THE ROLE OF FOOD IN CANADIAN EXPRESSIONS OF CHRISTIANITY

Food has always been a vital part of religious life. Based on their religious beliefs, people, in Canada and elsewhere, have restricted the food they eat, fed the spirit world, ingested the divine, offered food to others as charity, and celebrated important religious occasions with special food. Focusing historically, and in the present, on food and religious experience is one way to examine the lives of Canadian Christians. Despite the increasingly secular and multicultural nature of Canada, over three-quarters of the population still currently self-identify as Christian, and over half of these are Roman Catholic.1 In this chapter, we examine changes to Canadian Christian food practices that have occurred since the late 1960s, when altered immigration policies and the emergence of multiculturalism as a core Canadian value led to an increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious population, especially in the larger cities.

Historical Links between Food and Canadian Christianity

Canadian Christians have expressed their religiosity through food in ways quite similar to other Christians throughout the world, but their experiences have also been coloured by the European colonization of this land and its peoples, the multi-ethnic European immigrant presence throughout the country, tensions between ‘the French’ and ‘the English’ founding peoples, and deepseated antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants. This section reviews the main Christian food-related categories, highlighting some of their Canadian characteristics.2

Christianity in its early decades distinguished itself from its parent, Judaism, by declaring members free from dietary restrictions.3 But temporary food restrictions, sometimes called fasts, have a long history within Christianity.4 Christian fasts focus on the avoidance of animal products, including butter eggs, and meat itself. They often but not only precede special religious days, such as Christmas, Easter, and Sundays, with their length and severity varying between Christian groups and over time.

Canadian Roman Catholics on the whole have taken fasting far more seriously than Protestants. As a result, Catholic Friday and Lenten practices, especially in the early centuries of colonization, contributed significantly to the sense that Catholicism and Protestantism were not only different branches of the same religion, but entirely different religions. Until recently most Catholics abstained from meat on Fridays, often replacing it with fish, as a type of selfdenial in memory of the day on which Jesus was said to have suffered and died. Fish was not the only substitute: as Stacey Zembrzycki notes in her chapter in this volume, Ukrainian Canadians often replaced meat with their signature ethnic food – perogies – for their Friday fast. During the forty-day Lenten period that precedes Easter, Catholics also removed from their diet various sensory delights, including sweets (for the children) and animal dietary products. The weekly Friday food restriction was determinative: if there is one thing that Protestants knew about Catholics, it was that Catholics did not eat meat on Fridays.

Christian Sunday worship gatherings since the earliest days of Christianity have focused on a food ritual. Called by various names – Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Communion – this ritual symbolizes a wide range of possibilities, including thanksgiving, the invocation of the Spirit, the memory of Jesus’ sacrifice, the memory of the Last Supper, and hope of the upcoming Kingdom that Christians believe awaits them when Jesus returns.5 For the majority of Christians over the centuries, the Eucharist has not only been symbolic, but substantive: the bread and wine (or their substitutes) were thought to be changed, or ‘transubstantiated,’ into the actual body and blood of Jesus, giving believers direct corporal access to God through food.

In the Canadian context, sharply divided as it was until recent decades between Catholics and Protestants, the Eucharist, like Friday fasting, played a major part in delimiting boundaries. While Christians as a whole honoured this ritual, Protestants typically saw transubstantiation as akin to magic, and Catholics considered it a fundamental act of faith. In both cases, however, as well as for the Eastern Christian communities that also helped shape Canada for over a century,6 the Eucharistic food ritual was a primary conduit to the divine.

