Jamie Oliver eating Bahn Mi in east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

Jamie Oliver has made a name for himself as a celebrity chef who has sought to improve the way we eat.  Whether it be his instructional cooking or his fight to reform school cafeterias, Oliver has spent over a decade teaching us how to make food, and urging us to think more about it.

Some of his series have explored different national food cultures.  In Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, he tried to answer why Italy has a lower GDP than the United Kingdom, yet its people enjoy a healthier diet.  Oliver traveled across the USA in Jamie’s American Road Trip, while he showed us that despite outside stereotypes of a monotonous fast-food culture the country has a diverse number of cuisines based on its many different regions, histories, and people.

His newest show is called Jamie’s Great Britain, and its argument is a historical one: the foods that many Brits see as traditionally “British” weren’t always so.  The series is one example of connections between historical perspectives and food culture in popular media.

In the first episode, Oliver outlines the mission of the series.  “I want to scratch under the surface. I want to see what the modern day communities are like, whether they’re classic British (whatever that is) or the new waves of immigration,” he says.  The chef explains that he’s “not going to stop at the classic British dishes. I’m going to show you how centuries of foreign influences on our island have changed the whole landscape of what we eat and how we eat it. We’re like magpies. We love to sort of get little ideas or steal things.  Then what the British are brilliant at is making it our own.  At that is what I really love about British food.”

He offers an example in the apple pie: “We think its British? No way.  The whole concept of a pie came from the Egyptians.  The great British eating apple. Not British.  Came from western Asia.  And cinnamon. Not a single bit of that has ever come from Great Britain.  But you know what? It tastes so good, and it’s ours now.”

Jamie Oliver walking through east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

The series’ first segment starts off in the east end of London, where he notes different immigrant groups arrived before continuing their journey outwards. As he walks through Whitecross Street Market, he describes an unspecified earlier era, “back in the day,” when the area was known as Squalor Street, filled with street vendors and the mixing of immigrant cultures.

“Food was always a representation of immigration.  You take something quintessentially British like Fish and Chips – it’s not English!  You know, it’s Jewish.  And that was two hundred years ago when the Jewish were coming through east London. Hundreds of years before that it was the French Protestants.  In more recent times, it was the Bangladeshis, the Italians.”

Another immigrant group to make the east end home is the Vietnamese, who came as refugees to Britain in large numbers during the Vietnam War.  Oliver chats with two workers at a food stall selling Bahn Mi.  The sandwich is a mix of Vietnamese ingredients like red chilis, cilantro, and pork shoulder in a French bread slathered in mayonnaise.  Oliver points out that it is also an artifact of history, a product of the French colonization of Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century.

Oliver is taking apart the popular myth that there is one authentic, static, British food culture.  His point about Fish and Chips shows such an intention.  This is a political exercise.  It repudiates a corresponding idea that thinks there are Brits who have a more traditional claim to Britishness, ie white Anglo Saxons, compared to more recent inhabitants of the island, many of whom are people of colour.   By underlining the ways in which Britain’s food culture is historically contingent and a constant process of evolution, he shows that its populace, also ever changing, mirrors this phenomena.

As Jamie’s Great Britain illustrates, food history is a fruitful historical subject.  Food, after all, has been essential to the survival and everyday experience of all people living in the past.  It has also served as a key aspect in the development of human culture: the signs, symbols, and practices that we use to understand the world around us.

These factors help to make food history a topic with much popular appeal.  Everyone eats.  And recently there has been a growing interest in food, whether it be the popularity of Food Network or farmers markets.  A number of popular history books, some of which have become New York Times best sellers, have catered to this interest by examining the history of specific foods or ingredients like cod, sugar, chocolate, bananas, coffee, oysters, and corn.  Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), for example, traces the culinary origins of the mineral and its importance to various cultures.

Even popular books about food without an explicitly historical dimension make arguments based on particular perceptions of the past.  Food historian and ActiveHistory.ca contributor Ian Mosby has shown this with Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.  Pollan writes: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  This rule is based on a nostalgic understanding of the past, of an earlier time before factories made food (despite the fact that Jello was invented in 1897, Mosby points out).

In Canada, food history is a growing field.  Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010) looks at the role of Chinese immigrants within the Canadian restaurant industry and the ways in which such spaces have connected Chinese Canadians and people of other ethnic backgrounds.  The next few months will see the release of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, a collection of chapters edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp that is sure to continue this trend by exploring how food links to wider historical themes like religion, immigration, politics, gender, and science.  However, food has long had a subtle yet significant place in Canadian history books.  One only has to think of the importance of cod and wheat to the Staples Thesis of Canadian development, or the role of food shortages in the rebellions of 1837.

