fortunate to continue to have barbecue meats because of the good fight that happened," said the anthropology professor at Vancouver Island University.

"Why they wanted to ban it makes no sense," Lim added.

"There were reportedly two people who died of food poisoning in Tacoma, Wash., from barbecue meat that was not from a Chinese meat store. It was from a supermarket and apparently it was chicken. It set off this wave of basically anti-Chinese business in Vancouver."

Lim gave a talk at the Museum of Vancouver on Saturday, where the film, Under Fire: Inside a Chinese Roasted Meat Shop in Vancouver is screening as part of the museum's A Seat at the Table: Chinese Immigration and British Columbia feature exhibit.

The following transcript of their conversation on The Early Edition has been edited for clarity and length.

Why would something like this happen? There's the obvious, but go ahead. 

It's pure and simple racism. This occurrence happened in 1965 in Tacoma. Well what was happening throughout Canada and the United States? The purposeful means to try and eliminate what the city saw as "blighted" areas.

And we all know that Chinatown wasn't just Chinatown. There was the Italian community there, the Black community. It was a cluster of marginalized peoples. And the Chinese were the largest population in that area.

How much of this do you think had to do with the visibility of Chinese barbecue meats in Chinatown?

Certainly it was very popular and it was also very big business. Today if you're passing through Chinatown, it's readily available and there were lots of barbecue meat stores in Chinatown as well as restaurants offering it.

You can see what's happened to Chinatown since then. It was big business. When you have big business, who are the other players that we're not necessarily aware of that might be interested in the fact that it was a multi-million dollar business? At that point in time, $8 to $10 million. That's a lot of change.

It is. Who would have an interest in stopping it? 

The Chinese have always been viewed as taking away jobs from the "real" Canadians. I'm not going to speculate, but there has been this thread throughout history that Chinese are good labourers, but let's keep them in their place. Don't let them be successful.

The name of this film is Under Fire: Inside a Chinese Roasted Meat Shop in Vancouver. When was that documentary filmed? 

It's a few years old now. I can't remember the exact date for it. It is very interesting because people don't know the process of producing the meat. It's just like the baker, they got to get up really early to produce the meat.

So I think in the film they say that they were up at five o'clock, you know, doing the filming, and then there's a shot at the very end where the two filmmakers, they're slumped in their cars, napping. 

How did you get in the field of food anthropology? 

Part of it is my background. I am the daughter of a restaurateur from Vancouver's Chinatown. Back in the day, my family were part of the partnership that ran the WK Gardens. And we had the big banquets and all that. Chinatown was really a big part of who I am.

After I did my doctoral degree, I got a postdoctoral fellowship and I would say that was my reconnecting to my roots. When I did it some people say, "Oh look at that, somebody got some grant money to look at food." And it's really about social history.