The myth of Québec's traditional cuisine

Brillat-Savarin famously claimed that "we are what we eat," and it is the duty of thinkers and critics to articulate what can be observed about identities through one's culinary practices. Nowhere is the relationship between identity and foodways as explicit as in a nation's traditional cuisine. In this thesis, I examine how Québec's community has identified eating and cooking practices as being a signifier of its national identity. The process through which Québec elects a certain dish or set of gastronomic practices as representative of itself reveals some of the underlying ideologies that shape its national narrative. Adopting a semiological approach based on Roland Barthes work Mythologies, I investigate how food's expressive potential becomes a way to convey nationalist sentiment even as the national imaginary undergoes significant transformations. Looking at contemporary interpretations of the gastronomical canon of Québec traditional recipes, I research the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon and observed how it recuperates the narrative of Québec's cuisine to convey its current 'bourgeois-bohemian' ideologies, and therefore creates what Barthes refers to as a myth. Though the marketing strategies of the popular eatery claims to revisit the province's traditional cuisine, the actual restaurant experience seems more to embody notions of nostalgia, pride in terroir products, etc. that legitimizes the commercial aspects of the enterprise as well as the financial comfort of its customers. At Au Pied de Cochon, the myth of Québec cuisine is seamless in that it converts the contingent state of social relations and ideologies into an accepted belief and 'naturalizes' this marriage. The question then arises as to whether or not a national cuisine can escape this constant usurpation, and the answer Barthes proposes is that to expose the fallacy of myth, one must transform it into a mythology, which is, in short, an exaggeration and over-extension of the myth that reveals its fabricated nature. The chain of restaurants O Québec in France acts as an example of a mythology, where Québec cuisine is used as a theme for the franchise's menu, décor, and ambiance. Amplifying Québec elements in a manner similar to how Disney uses stories and themes to create fantastic worlds, the fiction of the myth of Québec's cuisine emerges and is simultaneously undone. Uncovering myth points to the ideologies propelling a community, and since as Socrates warns that "the unexamined life is not worth living," to achieve understanding about the narratives at play in one's society is crucial to living a fully conscious life.

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