Oliver’s argument about the heterogeneity of British food culture would probably come as less of a surprise to people living in Canada, a country whose recent national identity has been built more explicitly around immigration and multiculturalism.  Our national food culture is also certainly one of evolution, ever changing with new developments in technology (for example, deep freezers), economy, and cultural influences.

With food, we can see how the quotidian things of our everyday lives are not timeless.  They have a history that appeals to wide audiences.  And as Jamie’s Great Britain shows, these histories can make more palatable a larger argument about the need for cultural acceptance.

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Bents grain elevator, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

by Merle Massie

A new and fashionable trend in tourism is invading rural regions of western Canada. SUV crossovers, front windows obscured by maps and cameras, are driving down gravel backroads, sweeping around correction line curves and screeching to a stop when a wide-eyed fox creeps across to its den in the culvert.

Are lazy Sunday drives, once the mainstay of 1950s nuclear families, making a comeback? Are the drivers frantically trying to find the way to an uncle’s farm they haven’t seen since childhood?

No. The latest tourism destination is the proverbial ‘empty’ Saskatchewan landscape itself. Or, more specifically, the landscape of places that used to exist, but are no longer there.

Welcome to the latest tourism craze: hunting for ghost towns.

Now, as a rural Saskatchewan resident, I have been in my fair share of abandoned buildings. Driving through our local area with my favourite tour guide (my father in law) is always a lesson in family and community history, as well as sundry tawdry or titillating stories. Lost diamonds, the great Saskatchewan Ruby Rush, and concealed murder weapons dot his childhood memories, each one tied firmly to place.

Within our rural municipality, we have not one, not two, but three ghost towns: the now-extinct villages of Marriott, Valley Center, and Bents. All three were on the same railway line and boasted elevators, stores, post offices, community halls, and schools. Each gave their rural residents a unique postal, and therefore individual, identity. “Where are you from?” “I am from Valley Center.” These villages are known primarily to their ‘inner circle’ of nearby residents who a) know where the town is (or used to be), and b) got their mail at that post office or went to that school when they were kids.

Picture of Marriot, SK, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

All a ghost town hunter needs is a vehicle, a camera, and a road map (preferably one with gravel roads as well as highways). The official definition of a ‘ghost town’ is a place that was once incorporated, but has since lost (or forfeited) its designation. But after that, it’s a crapshoot. There might be nothing, not even a sign to mark its existence, and a ghost town hunter wonders: am I in the right place? At another site, there might still be buildings or even a few people there, and probably a community hall. Mapmakers, after all, don’t have to drive out and check if a town still exists. Maybe all those ‘empty’ Saskatchewan spaces look better when there is a name marking human civilization – even if it was in the past.

Why are there so many ghost towns in Saskatchewan? At the height of its (first) boom in the early 20^th century, Saskatchewan was the third largest Canadian province by population, right behind Ontario and Quebec. Raw energy, outside investment in a booming real estate market, and the sheer sweat equity of hundreds of thousands of people immigrating to the ‘Last Best West’ to homestead or set up businesses created an unprecedented explosion of people and money. Villages popped up like mushrooms, every five miles along the branching tentacles of the rail lines.

Photo of Valley Center wagon, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Over the course of the twentieth century, shifts in farm economics, mechanics, machinery, and government support for ‘efficient’ farms led to ever-increasing farm sizes and an ever-decreasing rural population. An improved road system to serve a mobile automotive population led to even more rural depopulation. Grain trucks took the place of wagons, hauling larger loads longer distances. By the 1960s, short line railways, once the mainstay of small towns, were ripped out.

Inexorably, the pull of larger centers and Alberta’s oil boom combined with farm consolidation. Rural depopulation was a long, slow bleed of the countryside, a vampiric draining of energy, money, and life. Ramshackle buildings on isolated farms and ghost towns, mere skeletons of their former glory, are all that remain.

Bents, SK. January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Yet, those skeletons, which were once testimony merely to a dying Saskatchewan, have been rejuvenated. There are at least six websites that reference Saskatchewan ghost towns, including Wikipedia, that fountain of knowledge, which has a list of 116 ghost towns across Saskatchewan – incomplete, but a good try nonetheless. Photography websites such as Panoramio and Flickr help amateur photographers show off creative ghost town shots.

One website in particular, http://biseenscene.com, has gone even further and created a ‘how-to’ guide to exploring Saskatchewan ghost towns. Get out a map, the website instructs, and pick a direction. It does not seem to matter much which way you drive from Saskatoon – although west and south will yield the most fruitful results. Don’t ask permission, it instructs. Just take your camera and your common sense and go.

As a rural landowner, I shudder at such instruction. You could be charged with trespassing, should someone choose to make an issue of your guddling around in their back forty. Yet, some towns welcome ghost town explorers. Recently, I was with a film crew from Saskatoon that visited Bents, Loverna, and Whitkow to create a mini-documentary on ghost towns for SaskTel’s MaxLocal On Demand channel. While I was leery at first about poking through the abandoned buildings, it was clear that Loverna area residents welcome, even anticipate, such visitors. Well-researched markers line the empty streets, one on each lot. The markers note all the businesses that once operated along the wind-swept almost-empty town.

