Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2016

The Current Transcript for June 29, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I'm grateful that I still have my beautiful wife and children around me. Without them I am... But if you asked me if I can guarantee my children a better future I doubt if I can do that, not even for a single day.

MIKE FINNERTY: On the third anniversary of the Declaration of the ISIS caliphate, Iraqi government forces say they've reclaimed the mosque where that declaration was made and the city of Mosul is days away from liberation. But for those dislodged by years of conflict there's no home left to return to. Today an award winning new film that takes us into the heart of the conflict zone in Iraq, with access no Western film maker has achieved, it asks the question how could we descend to this? Also today, eating Canadian.

SOUNDCLIP

We just want to keep it really simple, with cod tongue. You can go over fancy if you like but there's such a traditional thing that most Newfoundlanders are pretty nostalgic about the flavor of the cod tongue.

MF: How a country with so many regional and ethnic dishes can stake a claim to a truly Canadian cuisine. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

'Nobody's listening': Documentary reveals firsthand struggle of survival in Iraq

Guest: Zaradasht Ahmed

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

[Children talking]

MF: To translate, she's saying: “Mostafa, repeat after me please God don't let the plane bomb us.” And then little Mostafa repeats those words and his sister laughs. Those are two of the children of Nori Sharif a nurse in Iraq. His story is told in an award winning documentary called Nowhere to Hide. It follows Nori through five years of upheaval and heartbreak and one of the world's most dangerous places known as the Triangle of Death in central Iraq. The film begins soon after American troops retreated in 2011. Nori uses a camera to film the aftermath of what Iraqis call the American war. Their hope for peace dims as civil war escalates and their city is overtaken by the so-called Islamic State. Nowhere to hide is opening tomorrow in theaters in Toronto and Vancouver. Zaradasht Ahmed is the director of nowhere to hide and with us from New York City, and a warning some of what we're about to talk about is graphic and could be disturbing to some listeners. Zaradasht, hello.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Hello, how are you?

MF: I'm well thank you very much. And we were very moved by your film screening it here. What was it about Nori that really made you think he could be the right protagonist to tell the stories in the film?

ZARADASHT AHMED: He came back all the time with different material and he was talking about the other thing that it was happened to those areas. We, neither media nor us knew about it. So we realized he had a much much wider access to lots of other things than other people had in that area.

MF: Well and he's an incredibly engaging person, it seems from watching him on film. And he seems to have relationships far and wide with different sorts of people in the community.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Exactly. He's a goodhearted medic helping all sorts of people. One of the things that I liked about him he was very dedicated to public server. So he could go to anybody need bandages need médecins he cleaned their wounds go there. Some of them he just talked to them, make them feel comfortable. I liked that about him. It was a depth in his character that attracted to me.

MF: Much of that documentary really is made up of the footage that's shot by Nori, and you talk about the incredible access that it gave you. Could you give some examples of the types of things it reveals to the viewer and particularly to people who just aren't familiar with that part of the world?

ZARADASHT AHMED: I think the scenes where he's totally by himself like nobody else is there. No media is present there. ISIS is just right outside the hospital, he's there, he's filming. Other scenes where the explosions find place and they are the first hand informant because they have an ambulance they drive to where the crime scene are.

MF: There was some considerable optimism when U.S. led forces left Iraq in 2011 and you do get that sense from the film. But that quickly dissipates and a newer, or possibly even, a worse reality sets in. We'd like to play a clip from the documentary This Is Nori talking about life since the American invasion. It's in translation.

SOUNDCLIP

Life used to be simple here. But since the invasion this has become one of the most dangerous places in Iraq. Locals call it the Triangle of Death. It is in the very center of Iraq. Many people have been killed here. People here have been forgotten along with their stories. Neither the media nor the authorities are interested in these people. The only thing you hear about this area is that people who live here are either killers or terrorists.

MK: It is the Triangle of Death. I mean that is a new name for it, what was it like before?