Canadian Christians have long celebrated religious occasions with special foods linked to their ethnic backgrounds. Canadian Ukrainian cookbooks are full of old country recipes prepared for Christmas and Easter, as are Mennonite cookbooks, as illustrated by Marlene Epp in this volume.7 Colourful rituals have often complemented these special foods. For instance, some Christian immigrants from Eastern Europe continued the tradition of bringing elaborate food baskets to church on the Saturday before Easter, to be blessed by the priest and returned home. That blessed food, including bread, sausage, butter, cheese, and decorated eggs, became a vital part of the Easter meal. Franca Iacovetta describes a Latvian ethnic celebration that introduced Torontonians to the particular foods and recipes that were part of Latvian immigrant Easter rituals. Across the country, each Christian community has similar stories – of French-Canadian réveillons following Christmas midnight mass, Slovenian women working together to produce their Easter potica, or walnut role cakes, and Dene feasting on smoked moose and dried fish. Religion, ethnicity, and location have merged in distinct ways with food. Women, in particular, have played an important role in transmitting this knowledge from generation to generation.

Food has often accompanied religious services and gatherings in this country, for good reasons: shared snacks and meals bring people together and foster community, banquets can raise money for various needs, and commensality – the act of eating together – helps people get through long, cold winters. Canadian church cookbooks attest to this reality of Christians gathering after a service or to commemorate a special event. Moreover, church potlucks, post-service coffee and cookies, and bake sales have been around since the time that Europeans arrived on the shores of Canada.

The community building that each group did, however, also separated them from others. Food, after all, brings some people together and keeps them apart from others. But there have always been exceptions to this segregation, particularly in smaller communities where Christians of different denominations toiled and sometimes ate together, despite having religious food traditions that worked to keep them apart. An elderly informant we interviewed in 2006 in the Waterloo Region of southwestern Ontario recounted a local childhood memory that speaks to this reality:

"Growing up on a farm, we needed to work with our family’s neighbours to get the crops in – including our Protestant neighbours. This meant that the Catholic wives had to prepare meat on Fridays, because the Protestant men expected it, and it meant that the Protestant women had to prepare fish on Fridays, because the Catholic men needed it. These original experiences of cooperation between Catholic and Protestant farmers gave me a grounding in interfaith dialogue from a very early age."8

The most explicit link between religion and food for many Christians has been food charity, supported by biblical injunctions that encourage followers of Jesus to feed the poor. Canadian Christians of all denominations since the founding of New France have given food and meals to the poor, raised money for Christmas food baskets, and as soon as they were able sent money abroad for hungry populations. Until recently, Christian denominations have tended to perform this religious service independently of one other.

One expression of this food charity is work done by the Salvation Army, an evangelical Protestant group that arrived in Canada from London in 1882, establishing itself as a ‘soup and salvation’ mission that fed the hungry with a view to converting them to Christianity.9 The ‘Sally Ann’ focused on food charity, be it in the context of emergency and disaster food supply, homeless and addiction services, safe houses, or services for the mentally and physically needy.

Another group well known for its Christian food charity is the Society of St Vincent de Paul, which began in Paris in 1833 with the intention of encouraging more Roman Catholics to help the poor. First established in Canada in 1847, the Society developed support groups in most Canadian Catholic parishes to ensure that less fortunate families received at least some material support. A good deal of that support came in the form of food, with major fundraising anddistribution of that food taking place before and during the Christmas season.

Changing Patterns to the Role of Food in Canadian Christian Life

Much of what we have just reviewed continues to be practised by Canadian Christians. In some respects, food shapes Christian lives today in ways that have not changed much over time: The Salvation Army representatives still greet immigrants to this country, churches hold bake sales to raise money and foster community building, cities have their soup kitchens and out-of-the-cold programs run by local Christian churches, Sunday services usually include Eucharistic celebrations, Lent for many still evokes the thought of food restrictions, Easter baskets still get blessed in churches, and the major religious feasts have the smells and tastes of past places and times that sometimes extend beyond the Canadian shores.

In what follows, we focus less on continuity than on change. Canadian expressions of Christianity have undergone a transformation over the past forty years. We explore ways in which food has been implicated in these changes. Before turning to the federal government catalysts for these changes, we touch on two other events that significantly challenged Canada’s Catholics in the 1960s and helped to pave the way for new religious realities in this country. These were Vatican II and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.

