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A Veritable
Scoff
by Maura Hanrahan and
Marg Ewtushik
Food means so much to
us—as individuals and as members of a cultural group. It is a source of
pleasure, comfort, and even joy; it is also a source of worry and fear. Food
is imbued with personal and social meaning and it is an important way to
express ourselves culturally. As Andrea O’Brien shows in her paper, “There’s
nothing like a cup of tea in the woods” (entry 84), the traditional boil-up
expresses Newfoundlanders’ strong attachment to the natural environment.
Like people everywhere, we use food in a ritualistic manner to draw us
together, to make us feel part of a family or community. As an example, fish
and brewis, often considered the quintessential Newfoundland meal, remains
the focus of social occasions for many Newfoundlanders.
Food also plays a large
role in health, both for the individual and in a community sense. In terms
of the individual, a diet high in salt content, for example, does not
contribute to good heart health. And for a community, social cohesion or
togetherness is important to health, and this quality is often sustained
through food practices and rituals. Sources in this book identify some of
the nutrition issues that have characterized life on the island and in
Labrador for centuries. Adamson’s 1945 survey of nutrition in Newfoundland
(entry 108) found no evidence of protein deficiency but there were
inadequacies in Newfoundlanders’ intake of vitamins A and C. A 1978 report
(entry 134) concluded that children eat better when their school principal
advocates improved nutrition. Henriksen (1989, entry 7) tells us that for
the nomadic Mushuau Innu, now resident in Davis Inlet, caribou was “the only
decent food.”
One of the things that I
have learned while working on this book is that, in terms of our diets and
foodways, change has been the only constant. Aboriginal people are the most
striking example of this. Studies of Conne River and Davis Inlet (entries 8
and 13) reveal that the Mi’Kmaq and the Innu have undergone nutritional
change at a rapid rate. People whose diet was centred on caribou as late as
the 1960s now live in communities where chips and cheesies are consumed
daily. The effects on physical and cultural health have been significant.
Things changed frequently
for Newfoundlanders of European ancestry as well. Salt cod always seems to
have been a staple but, since the 1950s, this is no longer the case. As I
write this almost a decade after the moratorium, it seems that fish, salted
or otherwise, will never again be at the core of the Newfoundland diet.
Since the cash economy became general in the last century and a greater
variety of foodstuffs became available, our diets have changed;
Newfoundlanders now eat more vegetables, fruit, and “junk food.” Some of the
nutrition studies surveyed here show how our diet at various times has
hindered as well as helped us. Although much has been made of vitamin
deficiencies before World War ll, we are not alone in having the imperfect
diet. I suspect nutritional change has been less gradual here than on the
continent; after all, economic and social change occurred on a massive scale
with the union of Newfoundland and Canada in 1949. Another huge event was
the 1992 moratorium which led to the biggest lay-off in Canadian history,
most of it taking place in Newfoundland; with the loss of cod as a staple,
we are still undergoing a nutritional transition.
Indeed, the pace of change
in our diets no doubt picked up in the last century. While most
Newfoundlanders have a taste for game like partridge and moose, the settlers
from England, Ireland, France, Scotland, the Channel Islands and other
places seem to have been slow at adapting to their new geophysical
environment with its generally rocky soil and relatively long, severe
winters. This would have made their first years hard ones. Eventually,
probably with help from the original inhabitants, our ancestors learned to
live a more Aboriginal lifestyle. They settled into hunting as well as
fishing and began the practice of moving from their winter homes near woods
resources to their summer homes near the riches of the sea. In this, they
are almost unique among the European settlers of North America.