ZARADASHT AHMED: There were nothing called triangle of death in entire Iraq. Life used to be… These are like agricultural area. You have a lot of shepherds. They have animals, their villages. Peaceful, used to be very peaceful.

MF: It was peaceful.

ZARADASHT AHMED: It was peaceful.

MF: But then it descends into just a sort of depravity and barbarism. I mean there one scene, an awful scene, where people are recounting having to recover the beheaded bodies corpses of children. And one of the players in the film says this just didn't happen before.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Yes. Exactly. You know if you talk to Iraqis, now if we wide it up more, if we talk to Syrian, if you talk to Libyan, Middle East generally, people usually don't know why there is war. Lots of people, 95-96 % of the population they, you know, live like me and you go to work every day trying to provide the family with food and shelter and also education for the kids like the normal the average thing. And when these things happen you like this case of these two brothers, somebody came with a bag, put it on the table in the emergency and they went to open it so there were two heads of two young brothers on the way to school being kidnapped a couple of days before. And then the father found he is dead that the guy who brought it to the hospital was the father. It's devastating beyond imagination. And I was thinking about the father. So we tried to find the father we talked to the Father and he didn't understood why. Lots of people when you ask them they don't understand. They don't understand they don't know how to answer you. Nobody know where this war coming from, who's funding this war, who's organizing it. Because it's not chaotic, it's well organized. Even though it look chaotic but inside when you go and analyze the pattern, it's not. So that was our motivation in the beginning to try to understand that war. But when I got to know Nori and followed him it was he was the exact right person to put face on that war.

MF: Why did it become, in the process of making the film, so important to act as a witness to these stories?

ZARADASHT AHMED: First of all these stories that nobody care about, you know. So those people are actually people who still live in that war and nobody's listening to them, nobody cared about them. And when you been exposed for some unjustice you want to do something about it. You know, as a human it stays with you. You try to tell it, you try to go to court, you try to tell it in the mountain. So Nori was the one he wanted to tell. You see now I'm sitting with you because of that film because of Nori’s witness work in a way.

MF: As the violence picks up at one point a western doctor asks Nori if he feels he can trust anyone and Nori says: “No not any longer.” And I wonder what insight you have into you know, I suppose what mechanism was triggered in the people of the area that allowed friends and family and neighbors who had so peacefully co-existed before, turn on each other.

ZARADASHT AHMED: That's a good question because one of the symptoms of that war is turning people against each other. And to do so, you know one of the mistakes that the American was not aware of when they went to Iraq in 2003 and invaded it, it was the cultural background and the historical background for Iraq. Iraq has been built throughout thousands of years of conflict, clashes between civilizations. And later is the Shia-Sunni conflict, you know since the Prophet Muhammad’s death 4300 years ago there been a problem between these two major Muslim sects. Like you have the Shia the majority and the minority is the Sunni. So these two fragments of Islam has been in fight all the time. It's been in conflict all the time, who's running the Islamic world. And then they went there without considering this aspect of Iraq's history. So they in a way waked up all these conflicts and brought it back to the surface. The bad thing was when they left they'd never finished the job, and then they left the country facing a vacuum of power, where again everything came back and even the tribes rule and tribe history came back to…They also wanted to rule Iraq by tribal rules which is something that was not there for hundreds of years. And suddenly your friend or your family, that maybe you married from a Shia, you married it from a Kurd or Arab. Suddenly they face themselves as the enemy and that's how you cannot trust anybody because everybody has a motivation.

MF: And it gets it gets so vicious and so violent at one point that most of the staff at the hospital in Jalawla where Nori works actually Leave, including the lone doctor. But Nori stays with a few of the others to treat the wounded. Why does he stay despite all the danger?

ZARADASHT AHMED: He's very dedicated. He's well dedicated. He's one of the best examples of public service. For him it's a shame to leave the hospital.

MF: And the hospital comes under attack.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Yeah. He stays there you know. During that period I had only contact with him by phone, telephone. In one point the telephone also was not possible. So lots of these things when the hospital fall and all these things, I didn't know about them, I had no clue about how things were going. I was very afraid of his life.