The rulings that emerged from Vatican II, a series of meetings of Catholic Church leaders held from 1962 to 1965 in Rome, affected everyday Canadian Catholics like nothing they had personally known before. What these Catholics experienced were church services now being held in the vernacular language instead of Latin, the altar table being turned around with the priest facing them rather than away, and a removal of the requirement to abstain from meat on Fridays. In addition, they were encouraged to work more closely with Christians of other denominations, and to some extent also with religious people outside Christianity.

The implications for religious food culture were profound. The Eucharist now more closely resembled a meal, with priests openly conducting the transformative food ritual and parishioners being allowed to receive the food (and drink) in their hands. More significantly for many Catholics, the centuries-long rhythm of different Friday food was broken, a legal relaxation that surprisingly prompted a good number of Catholics to reconsider their participation in the church.

Yet, for Church leaders all was not doom and gloom. The ecumenical thrust of Vatican II led to an increasing number of new initiatives, with Catholics working more closely with other Christians on a variety of projects. A recent example is Catholic participation in the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFB), a Christian charitable project meant to alleviate world hunger. CFB started in 1983 out of the Mennonite Central Committee, and now it is owned by fifteen Canadian church agencies. One of these agencies is the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, which seeks to ‘pool resources, both human and financial, and work collaboratively together in a Christian Response to Hunger.’ 10 For the younger members of the churches, this inter-Christian involvement with food aid is now all they have ever known; for at least some older Catholics, who in their early years would have considered Mennonites as far removed from their faith as Buddhists (the reverse is equally true of Mennonites), the change has been enormous.

Quebec’s Quiet Revolution added another significant factor, particularly to the religious practices of francophone Catholics. Coined to represent the major cultural and religious changes that took place in Quebec during the early 1960s, this movement shifted control of education and health from the Catholic Church to secular governmental agencies, as part of a larger drive to strip the Church of the power it had wielded over Quebec Catholics for centuries.11 It ‘marked an acceleration of the process of secularization of the Québec State,’12 a process mirrored by Christians in other parts of Canada as well.13

The changes wrought by Vatican II and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution meant that fewer and fewer Canadians, particularly those with long family roots in this country, concern themselves with religious food restrictions and with the Eucharist. But these practices have not disappeared. One need only look at Friday menus to see that ‘fish on Fridays’ is alive and well throughout Canada, if not in Catholic homes, then at least in restaurants. And one need only look at the Christian churches filled with new immigrants, whose food practices often resemble what used to exist in Canada a generation or two ago. It is to that reality that we now turn.

The Vatican and Quebec changes were complemented by Canadian federal government legislation introduced in 1967 and 1971. The Immigration Act of 1967 significantly increased Canada’s ethnic diversity by introducing the ‘points system,’ replacing the old system of accepting immigrants to Canada that had discriminated against non-Caucasians. As a result of this Act, any applicant with enough points became equally competitive, regardless of race, colour, and religious affiliation. Along with this change, in 1971, the federal Liberal government introduced the official policy of Canadian ‘multiculturalism.’ 14 The result was a flood of new immigrants into Canada from all over the world – particularly South and East Asia, parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean – accompanied by changes to the self-identity of this country and a growing appreciation for the Aboriginal communities.15

A major consequence of these changes has been the increased presence of immigrants involved in other religious traditions, particularly Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism.16 Over the past forty years, Vancouver and Montreal, and especially Toronto, have been transformed into cities containing extraordinarily mixed populations. What is less well known, however, is that most immigrants to Canada continued to be Christian, especially Roman Catholics, from the Philippines, Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the global South.