The popularity of ghost town hunting is increasing. At Bents, the hall, store, and grain elevator – complete with signs and artefacts – entices so many visitors that coffee mugs have been created that celebrate its ghostly existence. “I found it! Bents, SK” and “I (Heart) Bents”.

Come and see for yourself. I’ll show you the way. Or if you’re feeling adventurous, buy a map.

Photo of Bents general store, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Photo of Bents cup, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Merle Massie is a writer and historian, and a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan. She and her husband farm in the RM of Marriott in west-central Saskatchewan. Find her blog at: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/.

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Deer steaks or venison are nearly indistinguishable from other forms of red meat. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.

by Mike Commito

On December 21st 2011, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters tweeted a link to a National Post article, “Wild Game Meat not Welcome at Ontario Food Banks,” which reported that a Lanark, Ontario food bank had decided to reject donations of wild game meat. The post piqued my interest for several reasons. First, while the economy has improved since the onset of the recession three years ago, data reveals that food bank usage is still high. Food Banks Canada recently released a report entitled “Hunger Count 2011” in which it revealed that 700,000 Canadians – roughly 2% of our population – rely on food banks every month. The holidays can be a particular stressful and trying time for families and individuals in need, so the timing of the food bank’s decision was curious. Second, as an environmental historian and an avid hunter, the issue raises some intriguing concerns for me about how our society views the consumption of wild game meat.

The Lanark decision was backed by Food Banks Canada, which had recommended that Ontario food banks should reject any meat neither raised in captivity nor killed in a provincially-licensed abattoir. However, in previous years, groups such as the Safari Club International have donated deer steaks and ground venison during the holiday season. While club members kill the animals, the meat is always cut, wrapped and frozen by a provincially licensed butcher.

This was the first time a food bank rejected the Safari Club’s donation. Opponents of the decision argue that wild game meat is the most organic meat available to Canadians. Provincial legislation dictates that individuals cannot distribute meat unless the animal was killed and processed in a government-licensed abattoir. Yet, in years past, Ontario food banks have turned a blind eye to the legislation and openly accepted the donations. The Lanark decision marks a departure from other provincial food banks in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, many of which actively campaign for donations of wild game.

On the other side of the border, naturalist Jackson Landers of Virginia has suggested that Canada geese in New York should be hunted in order to control the population and help feed the poor. He began to push this idea after New York City officials in 2010 rounded up 150,000 geese, poisoned them and dumped the carcasses in a landfill as a population control measure. Imagine how many tables these geese would have enriched; instead, these animals were treated like garbage.

Historically, Canada is a country that was built on the consumption of wild meat. Subsistence hunting has been an integral part of First Nations culture, but it was also significant for our nation’s European settlers. When domestic meat products were unavailable, game meat served as an alternative protein source that was both readily available and easily transportable. With the development of the railway and more advanced refrigeration techniques since the late nineteenth century, many Canadians began to consume less wild game meat, although it was still significant to many communities and groups across the country. As historian Gerald Killan has demonstrated, wild game meat continued to be important during times of crisis. During World War I, the Superintendent of Algonquin Provincial Park, George W. Bartlett, arranged to have a significant number of deer culled from the park in order to alleviate the wartime meat shortage.

While certain methods of hunting have come under scrutiny in recent years – most notably the cancellation of the Ontario spring bear hunt in 1999 – statistics show that hunting is on the rise with younger generations. Nonetheless, many Canadians are still against the sport and its obvious by-product, wild game meat.

As the sole hunter in my family, I experienced this type of opposition following my first successful duck-hunting trip on Manitoulin Island in fall 2009. After bringing the duck in one night from the barbecue while the rest of my family dined on an alternative dish, my parents and sister were repulsed by what was on my plate. Not only did they believe the duck was emanating an offensive odour, but they were also put off by the reality that I had killed and butchered the birds myself.

My family held no qualms with the process that their poultry had gone through to arrive in our household. I tried to convince them that they were missing out on an opportunity to consume fresh and organic meat, but my efforts were dashed as they all staunchly refused to sample my cuisine. Today where the pitfalls of genetically modified food are readily accessible and the mistreatment of farm animals are well documented, it is no wonder that organic food is increasing in popularity. For example, this past summer, some of my colleagues from York University produced a video for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) that detailed their efforts in butchering four lambs acquired from Kawartha Ecological Growers.

As my family’s refusal of my dinner offerings illustrates, many people still do not connect wild game meat as organic. My dissertation chronicles the history of black bear hunting and management practices in Ontario. Yet I believe that I also have a duty as an environmental historian to educate the public on the benefits of safe and careful hunting.