MF: I want to start to talk about how ISIS enters the scene and play another clip from the documentary. This is Nori Sharif talking about the nature of the war that's going on around him. And again you'll hear a translator voicing Nori.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

It is difficult to diagnose this war. It is an undiagnosed war. You only see the symptoms, the killing, displacements, the bloodbaths, but you don't understand the disease. It is hidden in the body. The purpose of this war is to make you confused and unable to think straight, brain dead to paralyze your will and determination.

MF: Zaradasht it was hard for many in the West to understand the rise of ISIS and indeed ISIS takes over Jalawla. What did allow that to happen?

ZARADASHT AHMED: ISIS in itself is not a product of, let me say in a way, Islam as a religion. I think it's a combination of…There's a huge motivation for such ideology such ISIS to come to the arena and play. So there are Sunnis who really lost everything, lost power. They want to come back to power, get it back. There are people based on revenge. They're victims of war, joining the opposition in a way, joining also those fanatic groups. There are foreign groups that are… they are enemy to the state, their enemy to these values. And they're always after them, the jihadists. In my opinion who's hosting them is this ideology of violence. They can't find themselves. Like ISIS is not a narrow ideology. If you go in ISIS, it is a wide ideology. So ISIS is a big game using this vacuum of power. You see it in Iraq, started from there and now spread into Syria spreading to Libya spreading to Yemen. And it's been in Afghanistan before, they have been in the tribal area in Peshawar in Pakistan, in Chechnya and before that it's been in Bosnia. So it's been going on under different names.

MF: And Noori and his family, he has several young children, they decide to flee Jalawla once ISIS arrives on the scene. How did they manage it? How did they manage to avoid getting caught?

ZARADASHT AHMED: I don't know. It's like this is a chance you take, this is a chance. He's a good diplomat he knows how to speak you know how to talk. As you see, there are shelling there are also ISIS is everywhere. I don't know. I was very worried. And the contact interrupt between me and him. I didn't hear from him maybe a couple of month, during that time. And then suddenly he popped up and he called me. I was very worried. I was in Iraq waiting for him, you know.

MF: You feature a number of scenes with children in them. Why did you want them to be such a prominent feature of the film?

ZARADASHT AHMED: It's about these vulnerable people, you know. It's about people trying to survive something they never asked for, which in this case war in Iraq. After the old critiques some people's reaction after seeing the film, I have been screening it over 40-45 festivals until now, and all of them agree about that this is a story it's very new for them because never seen the war, never seen the war from that perspective from that point of view, point of view of the small guy and his family. And to make a family visual a family life, you need to see all the aspect of the family, you know the kids the daily life to associate with it to make empathy to put yourself in their shoes.

MF: In the case of Nori and his family I mean they become internally displaced people. Where do they end up and where are they now?

ZARADASHT AHMED: Nori’s status is IDP. Like internally displaced person which you have millions of them in Iraq. We don't hear too much about the ID piece. Nori now has been in this sad IDP camp. I think it is soon three years. Every day it's like “Okay, tomorrow we go back”. I don't think he will… I do have a feeling that he will stay longer.

MF: But people are moving back to Jalawla now.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Yeah. Because not only not safe, the town is destroyed. You know there's nothing being built again. You know if you want to live in a town you need the infrastructure. You don't have that. Nori’s house is demolished, like it's not exist anymore.

MF: And you don't present any solutions, Zaradasht, to the descent into violence. That is really the story of the film. Is that how you feel? Do you feel that there is any solution?

ZARADASHT AHMED: I think the first thing for not only Iraq and everybody in facing the war, and also everybody facing this kind of that we don't care any more, even we are not facing war in the western part of the world, I think first thing we have to care. That's essential, that's the start, we start to think listening to the other side we have to care before that and then we listen.

