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Work needed to put Canadian cuisine on global food map

Founder and CEO of Food Day Canada headliner at luncheon

Anita Stewart is all about Canadian food. She’s into Canadian food, she’s on top of Canadian food, she makes and promotes Canadian food, and collects Canadian food recipes.  

But when it comes to the rest of the world, there may not be definitive notion of what Canadian food is. Stewart has been working for decades to promote a purely Canadian cuisine, a cuisine the rest of the world thinks about when it thinks about Canada.

Stewart, the author of 14 books on cooking, a member of the Order of Canada, and the Food Laureate at the University of Guelph, was the headliner at Thursday’s Guelph Chamber of Commerce ‘Inspirational Women’ luncheon, held at Delta Hotel Guelph. She drew a crowd of about 130.

The food trailblazer - perhaps most widely known for founding and running Food Day Canada - was interviewed on stage by Rogers TV personality Trish Stevenson. Stevenson confessed at the outset that she hates to cook.

But Stewart said a loathing of cooking has never been something she had to fight. Growing up, she took on the cooking assignment in the home, while her mother was happy to take the cleanup detail.

“I loved to cook, and I loved to eat,” said Stewart, who has four sons, three of them chefs.

International tourism, she said, has a lot to do with food. We travel, and we eat where we travel. Many countries are known for their food, for a distinctive cuisine that is integral to the travelling experience. But, sadly, Canada is not a culinary destination for tourists, she said.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” she said.

Part of the problem is that Canada doesn’t make the effort to broadcast its distinctly Canadian foods to the world. Like the country itself, our food is diverse, with regional variants across the land. But it is distinct in the world, and has several purely Canadian food innovations, like the butter tart, maple syrup, poutine, Canadian beef or Montreal-style bagels.

“Canada has to take matters into its own hands and differentiate, differentiate, differentiate,” Stewart said, speaking of the national effort needed to put Canada on the culinary tourism map.

The first Canadian to earn a graduate degree in gastronomy, Stewart has done her part to whip up a national food movement. As the founder and CEO of Food Day Canada, she has rallied a growing network of top Canadian chefs to cook Canadian cuisine during the annual summer celebration of Canadian food culture.

Stewart told the crowd that Food Day Canada evolved from an event she organized in 2003, after a mad cow disease incident in Alberta. Entire communities were devastated, she said, as borders closed to Canadian beef.

To quell the fear and promote Canadian beef and Canadian food in general, she made a plea to Canadians to go to their barbecues, cook something wonderful, and tell their stories. The concept went viral. Food Day Canada is on Aug. 5 this year.

The University of Guelph, Stewart said, is finally beginning to realize that it is Canada’s food university. It is making significant contributes is a host of areas related to the Canadian food sector.

Sharing food, she said, is a higher level of communion. Food sets the table for celebration, brings people together in friendship. Canadian food is part of the national identity.


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Rob O'Flanagan

About the Author: Rob O'Flanagan

Rob O’Flanagan has been a newspaper reporter, photojournalist and columnist for over twenty years. He has won numerous Ontario Newspaper Awards and a National Newspaper Award.
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