Responses to the National Post article ranged from insightful to misguided. Some believed that the Lanark decision came from senior government officials eager to continue promoting an anti-gun and anti-hunting agenda. For example, one individual disagreed that wild game meat is more organic than domestically-raised protein, and even suggested that moose and deer contain more mercury and dioxin than their bovine counterparts. To my knowledge, no studies have been undertaken that prove ungulates such as deer contain more toxins than farm animals. But, as game animals are not inspected, wild meat enthusiasts should always be mindful of the parasites and bacteria that these animals could carry. This means that extra care should always be taken to ensure that wild game meat is cooked properly and thoroughly.

It is important that we make informed decisions about where our food comes from and how it is processed. While some may disagree with the opinions I hold about the value of subsistence hunting, it is an important part of our heritage. With more and more people making conscious decisions to obtain organic and cruelty-free protein, it is time to start reconsidering the value of wild game meat. This does not necessarily mean that everyone should take up hunting, but Canadians should keep an open mind to the idea of consuming wild game meat, be it duck or venison.

Mike Commito is a second-year PhD student at McMaster University. His dissertation, tentatively titled ”Orphaned Cubs and Responsible Hunters: Conflicting Values and the Management of Black Bears in Ontario, 1900-2000″ focuses on the development of black bear hunting policy and management strategies in Ontario. He is interested in how various groups in the province such as biologists, policy-makers and the lay public viewed bears and how this perspective has changed over time.

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Heritage White Oak Tree in Cambridge

- Sergeant Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

While many of us may be familiar with the designation of built heritage properties under the Ontario Heritage Act, recently municipalities have been using the Ontario Heritage Act to designate individual trees as heritage trees.  Municipalities like Burlington, Pelham, Thorold, Cambridge, and most recently Brant, have designated individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.

First enacted in 1975, the Ontario Heritage Act enables municipalities to pass by-laws designating individual properties as having cultural heritage value through Part IV of the Act.  This designation provides some protection for the property from demolition, as well as regulates potential alterations to the property to maintain its heritage value.  Larger areas can be designated under Part V of the Act as Heritage Conservation Districts.

In recent years the definition of cultural heritage resources covered under the Ontario Heritage Act has been expanded to include not only the commonly understood Built Heritage Resources, defined as “one or more significant buildings (including fixtures or equipment located in or forming part of a building), structures, earthworks, monuments, installations, or remains that have cultural heritage value,” but also Cultural Heritage Landscapes.  Cultural Heritage Landscapes are defined as a “geographical area that human activity has modified and that has cultural heritage value.”  These areas can include “one or more groupings of individual heritage features, such as structures, spaces, archaeological sites, and natural elements, which together form a significant type of heritage form distinct from that of its constituent elements or parts…villages, parks, gardens, battlefields, mainstreets and neighbourhoods, cemeteries, trails, and industrial complexes of cultural heritage value.”  The addition of Cultural Heritage Landscapes as well as other amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act made in 2005, have included natural landscape features, such as trees, as integral parts of cultural heritage landscapes and built heritage properties that should be protected.

With these changes in the understanding of cultural heritage, municipalities began designating individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.  In 2008 the City of Cambridge passed a by-law to designate a 130 year-old White Oak tree under the Ontario Heritage Act.  This tree survived a disastrous flood of the Grand River in 1974.  Several one-hundred year old workers’ cottages in the vicinity of the tree had to be demolished after the ’74 flood, with the construction of a levee system along the banks of the Grand River and the raising of the grade of the land by five feet.  At that time John Kingswood, forester for the City of Cambridge, decided to save the then 100 year old White Oak Tree on the grounds.  He constructed a well around the tree and a system of drainage pipes to feed the tree’s root system.  Today the heritage designated White Oak tree is a center-piece of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden on the banks of the Grand River in downtown Cambridge.  At the time of its designation, Cambridge’s White Oak was only one of ten heritage designated trees in Ontario.

The most recent heritage designated tree in Ontario is a massive Black Walnut tree located in Brant County.  Estimated at more than 150 years old, the tree may have originally been planted as a cultivated nut-bearing tree on a country estate.

While there are few examples of preserved built heritage in Ontario dating back over 200 years, there are at least two heritage designated trees that have been standing for over 250 years.  Oakville has designated a 250-year old White Oak that was narrowly saved from being cut down for a road expansion project in 2006.  Nearby Burlington designated a 300 year-old White Oak, that for hundred of years appeared on surveyors’ maps as a significant landmark distinguishing borders like Brant’s Block, and the border between Burlington and Aldershot.

The designation of these trees and others in Ontario speaks to a growing realization that cultural heritage isn’t just about old buildings and quaint downtowns, but the preservation of diverse elements of our landscape, including natural heritage and trees, that capture our human history and the history of our environment.