MF: It's hard to care when you don't even know.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Exactly. So, that's the thing. We have a long long way to go.

MF: But there is a scene in the film at the end where Nori says that Iraq may lose a generation or two but in the end the will to build will win over the forces.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Yes, but that's how we believe in it. That's my message. My conclusion has been always like that. You know the will of building, survival is always stronger than the will of destruction and death. Because in matter of fact we are here today, otherwise ones that will of this destruction winning then it will be the end. That will be the end.

MF: It is a remarkable film and a singular film. And congratulations for pulling that off and thank you very much for speaking to us.

ZARADASHT AHMED: Thank you very much for you to have me here.

MF: Zaradasht Ahmed is the director of Nowhere to Hide. He was in New York City and Nowhere to Hide opens tomorrow in cinemas in Toronto and Vancouver.

[Music]

MF: The CBC News is next. then what could be more Canadian than a sushi roll?

SOUNDCLIP

You eat the smoked salmon. You love lobster. So I put it together. So we call Great Canadian Roll.

MF: Vancouver Chef Hidekazu Tojo with his great Canadian roll. In our next half hour we'll sit down to a feast of Canadian cuisine from Poutine, to Cod's tongues, to sushi with food researcher Lenore Newman. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

From cod tongues to butter chicken pizza: Lenore Newman's Canadian culinary journey

Guest: Lenore Newman

MF: Hello I'm Mike Finnerty. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MF: Up next, a Canada Day buffet nibbling towards a national cuisine.

SOUNDCLIP

It's like the kettle when you're dying for a cup of tea, right? [Laughs] Even a few minutes is to long and your dying for a cod tongue.

MF: You heard her right. She's dying for a cod tongue. It's about as Newfoundland a sentiment as you can get. And with Canada Day two days away that would seem to be as good a place as any to embark on a tour of Canadian cuisine. For a country such as Canada with so many distinctive regional and ethnic flavors it may be hard to imagine a truly national cuisine. But we're about to hear from one author who argues that it exists and it's delicious. First though, let's go back to restaurant owner Andrea Maunder at her St. John's restaurant Bacalao which serves a dressed up version of classic Newfoundland grub.

SOUNDCLIP

So what I’m doing is just getting out some flower so that we can dredge the cod tongues, season it with nice kosher salt, a little bit of fresh ground pepper and we just want to keep it really simple with cod tongues. You can go uber-fancy if you like, but they’re such a traditional thing that most Newfoundlanders are pretty nostalgic about the flavor of a cod tongues. So the only other thing you might want to have with the cod tongues maybe is a bit of scrunchins. I am merging my basket in the deep fryer here, it is on 350. You can hear the sizzle. There's two textures to a cod tongue. There's the [unintelligible] part which is almost like a cheap [unintelligible] from Klesh fish,and then there's the little jelly part. In Newfoundland it would be sacrilege to cut off the jelly off, but I do know people who do it. But for me it is the yummiest part. One thing I really love about the idea of eating cod tongues, I mean obviously it was born of necessity like all Newfoundland cuisine, these days we are throwing back to the time when we ate nose to tail. When you killed an animal you ate everything because that was how people survived and lived. And the cod tongues for me are the fish version of that. And what used to be a necessity of course now is a delicacy. We’ve got lift off on those cod tongues, now. So I'm just shaking the basket off a little bit and they are golden brown and so crispy - they're gorgeous.

MF: Whether you see Cod tongues as a delicious delicacy or an acquired taste, Lenore Newman wants you to consider them a vital element of Canadian cuisine. She is a Canada Research Chair in food security and the environment at the University of the Fraser Valley in B.C. and she's the author of Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey. Lenore Newman spoke to Anna Maria from Vancouver, in January.

AMT: What side do you fall on? Are you a lover of cod tongues?

LENORE NEWMAN: I adored them and I am a fisherman's daughter, so maybe I was predisposed. but I sort of found them like they were like “Dessert Cod”, they're fatty and rich and quite wonderful.