I also feel compelled to
comment on the notion that Newfoundlanders were generally hungry before
Confederation with Canada. The simple truth is that we don’t have a
long-running picture of how things were, food and nutrition-wise, through
the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. Thanks to a spate of nutrition
studies on the Great Northern Peninsula in the first half of the 1900s
(entries 43, 61 and others), we do know that the diet there was deficient in
a number of respects. It likely was elsewhere. We know from oral history,
much of it not recorded, and other sources that malnutrition and hunger were
possible and probable in certain regions; the Great Northern Peninsula with
its harsh climate is one area. My father, from Placentia Bay, often referred
to February and March as “the hungry months”; similar expressions are used
on the coast of Labrador and elsewhere. The Avalon Peninsula in general and
the Codroy Valley, though, were kinder places. Nowhere—not in Newfoundland,
Canada, the U.S. and Europe—was kind during the Depression of the 1930s,
however, and it is this dreadful time when deprivation was general that
comes to mind when we think of Newfoundland before Confederation. Another
point to remember is that, although we may have bought into the idea that
Newfoundland society had two classes—fishermen and merchants—our communities
were much more stratified and complicated than that. Indeed, at least one of
the nutrition studies here (entry 43) implies that there was a range of
economic conditions among the population being studied.
It’s too simplistic a
picture, then: Newfoundland as economic basketcase and Canada as saviour.
Unfortunately, it still influences our self-perceptions and the way we are
viewed by other Canadians. Much has been made of the occurrence of beriberi
in Newfoundland before Confederation, yet as Wilder shows (entry 128), the
deficiency disease was “not unusual” in New York City hospitals at the time.
The prosperity brought by World War ll and the introduction of enriched
white flour and refined cornmeal alleviated many of the nutrition
deficiencies here and elsewhere. Indeed, although the Japanese and
Mediterranean diets have recently been touted as excellent, no cultural
region in the world has a perfect diet. (Sadly, the almost universally
popular fast foods are becoming an increasing part of the Mediterranean
diet.)
The sources cited here
show that Newfoundlanders were adaptive, resilient and inventive in their
use of food; see in particular John Crellin’s book on traditional remedies
(entry 78). Indeed, there is much worth holding onto in our traditional
foodways.
There are also serious
food-related problems in the province. In Newfoundland, as in other places,
food-related issues are often contentious, if not downright political. Food
banks and the food security debate spring immediately to mind. Are food
banks merely absolving government of its responsibilities and therefore
preserving hunger? Is charity an effective way to more equitably distribute
resources? How do corporate donors like supermarkets benefit from the
now-entrenched food bank system?
There are other questions
that need to be further explored and researched. Seal once played an
important role in Newfoundlanders’ diet on the northeast coast and for
Aboriginal people in Labrador; it no longer does, partly because of the
global animal rights movement. With the demise of the cod stocks and the
subsequent groundfish moratorium, we lost cod, another fixture in the
traditional diet. What are the health effects of these losses? What are the
cultural as well as economic impacts? While this book cannot answer these
questions, it allows readers glimpses into Newfoundlanders’ foodways and
food history—or at least glimpses into conventional wisdom and expert
thinking on these issues at various times. I hope, too, that it will
encourage others to research foodways and nutrition in Newfoundland and
Labrador.
Judgements about the
quality of works cited are not part of an annotated bibliography like this
one. So Marg and I have striven to present what people wrote without
qualification. (I confess to having found this to be exceedingly difficult
in some cases.) Still, the exercise was a welcome and exciting learning
experience.
Readers will notice that
we did not include cookbooks, mainly due to the sheer number of such
publications. Keep in mind also that while we have divided entries into a
number of categories (see the Table of Contents), some publications might
easily belong to one category as well as another. This applies to “Foodways”
and “Social History,” for example. Readers are therefore, encouraged to
search all categories that may be relevant to their specific area of
interest. There is also an index which we hope will prove useful. We also
made a decision to exclude articles in the popular press (this includes
publications like Decks Awash as well as newspapers and magazines).
Had we included material of this nature, the book would have been much, much
longer. Nor did we include student papers such as those located in the MUN
Folklore Archives, although many of these papers are worth consulting. We
did include honours and masters’ theses. All the sources cited here are
available through the University libraries, the public libraries, or through
government departments. Finally, please note that sources related to the
province’s Aboriginal peoples are in the “Aboriginal Peoples” section and
nowhere else; this includes nutrition surveys, historical documents, and
publications from many other categories. We did this to facilitate effective
and comprehensive searches on this topic.
We very much hope that the
book is useful to a range of readers throughout the province and beyond.
Maura Hanrahan
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