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Gate of former GM North Plant site in Oshawa

“Sam McLaughlin’s name continues to loom large over the city of Oshawa.  But the stories of working people offer alternate versions of history.  Spaces in the city ought to be made for commemorating and remembering these stories,” historian Christine McLaughlin (no relation to Sam) recently argued during her talk at a local library in Toronto.  McLaughlin’s presentation, “Producing History in an Auto Town: Oshawa After World War II,” explored the “highly political process” of how people have made and understood the historical memory of General Motors in Oshawa. 

McLaughlin’s talk is available here for audio download.

The presentation was the last talk of the 2011 History Matters lecture series, which gave the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which the past shapes the present.  This year’s talks focused on two themes: labour and environmental history.  Podcasts from other talks from the series can be found here.

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"Cleaner sweeping the floor after the Wall Street crash, 1929," The Nationaal Archief in The Hague

Discussing money is generally afforded the same privacy as the balance of one’s bank account. Inviting an open conversation about the subject in public, from basic finance to complex economics, is thought to be rude and even poorer politics.

It is perhaps the most polarizing field of contemporary journalism because it has absolutely no means of circumventing readers’ class ties and can only clash with their compromised socio-economic opinions: what time readers could devote to the possible merits of ‘tax cuts’ or increased ‘government spending’ from one year to the next is usually put in the service of bolstering their own particular side of the trench.

And then there’s the fact that financial reporting was tasked with covering the ascendancy of “Reaganomics” in Western political discourse during the 1980s, and outright drafted to make sense of “globalization” (a vague catch-all for the apparent international prosperity brought about by free trade agreements but also the arrival of budgetary shortfalls, lapsed or eliminated regulatory provisions, and rising unemployment) since the 1990s.

To meet the demand, and keep pace with a burgeoning cottage industry of self-appointed financial experts, we borrowed more and more aloof language and overly-complicated concepts from the notoriously noncommittal (read: variable-rich) social science of economics that is inaccessible to most of us, even if we had the time between our first and now second jobs to look into it.

The result is a version of information that is not exactly propaganda (although media concentration does present clear conflicts of interest) but not strictly informative either. Here’s a fun example from Bloomberg News, with their editorial, “Black Friday 2011 Turns Freaky for Economists, Politicians: View” (24 November):

Black Friday 2011 is especially fraught for several reasons. First, the future is more uncertain than usual. We don’t know whether we’re emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression or about to plunge into a ‘double dip.’ Second, the 2012 elections are approaching and both the White House and the Senate, now in Democratic hands, are very much up for grabs. Historically, the state of the economy is the most important factor in determining the winner of the presidency.

Third, it’s not even clear what we should be hoping for in the Black Friday sales figures, when they start pouring out tomorrow. Our every instinct is to hope for brisk sales and record highs, signs of what’s charmingly called ‘consumer confidence.’ The consumer has been the engine of past prosperity, and consumption has always played a large role in America’s particular style of the pursuit of happiness. Economic recovery depends on whether the consumer has got his or her confidence back. Some fear that we are losing our taste for things — that the recession may have taught us that we don’t really need. Others, of course, applaud the same development.

It’s the perfect Rumsfeldian nightmare.

OCCUPY THE EVERYDAY

In short: we don’t talk about money. We talk around it. And when a crisis makes it impossible not to talk about, we discover that we’re not very good at it.

We easily remember “Black Tuesday” 29 October 1929, the original financial catastrophe of our time, but we recall less about the Glass-Steagall Act of 16 June 1932 and its regulatory framework for averting another crash — and we know even less about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, passed under President Bill Clinton (not President George W. Bush), which nullified its most powerful provisions and started the countdown to the next catastrophe.

Still, there is an emerging pool of general audience material that makes our complex international financial situation more accessible in new ways: Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008), Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time is Different (2009), David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital (2010), Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s Crisis Economics (2010), Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia (2010), and Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost (2011) — along with documentaries like Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) and Inside Job (2010).

These and similar works, by both economists and non-economists, cover a wide variety of problems and solutions (not to mention financial crimes) and can ultimately serve as the foundation for a new conversation about money while perhaps even provoking an unprecedented demand for serious and permanent financial literacy.

Which brings me to the current international Occupy Movement. What makes it so interesting is its loose platform and the lack of any formal centralized bureaucratic authority (even that of a ‘big tent’ political party). You don’t have to endorse or even agree with the movement to see it as basically an international confession that we have a problem.

We would do well to recall that mass calls for radical financial upheaval or reform are historically followed by hard right or left turns, as parties attempt to capture the moment and co-opt enthusiasm. Until we simplify and popularize the elements of economic order (that is to say, become more open and willing to discuss money), from domestic policies to regional agreements, we will continue to swing from one extreme to the other.