AMT: Dessert Cod, I love it. Only in Canada. You say you're from a fishing family. What did what did that teach you about the link between culture and food?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well, I really grew up thinking everyone produce food for a living. We were a halibut family and a salmon family and I spent a lot of my youth on the water and selling fish at the dock with my father who treated his children as sort of advertisements for fish. That if you don't buy my fish my children will die. So please buy the fish and we were sort of part of the show of selling, so I think from that I really learned that food is a performance. And the people didn't buy fish from us just because they wanted it fresh. That was part of it. They wanted to interact with a real fishing family and they were always really disappointed we didn't live on the boat.

AMT: You did a lot of traveling and you research for this project didn’t you?

LENORE NEWMAN: I did. Canada's a very very large country. And so I spent a great deal of time on the road.

AMT: Were you looking at restaurant food or home cooking?

LENORE NEWMAN: Mostly restaurant food because it's the easiest way to get a handle on cuisine and home cooking does differ than the formal cuisine we present to the world. Certainly in Canada probably the meal we eat most at home is lasagna. Weirdly enough if you look at the numbers. And the food product we use the most in our food is cheese. But in our restaurants that's not what we highlight.

AMT: That’s so interesting OK. So there are a lot of Canadian foods that evoke nostalgia iconic items such as, of course, cod tongues, Nanaimo bars, tourtiere. But you argue there's a new vibrant Canadian cuisine emerging. What do you see as the current version of Canadian cuisine?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well, I think these days Canadian cuisine is really reflecting our identity as a country and it's an interesting time to be saying that given our Prime Minister just hinted we don't have a core identity. And I'm not going argue with him, but I do feel we have a bit of a core cuisine that has emerged, this idea that we really are putting forward fresh food, seasonal foods and foods coming from all sorts of cultures. I think our multiculturalism is really being reflected in our cuisine and that we're highlighting the best of our region. And it makes us look a little more like say the New Nordic cuisine that's emerged in places like Iceland and Denmark. in comparison save French cuisine which is very nationalistic in it's very identity. We're highlighting our multiculturalism through food.

AMT: You use the term Creole cuisine. What is that?

LENORE NEWMAN: Yes that a little contentious at first but I think the justification is there. Everyone is familiar usually with fusion. The idea of taking two cultures dishes and mixing them together, but Creole is deeper. It's when cultures coexist until they form a cuisine together. So the quintessential example is usually Louisiana or New Orleans Creole, where you have this blending of Spanish and French American and Indigenous foods. And I believe quite firmly that Canada has developed a bit of a creole, that we've become very adept at bringing ingredients from multicultural cuisine and mix them into our cuisine. So we say make our poutine and put butter chicken on it. Or we take a recipe that comes from another culture like say the recipe for a lassie and we make it with blueberries which does that. That uses local ingredients to replace something in a recipe from somewhere else. And this has become so natural to us. It no longer feels other. So for example when I ask my students where is sushi from? I mean they know it's from Japan but they'll also say oh it's Canadian food and Canadian sushi is a distinct thing to them.

AMT: Well in fact since you brought it up I have a clip that speaks to that. We're going to visit another restaurant Now this is a high end sushi restaurant in Vancouver. Owner and chef Hidekazu Tojo is making one of his famous rolls at Tojo's. Listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

HIDEKAZU TOJO: So that I show you how to outside smoke salmon inside lettuce, asparagus and lobster. I use a lobster tail looks nice and nice presentation. My philosophy use local ingredients. You know I came in 1970, around that time we don't have no chance to only use local. So people they don’t know about sushi Japan food. So I like to slowly slowly teaching Canadian people. But you eat smoked salmon and you eat lobster, so I put it together. Easy to approach, so we call “Great Canadian Roll” that looks great and tastes excellent.

