Category Archives: The CanLitFare Blog

The CanLitFare Blog focuses on Canadian literature with food scenes in it. There is usually an ongoing theme involved. Our first project was “Capital Meals,” which highlighted food scenes related to Canada’s Capital cities and how these scenes speak about food policy, culture, family, and the importance of the space where food is shared.

Our latest project is “Turning Point Meals.” These posts examine scenes that depict a notable change in character development, or plot through food.

Let us know what’s on your mind by sharing or commenting on social media.

Why Half a Grapefruit?

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In Alice Munro’s “Half a Grapefruit,” the fruit is an occasion around which Rose hopes to distance herself from her classmates and from her less-than-desirable West Hanratty origins. No one else had thought to mention grapefruit as breakfast fare during that somewhat ill-conceived classroom discussion.

This grapefruit anecdote, as Sarah Contreras-Wolfe points out below, is also a tool for Munro to demonstrate ways in which Rose and step-mother Flo (gingerly) negotiate their relationship.

Text by Sarah Contreras-Wolfe

Flo and Rose bond by hiding their weaknesses from one another.

Rose never talks to Flo about the grapefruit incident. Rose would not share something that would reflect poorly on herself: “Half-a-grapefruit she never got to hear about. Rose would not have told her anything in which she did not play a superior, an onlooker’s part. Pitfalls were for others, Flo and Rose agreed” (Munro 54). Munro includes the story about the half a grapefruit to demonstrate Flo and Rose’s mutual belief that personal hardships should not be discussed between the two of them, not even when it comes to Rose’s father’s illness.

When Rose is talking to Billy Pope about her father, she speaks candidly, which she would not do with Flo: “’Not if he has lung cancer,’ Rose said firmly. She had never said that before and certainly Flo had not said it” (66). When Flo is telling a story about a woman with second sight who suggested her mother eat green onions to help with her nerves, she is also direct, like Rose: “It wasn’t nerves at all it was cancer, so what good they did I don’t know:’ Flo’s voice climbed· and hurried on, embarrassed that she had let that out” (69).

What doesn’t get said in these conversations between Rose and Flo is the meat, if you will, of this story.

 

 

Munro, Alice. “Half a Grapefruit.” Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Penguin, 1996. 51-72. Print.

Mills, Amanda. “Whole ceramic bowls each containing a half a grapefruit free stock picture”. 2015. CC0. <a href=”http://www.public-domain-image.com/free-images/still-life/whole-ceramic-bowls-each-containing-a-half-of-a-grapefruit&#8221; title=”Whole ceramic bowls each containing a half of a grapefruit public domain image”>Whole ceramic bowls each containing a half of a grapefruit</a>

Everybody’s Hungry: Food and Control in “Play the Monster Blind”

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We are launching a second miniseries. Over the next few weeks we will be joined by students from Nathalie Cooke’s Canadian Literary Fare course (ENG 441, department of English, McGill) as they too are studying food scenes in Canadian literature this term.

 

Text by Carla Dean.

Food and familial power dynamics form the center of “Play the Monster Blind” by Lynn Coady; throughout the story, the struggles of various characters for power in their relationships are reflected by their eating and drinking habits. Characters who successfully control their food intake have power in the family unit; those who are controlled by food are disempowered.

John is a more powerful version of his father; he has overcome an eating disorder (4), whereas his father is incapable of controlling his drinking habits. An example of this dynamic is the restaurant incident, where the father causes a scene over “a good dry chip” (15). John, however, uses “‘[a] little thing out there called PR,’” (13) which really means a controlled approach, to much better effect. John’s interpersonal skills earn him far more social currency than his father’s drunken antics.

Bethany similarly mirrors Ann, whose lack of agency is clearly linked to her eating habits. Bethany is a self-described “big eater most of the time” (11) and earns the father’s approval because of her appetite (10), whereas Ann is a “meal-obsessed” recovering anorexic (11). Ann associates her stagnant, disappointing life circumstances with food; she throws up shellfish after a nightmare in which she “‘[is] just doing all the things [she’s] been doing all along’” (15). Ann’s blow to Bethany at the end of the novel, which turns her new ally against her, only happens because of excessive drinking—and Bethany, who does not lose control, tastes power (25).

 

Works Cited

Coady, Lynn. “Play the Monster Blind.” Play the Monster Blind: Stories. Toronto: Doubleday, 2000. 1-25. Print.

Kulesza, Michal. Movie Night. Digital image. Stock.tookapic.com. JPEG file. February 7th, 2016. <https://stock.tookapic.com/photos/21005&gt;.

Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium

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Mark your calendars for February 19-20th.  And prepare for a remarkable feast!

ARTWORK: Tasman Brewster, Out of This World (2015)

The Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium is a two-day interdisciplinary event at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU, Richmond campus) with over 25 invited speakers, including local and international academics, artists, curators, and writers, who will explore how Canadian writers and/or visual artists use food to articulate larger historical and cultural contexts.

The full schedule and list of participants can be found at the Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium homepage.

The symposium will coincide with the launch of the public art exhibition “Artful Fare: Conversations About Food” featuring the collaborative art projects of KPU Fine Arts and English students as they engage in creative-critical dialogues about Canadian poetry.

The artwork featured here — Tasman Brewster’s Out of This World (2015) — was inspired by Lorna Crozier’s poem “Jell-O” from The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things. Jell-O has a long history of being served at church basement dinners on the Canadian prairies, a fact Crozier knows first hand, having grown up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.  Yet Jell-O is no ordinary food.  Crozier delights in its mysterious origins: “Animal or vegetable? From the ground or the sea? Perhaps a Martian staple?” (60). In Crozier’s and Brewster’s hands, Canadian literary fare takes on sumptuous, otherworldly dimensions!

Featured at the symposium will be Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, who will present a Creative-Keynote on the topic of poetry inspired by food. Visual artist Sylvia Grace Borda will give a Creative Presentation on her art projects and their relationship to sustainable food systems and economies.

Space is limited, so we encourage you to Register

See you in February and spread the word!

 

Crozier, Lorna. The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2012.

Meals Turn a Narrative Plot in Surprising Directions

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The Birthday Lunch

The Birthday Lunch

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