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British politicians and planners are using the 2012 Olympic games to “revitalize” the Lower Lea Valley, a post-industrial landscape, situated between four inner-suburban boroughs in the East of London, including West Ham, which was the focus of my dissertation research.

A century ago R. A. Bray described West Ham “as that of a spot somewhere near London to which people went with reluctance if they had business there, and from which they returned with joy as soon as the business was over.”[1] Sadly, I don’t imagine most people would describe it any differently today.

Half a century of rapid industrial and population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the once green wetlands of the Lower Lea River and Thames Estuary into a dirty manufacturing suburb with a range of social problems that matched the extensive environmental decline. Despite this troubled history and the scarred landscape it left, I would suggest travelers to London should venture eastward and see a different side of London from the regal and imperial parks and buildings in Westminster. The Docklands Light Rail lines make it easy to travel through East London and they are above ground, so you can see where you are going. Most of the West Ham sites listed below are within walking distance of a DLR station.

View Olympic Neighbourhoods in a larger map
Here are a few highlights:

• The Olympic Park: While the stadium is visible from a lot of places in the Lower Lea Valley, the park was blocked by high blue walls the last time I was in London. At that time, the best views were from the elevated Dockland Light Rail trains traveling from Stratford to Bow. You can get off at the Pudding Mill Station for a longer view. The building is starting to accelerate and each time I visited more of the buildings are taking shape. I imagine at least some sections of the park are now open to the public. You can see the two Back Rivers that flow through the Olympic park.
• 
• Abbey Mills Pumping Station (Cathedral of Sewage): This amazing building located alongside a polluted stream and old factories looks really out of place. It is even more bazaar when you realize its function: to pump sewage through the massive main drain underneath the green-way path you’ve just walked on to find this Victorian relic. The architecture provides a reminder of the civic pride the came with the construction of the integrated sewage system in the 1860s.
• 

• Three Mills Island: This is the oldest remaining tidal water mill in England. There have been tidal mills on the Lower Lea since before the Norman Invasion in the 11th century and the House Mill building dates back to the early 18th century. You can also admire the massive gasometers just south of Three Mills and consider the changing scale of industry between the 18th and 19th centuries.
• The Royal Docks and the Excel Centre: The former docks provide an excellent opportunity to see the process of revitalization underway in this region, as the warehouse have been replaced with a university, an airport and a large conference facility. The Excel Conference centre will host some of the Olympic events and this is one of the better places in West Ham to find a cluster of nice restaurants.
• The Thames Barrier: Taking the train out to the amazing flood barrier bring your past the handful of remaining industrial sites in West Ham, including the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery.
• The Lea Towpath: If you are lucky enough to be in London during nice weather the many tow paths along the old canals are great locations for walks. You can walk north along the River Lea miles, all the way to Waltham Abbey if you are feeling really ambitious.
• 

[1] R. A. Bray, “Review: West Ham A Study,” The Economic Journal 18, no. 69 (March 1908): 60-64.

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Last week I presented some of my research at a conference in Boston and drove from Toronto in order to do so. I have not driven in the north-eastern United States in a few years and was quickly surprised to learn that I-90 for most of its length from Buffalo to Boston has become a toll road known as the Thomas Dewey Thruway and the MassPike. The existence of tolls on a previously free road made me think about the relationship between how roads are paid for and other economic behavior.

The tolls to get from Buffalo to the Massachusetts border were $14 for my car, with a further $3.50 to get from the border to Boston. Gasoline Taxes are also lower in the United States, so at $3.39/gallon (rather than $1.18/litre in Toronto) it cost me about $15 less to fill the one tank required to get from Buffalo to Boston. In Canada, the added taxes that make gasoline more expensive contribute to the construction of roads, so are somewhat analogous to the tolls charged on some American highways and bridges. My car is fairly efficient on fuel, so while I paid about $3 more to drive on I-90 than a similar Canadian road, a larger and less-efficient vehicle would have paid less to drive on American turnpikes, despite the tolls. Which transactions are taxed affect behavior and it is worth noting that vehicles tend to be somewhat smaller in Ontario than in New York. To the extent that limiting gasoline consumption is important for limiting the problems of peak oil and climate change, New York would be well served to institute much higher gasoline taxes to replace tolls on the interstate. Such high taxes would also affect behavior on the many non-toll secondary highways and local roads. It would also be more efficient to increase gasoline taxes as they would not require building toll booths or having people collect small tolls, like the $0.15 charged when I made a brief stop in the suburbs of Buffalo.