AMT: There you go “The Great Canadian Roll”. Lenore Newman, how does Tojo's creation fit into the idea of a Creole Canadian cuisine?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well, it fits perfectly into it. I'm hungry now because of that. Tojo is a great example of someone who brings local ingredients into classical Japanese cuisine. It really comes together where you have that local flavor presented in a new way. And one of the best things I ate on the entire trip was actually a lobster that he did in miso and butter. And it was a lovely combination, but not one you would ever find in classical Japanese cuisine.

AMT: Now I'm getting hungry. He's had some flack from traditional Japanese chefs for all of this though hasn't he?

LENORE NEWMAN: Yes. Originally sushi was a preservation method, you didn't even eat the rice you threw it away after it fermented the fish. And, of course, it's evolved over the years. But there are people in Japan who feel what's being done to sushi around the world is wrong. But you can't really call a cuisine wrong. So you take it with a grain of salt I suppose.

AMT: What are some other Creole dishes that have become specifically Canadian?

LENORE NEWMAN: Butter chicken pizza is very popular in the Fraser Valley and actually emerges out of there's a great number of Italian-Indian restaurants in the valley on the East Coast, one of the best examples is donair and you have a Greek food reimagined, made into all sorts of wonderful things that you have after a night at the pub. A little less in Quebec, Quebecois cuisine is one of our leading cuisines and it's emerging very strongly as sort of a reclamation of a traditional cuisine. The modern Quebecois cuisine is lighter. It incorporates more vegetables and of course Toronto. You know you can throw a rock and hit an interesting Creole.

AMT: Where does the Timbit fit into this?

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh well, you know it’s a bit of an outlier. Tim Horton’s though is wonderful in that it is so very Canadian. It highlights maple. If we have a national food it is maple followed maybe by poutine, if you need an actual dish. Tim Horton’s has really captured that idea of cold mornings, hockey and brought it all together. Has their maple glazed and double double which has been called by some people sort of iconic Canadian experience. So it draws something different, one of the founding cultures for sure.

AMT: How much of Creole cuisine is an urban phenomenon in Canada?

LENORE NEWMAN: To date it is largely urban, but that's not entirely the case and I was recently in Tofino. I decided I'd go for sushi. They asked me if I wanted fresh crab and I thought that's a strange question, of course, I do. And they walked out to the end of the dock and actually pulled it out of a little cage and sort of that mix with the Canadian experience of dead fresh, local being incorporated into classic dishes. So we are seeing it spread a little bit.

AMT: Hidekazu Tojo mentioned using local ingredients. What is particularly Canadian about that phenomenon?

LENORE NEWMAN: This plays a little bit on California cuisine. That’s really where the local phenomena had its more recent exposure, but historically Canadians really drew on that wild cuisine to just stay alive and to stay healthy. So if you look at the seasonality of Canadian food, rhubarb and fiddleheads play a large role in our cuisine in the east particularly. And those are things that appear very early in the spring. And another one is the role maple plays in Quebec. Often the maple syrup provides about 10 per cent of the farm's income, but it comes right at the start of the season before you've bought your seeds, your fertilizer, your fuel. So it's critical to the economy there. So we have a harsh country even here in B.C. It's not ideal for you know a bounty of year round survival. So you really have to draw heavily that local environment. I would actually argue we probably use more wild food than any other country on earth. In Canada, everyone eats wild food all the time. And I can say that because, of course, our fisheries are such a big part of the cuisine. But also you've got in Newfoundland you certainly have a lot of moose, you have right across the country game. In Quebec there's a lot of deer and right across the country berries. We're still pulling heavily on wild cuisine and it's actually a fairly big industry in some places.

AMT: Well, let's go to one more restaurant this time a First Nations restaurant in Toronto it is called Tea N Bannock. They serve dishes such as elk stew or a trout dinner, but also so-called post-contact food. Listen to Christina Nakogee and Joanne Pezzo.

SOUNDCLIP

CHRISTINA NAKOGEE: So traditionally your bannock has flour, salt, baking powder, water and lard.

JOANNE PEZZO: Bannock is traditionally from Scotland and we I guess have adapted and took it in and we made it ours and it's ours now.

