Abstract

By focusing on Toronto as a “global city” (Sassen, 1991), the main objective of this Major Research Paper is to examine the contradictory relationship between Toronto’s discourse of “food multiculturalism” (Flowers & Swan, 2012) and processes of “culinary colonialism” (Heldke, 2003). This paper will use Tourism Toronto’s “How To Eat...” guides as a case study of Toronto’s discourse of food multiculturalism. Through critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how Toronto’s discourse of food multiculturalism depends on colonial assumptions that commodify its racialized immigrants and diaspora as the Other. Consequently, this paper finds that Toronto’s global city strategy is critically linked to culinary colonialism. Furthermore, this paper conceptually builds on culinary colonialism by emphasizing food adventuring as a performative act of the Other. Within this context, these guides also operate as an intimate map for individual eaters to perform ‘the Other’ through food. Key Words: Global city; Food Multiculturalism; Culinary Colonialism; Performance Theory; Critical Discourse Analysis

Highlights

  • On the very first page of Tourism Toronto’s “Eat & Drink” page, you can click on a “How To Eat...” link1 (Tourism Toronto, 2019)

  • In the context of intensified global capitalism, discourses of food multiculturalism are increasingly used to legitimize the tolerance of global cities to attract foreign investment and migrants

  • In order to interrogate this contradiction, I used Heldke’s (2003) culinary colonialism as a framework to examine Tourism Toronto’s “How to Eat...” guides. These guides were selected as a productive example of how discourses of food multiculturalism are used to legitimize Toronto’s claim to global city status

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Summary

Introduction

On the very first page of Tourism Toronto’s “Eat & Drink” page, you can click on a “How To Eat...” link (Tourism Toronto, 2019) This link leads to a series of five infographic guides in which a rosy cheeked blonde boy helps you overcome your “intimidation” of five “ethnic foods” so that you can “eat like a pro” (read: eat like Them) (Tourism Toronto, 2019). This guide is an example of the many “How to Eat...” ( HTE) resources that have been circulating recently on the web as one’s savviness around ethnic food is increasingly becoming a marker of the desirable cosmopolitan subject (see Cappeliez & Johnston, 2013 and Wise, 2011 for more) By extension of this logic, Toronto often articulates its status as the “world’s most multicultural city” through the promotion of its diverse ethnic foodscape. This strategy is referred to as “food multiculturalism” (Flowers and Swan, 2012) and will be the focus of this Major Research Paper

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