Charging tolls in order to pay for the upkeep of roads has a long history. This was frequently done on stretches of privately maintained roads in the Roman Empire, although carts carrying grain were usually exempt. Many private roads, known as turnpikes, were built in Britain during the 18^th century. These were built by private companies but required an Act of Parliament in order to expropriate land, realign fields and charge tolls. English turnpikes always had some people and goods that were exempt from paying tolls. For instance, the 1790 Act allowing for the creation of a road from Canterbury to Gutteridge Bottom exempted carts carrying manure for fields or stones to repair roads, along with people travelling to elections, soldiers, those carrying sick people or going to church. In other parts of England, carts carrying coal away from mines paid lower tolls than those carrying other goods. A number of historians have argued that the improvements in transportation with better roads, along with lower dues on coal and manure, contributed to the growth of manufacturing during the early Industrial Revolution.

The differential tolls charged to vehicles affect who pays for the upkeep of roads, as well as which vehicles are more likely to use them and the end costs of goods travelling by truck. Nobody likes traffic jams but most people would agree that the speedy passage of commercial trucks is more essential to our manufacturing economy and consumption of foods while busses allow more people to pass through the same road. An ideal combination of gasoline taxes and tolls would pay for the costs of road construction and encourage the use of more fuel-efficient vehicles while also allowing public transit and commercial trucks to move quickly. Tolls are rare in Canada, but the Ontario government, in partnership with a private company, constructed the 407 through suburban Toronto in the 1990s. There are legitimate complaints about the financial arrangements between the two parties but the current situation is a quick route for buses that connect the suburbs whose construction has been paid for with the tolls of cars willing to pay a premium for faster transit. Its off-peak tolls are $0.1935/km for light vehicles, $0.387/km for heavy single unit vehicles and $0.585/km for heavy multi-unit vehicles. New York and Massachusetts also have differential tolls depending on vehicle size but their turnpikes are dominated by transport trucks. The high tolls on transport trucks in Ontario contribute to its being mostly used by passenger cars, but if they were re-balanced it might encourage the road’s use by larger vehicles and help ease the gridlock which hampers Toronto grocery stores and manufacturing.

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Cover Image of Michael Pollan's Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).

by Ian Mosby

This month’s publication of a colourfully illustrated, revised edition of Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, once again has me thinking about the role of historians in contemporary debates about the health and environmental impacts of our current industrial food system. As a historian of food and nutrition, I often find myself getting a bit squeamish whenever I hear anyone invoking the past to either defend or critique contemporary dietary practices. And Pollan, like other critics of the food industry, makes extensive use of history to guide his analysis of our current food choices.           

My first reaction when I read Pollan’s second rule ­– “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” ­– was therefore immediately defensive. In part, this was based on my own reading of the often strange and wonderful recipes from the dozens of early- and mid-twentieth century cookbooks that were part of the research for my dissertation on the politics and culture of food and nutrition in Canada during the Second World War.

Arguably, for instance, most of us would have trouble recognizing mid-century Canadian food celebrity Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for “Green Salad” as something edible. With an ingredient list that includes gelatine, green food coloring, lemon rind, mayonnaise, chopped green pickles, and horseradish, this quivering green mass from Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book would be, to say the least, hard for most contemporary eaters to stomach. (I know from experience: I was recently left with a pretty much untouched salad after my 1940s food themed post-dissertation defense party.)

Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for Green salad from her Canadian Cook Book (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2004), 224.

Kate Aitken's green salad (photo by author)

“Green Salad,” of course, is just the tip of the culinary iceberg. I could list dozens of other recipes that my great-grandmother might have read in cookbooks and magazines from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that would seem alien to most of us in the early 2010s. I’m personally still not brave enough to try Mrs. Elmer Scott of Newington Ontario’s recipe for “Pork Fruit Cake” – which includes 1 lb of “salted fat pork, chopped fine” – from the 1941 Cornwall Standard Freeholder Cookbook.

In Pollan’s defense, he readily concedes that the rule doesn’t always work perfectly and he stresses that it’s main purpose is that avoid eating many of the industrial preservatives, flavour enhancers, stabilizers, and other food additives that have become the basis our modern food system since the 1940s. Pollan even adds an addendum that you could substitute your own great-grandmother if she was a “terrible cook or eater” for someone else’s great-grandmother – particularly if that person is Sicilian or French.

While it’s easy to quibble with the details of Pollan’s great-grandmother rule – pointing out, for instance, that something like Jell-O, one of the quintessentially modern, mass-produced convenience foods, was introduced in 1897 ­­– the rule itself nonetheless acts as a useful shorthand for Pollan’s broader point. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, by and large, ate far less processed and heavily refined industrial foods than most of us currently do. The great-grandmother rule therefore provides a good place to start thinking about how our diets have changed over time. And, despite its faults, it’s probably much easier to wrap your head around than the confusing “servings” that form the basis of the contemporary Canada’s Food Guide  or the recently abandoned USDA Food Pyramid.