[Sound: Laughter]

JOANNE PEZZO: Now that I know how to make bannock it gives me a real good sense of pride and also strengthens my identity as an Aboriginal woman. I can go home and make this for my family now. I can make them bannock pudding.

CHRISTINA NAKOGEE: This place first started off selling Navajo Indian tacos. if you want to get politically correct it's Navajo or whatever, but we just say Indian tacos. But at every pow wow, you have to have an Indian taco. An Indian taco is fried bread and then you have a sauce on it and your cheese, lettuce, tomato and onion sour cream and salsa on the side. It’s delicious, you have to try that. That's one thing that you can get really anywhere in the city.

JOANNE PEZZ: So here you have trappers snack which is a fried bread or Bannock with a Click lunch meat on it.

CHRISTINA NAKOGEE: to me, when I see that we're trapper's snack I think of someone on the trap's line and back in the bush and they can't carry a lot of supplies with them. So something like carrying some flour and lard and some basic vases vegetables and a can of Click. You know you just open it up, cut it up, fry it together and there's your trapper's snack.

AMT: So Lenore Newman, how big of a place has Indigenous food had in Canadian cuisine to this point?

LENORE NEWMAN: Traditionally it was incredibly important, but it was hidden and settler culture has a lot to answer for in the culinary violence we did to indigenous peoples. People taken to the residential schools were not allowed to eat their cuisine and here on the West Coast the Potlatch was banned and our first Prime Minister to use food as a weapon on the prairies against the plains people. But the impact was there underlying our cuisine is Indigenous cuisine, but it's only really in the last five or ten years it's been emerging that that groups are rediscovering their cuisine and that's just a wonderful thing to see and I think we're all richer for it.

AMT: And so that might explain why restaurants serving so-called Indian tacos and trapper's snack post-contact food is controversial.

LENORE NEWMAN: Before that the very few Indigenous restaurants in Canada that sort of pretended that colonization didn't happen. And I really like Tea N Bannock because it's very honest it's like hey we're eaten Click and that's part of our culture and we're going to own that.

AMT: Remind us what Click is?

LENORE NEWMAN: Click is like Spam.

AMT: Do all Canadians have access to the new Canadian cuisine you describe?

LENORE NEWMAN: Definitely not. And I do feel one of our great shames that we need to address is the north and food access and food security. And my travels in the north were not quite as extensive as I want it because it's very difficult, but I was shocked at the price of food and in many places. What what's often referred to as bush food or Indigenous food is buffering that.

AMT: A lot of Canadians probably cannot come up with one unified description of Canadian cuisine. Why did you feel it was important to define?

LENORE NEWMAN: I think I got angry at people saying oh it's just American cuisine. Or saying well the French or the Italian, they have real cuisine. We don't. And I wasn't sure when I said how I'd actually find it. The book could have easily been subtitled A search for Canadian Cuisine and culinary journey. But pretty quickly I realized there was a unifying cuisine.

AMT: It's amazing what we can learn from our food and just our travels for food.

LENORE NEWMAN: Definitely cuisine is a living - it's a living art - and it's largely oral and practical, so it can be easily damaged or lost. And I was amazed at how dedicated these restaurateurs were or these farmers or fisher people working in terrible conditions for not a lot of money and just being so proud and wanting to share it with me and show it to me.

AMT: At the end of all of this what was your most memorable meal?

LENORE NEWMAN: Certainly one that sticks in my mind is I had to go to Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal because Anthony Bourdain had been there and talked about how just punishingly good the food was. Kills you with flavor and this is Chef Martin Picard. And so I took a friend thinking well, that'll do I can try more things and I just fell in love with his pudding show mare which translates roughly as welfare pudding. And it was this rich may Maple-buttery dish. We knew we shouldn't eat the whole thing.

AMT: I know where this is going.