Pollan, of course, is not alone in pointing to the past for solutions to our contemporary problems. Whether it’s the current movements promoting the 100- mile diet, slow food, or the legalization of raw milk sales, food reformers often invoke the past as both a model and justification for changing contemporary practices. The same is also often true of the proponents of genetically modified foods, who point to the post-World War II green revolution and the history of famines and food shortages in the developing world to justify current drives to increase yields through the patenting of novel plants and animals. Even fad diets like the popular “paleo diet” often claim a certain level of legitimacy for their recommendations by invoking the supposed foodways of our ancestors.

In many ways, Pollan’s great-grandmother food rule and all of these broader attempts to use our knowledge of the past to deal with some of the most pressing contemporary issues is an extremely hopeful sign – despite the cringe inducing use of history by some, such as the “paleo diet” promoters. The general public and policy makers alike are, perhaps more than ever, looking to the past to explain our present predicament and to come up with viable solutions. This means that, not only can historians provide some important nuance and detail to these contemporary debates, but they can also help to encourage Canadians to engage more broadly with their past.

Ultimately, my own hope is that these kinds of calls to examine the diet of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers is accompanied by a growing interest, not just in how they ate, but in the role that food played in defining their lives and work, more broadly. While it is often easier to draw a direct line between the work of environmental and economic historians and problems with our contemporary food system, these kinds of invocations of our shared social and culinary history offer new outlets for other groups of historians to similarly engage with the general public.

In Canada, academic social and cultural historians, in particular, have been slow to meet this growing interest in food and culinary history. But the recent publication of an edited collection on Canadian food history from McGill-Queen’s University Press and a forthcoming collection from the University of Toronto Press – combined with a growing interest at a number of libraries and archives in cookbooks and other forms of culinary literature – are encouraging signs. Hopefully, by adding our voices to these contemporary debates over the future of food in Canada, professional social and cultural historians can find new audiences for our work and a more active (and activist) role in our communities.

Ian Mosby is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Guelph and studies the history of food and nutrition in Canada during the twentieth century

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Northern Plains Moccasins, 1890-1915. McCord Museum, M18421.1

When someone talks about undertaking serious historical research what comes to mind? Perhaps you conjure up an image of a dusty archives room and leaning towers of paper.  Census data, photographs, journals, correspondence, business records, and many other traditional archival materials may come to mind as potential sources.

Did the phrase historical research make you think of artifacts? No? Not surprising, artifacts are often overlooked when seeking primary sources and at times are written off as museum fodder.  However, a bounty of information can be gained from examining artifacts and material culture as primary sources.

“Artifacts are tangible incarnations of social relationships embodying the attitudes and behaviours of the past.” -Mary C. Beaudry, Lauren Cook, and Stephen A. Mrozowski, Artifacts and Active Voices<

The examination of artifacts can reveal information about creators, technology of the period, social practices, cultural norms, customs, and other valuable historical data.  These glimpses into the past can be useful for providing context to museum professionals, archaeologists, social historians, and as educational tools for students.

For example, a pair of beaded moccasins, like the ones pictured above can provide information about the culture that created them, the time period, hunting methods, and First Nation-Settler relations.

• The type of glass and brass beads used in these moccasins helps date the item.  Prior to European contact First Nation decorative work was done primarily with porcupine and bird quills, making the presence of beads significant.
• The style and colours used in the bead work are typical of beading done by Northern Plains First Nations.
• The tanned and smoked buffalo hide used highlights one of the many animals the creators hunted during the period and gives an example of the tanning process favoured by that particular First Nation.
• Similarly, with specialized analysis the sinew used for stitches could also reveal information about the type of animals that were hunted in the area.  The sinew can also be used for dating the artifact.

Through the examination of a variety of artifacts relating to a specific time period, geographical region, or cultural group it is possible to glean information about cultural, technical, and social trends.   Artifacts also transcend literacy and language barriers.  This transcendence makes them ideal resources for research surrounding oral based societies and societies where little written history is available.

Artifacts that are more commonly used for historical research include: craft-work, regalia, medals and awards, coinage, tools, ceramics, and household items.   Artifacts with known provenance are typically the most useful.  However, almost any type of artifact can be used in historical research — researchers have used items as seemingly insignificant as building materials, quilts, and bits of coloured glass to make observations about a cultural group.

In addition to potential sources for research artifacts can be great educational tools.  No, I’m not suggesting that museums should let a group of rowdy children handle pottery from the early 1900s.  However, having an artifact show and tell session done by a museum professional can help students understand the value of material culture and provide more intrigue than pictures of artifacts.  Replicas and material designated as part of an education collection can also provide a tactile dimension to history lessons.

That old handcrafted broach, a relative’s Orange Lodge regalia, quilts your great grandmother made, and all kinds of items that may be stored away in your attic or basement could have the potential to provide a window into the past.  Not everything has archival or historical value, however a wide range of artifacts definitely deserve a place in our approaches to historical understanding.

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