LENORE NEWMAN: And we’d had the foie gras poutine and entire side of beef sort of thing and we knew we should stop and we couldn't stop and we ate the whole thing. And we walked outside and I said you know if I don't walk for an hour or two, I may actually die. And so we walked around the plateau in the cold sort of thing and just sweating. It was amazing.

AMT: What's the most unusual Canadian food you've tried?

LENORE NEWMAN: I think the seal flipper pie in Newfoundland is a very interesting one. It's such a traditional dish and it's tied up with all this politics and personally, and this is a bit contentious, I think if a person is out there eating you know cows and pigs to single out Newfoundland and it's seal is a little hypocritical. But it is a very odd experience because it's a very gelatinous food. And here in the west we're not big on gelatinous food so that was a strange one.

AMT: You had toasted dulse too on the East coast?

LENORE NEWMAN: That was a wonderful experience. And it's just this hauntingly beautiful island. And they picked dulse there which is a dark seaweed that's dried and then exported all over the world, And it's one of the most horrible harvesting techniques I've ever seen in terms of backbreaking work. You literally walk on the sea floor on these slippery rocks pulling the dulse off and it's terrible for your back in your hands. But they've done it for hundreds of years. And when I was waiting for the ferry, there were a bunch of teenagers behind the store where teenagers always are and they were toasting dulse with a lighter. And I went over and I'm like what are you doing there? And they're like oh this is how we eat this here is a little snack. And it was kind of like salty pop and it was wonderful and it was just one of those moments where you encounter something so local that you wouldn't otherwise.

AMT: And you thought they were smoking up?

LENORE NEWMAN: I totally did. You know I'm from Vancouver. I mean what would they be doing behind the store? But no they were eating dulse.

AMT: This is all very fitting because you begin your book with I think the best line ever. “Canada was born at lunch.”

LENORE NEWMAN: It really was interesting delving into the culinary history how accidental our country is. I was really surprised to find out that Upper and Lower Canada weren't even supposed to come to the Confederation meetings. They crashed them and they brought a whole bunch of food to kind of make it better. And in the book I call it sideboard diplomacy. That these Victorian men seem to only make decisions when very drunk and very full.

AMT: So who needs ammunition when you can have appetizers?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well, exactly and it's so very Canadian that we just sort of accidentally became a country over lunch.

AMT: What political message do you see in Canadian cuisine now?

LENORE NEWMAN: Of course, when I finished the book I had no idea where the world was going. And since then we've had Brexit, we've had the U.S. election and definitely a resurgence of nationalism around the world and sort of suspicion of the other and some people like have said. Canada now almost stands alone as a country fully committed to multiculturalism and our cuisine reflects that. And when we began taking Syrian refugees because, of course, I'm food obsessed, my first thought was this is going to be great it'll be like with the Vietnamese boat people being integrated we will get all this great Syrian cuisine. I think we're really you know standing kind of on a bit of a precipice. Where do we retreat into nationalism or do we maintain multiculturalism in the face of incredible pressure coming from Europe and the south? So I think it's an interesting point in our cuisine and in our history.

AMT: Lenore Newman, it's fascinating to talk to you. Thank you.

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh thank you. This has been wonderful.

MF: Anna Maria's conversation with Lenore Newman. She's Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley in BC and she's the author of Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey. She was in Vancouver and we would love to hear from you about all this. What has been your most memorable Canadian meal, and what does Canadian cuisine mean to you? Send us your stories and your photos. We love those as well. You can post on the segment over on our Facebook page. Just search for The Current on Facebook. You can tweet us we're @thecurrentCBC where you can e-mail us through our website by clicking on contact. Head over to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for shortcuts from the BBC. It's a program that showcases adventurous documentaries, true stories, brief encounters and radio adventures. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app, that lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening and just a few seconds. It's great for a summer car trip. You can search for stories you missed or want to hear again or listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or tablet. Here are the day's top stories. Make your own playlist and it's free from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Mike Finnerty Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current. And we'll see you tomorrow.

[Music: Theme]

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

June 29, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

Social Sharing

More from this episode