Increased religious pluralism and ethnic diversification of the Canadian Christian population certainly has had an effect on the intersection of food and Christianity. We begin by looking at ethnic diversification through the looking glass provided by Paul Bramadat and David Seljak’s Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada.17 This book, with chapters addressing different Christian denominations, reveals that not all Christian communities have been affected to the same extent by Canada’s changing ethnic mix. The Eastern Christian communities that are more ethnically and regionally specific (e.g., Serb, Greek, Coptic, Ukrainian, Russian) have been influenced far more by the arrival of other Christians from their home countries than by ethnic diversification.18 The same applies to the Christian Reformed Church, where over 98 per cent of members still claim European ancestry.19 By contrast, to be a member of the United Church has long ceased to mean being an anglophone Protestant with family roots in the British Isles. Similarly, Presbyterians, Catholics, and even Anglicans at church gatherings in Canada are now sometimes encouraged by their new parishioners to serve tortillas alongside the cabbage, and beans instead of pork. In other words, the vital sensory links made between food and religious place are currently being reconfigured in Canadian Christian communities – in some communities more than in others.

Quebec religious life has been affected by the influx of immigrants from new parts of the world. Solange Lefebvre observes that because of a 1977 ruling that required immigrant children in Quebec to attend French schools, a large number of francophone Roman Catholic parishes have become multiethnic. 20 Changes in food practices followed suit. Montreal Catholics, in particular, Lefebvre notes, when they invite their Muslim friends to share meals with them, are learning that respect includes an understanding of Muslim dietary restrictions. Moreover, since most immigrants tend to be socially more conservative, the new ethnic mixes have meant that the preparation of food for religious events often reverts back to the kitchens, to the control of women.

These types of examples are repeated across Canada, across many Christian traditions. Presbyterians are seeing their Scottish roots, and food fare, mix with those of Koreans.21 The United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, has been a leader in dealing with the implications of ethnic diversity. As Greer Anne Wenh-in Ng notes, the Amazing Grace Taiwanese Mission in Fraser, B.C., celebrates the Chinese Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival with their food-rich traditions (moon cakes, pomelos, etc.).22 For their part, most Lutherans in Canada, although still grounded in their German roots and accompanying German food, are also embracing ethnic diversity. In Surrey, B.C., for example, ‘there are English, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish services at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church, comprising four “worshipping fellowships”... [One of the leaders] is also training lay people of Hispanic, Hindi and Mandarin backgrounds [and has hired] a Hindu convert to Christianity as an evangelist... On festival days Faith Lutheran brings all four worshipping fellowships together for joint worship services, followed by a pot-luck lunch where ethnic foods are shared.’23 One imagines ethnic fusion in potlucks, with the pork sausages complemented by noodles, pickled vegetables, dhal, and tacos. All of this matters because Christians tend to associate particular food with special religious occasions, and as that food culture changes so, too, does a person’s religious culture. Sermons and biblical texts might be fodder for theologians, but food is universally significant.

Ethnic diversification in Canadian congregations has helped to create greater global awareness, including more calls by Christians for global justice.24 Moreover, it has increased sensitivity to the problems inherent in the traditional model of Christian charity which, as Janet Poppendieck for one has noted, both at home and abroad has at times offered token rather than structural solutions.25

Moving from ethnic diversification within the Christian tradition to religious pluralism more broadly, one sees tensions throughout Canada, to be sure, 26 but also an abundance of positive discoveries and sharing.27 One example among many is a Quebec group, Astrolabe, which since 2004 has been introducing Muslims to the cabanes à sucre that was traditionally a French-Canadian Catholic rite of spring, blessed by priests and, in francophone Catholic communities outside Quebec, often held adjacent to the church. Still, we should not paint too rosy a picture. Interreligious understanding has a long way to go before all Christians in this country appreciate, for instance, the visceral negative response that Muslims, many Jews, and some Indians feel about pork, but we are far from the mid-twentieth century mindset that simply assumed Christianity and Christian food practices as the norm.

Christian encounters with people of other religious traditions have sometimes had unexpected results. On the Wilfrid Laurier University campus in Waterloo, Ontario, some Catholic students who are trying to revitalize their own faith by returning to their tradition’s fasting roots are modelling themselves on their Muslim classmates.28 Inspired by their classmates’ piety during Ramadan, fasting for these young Catholics now entails total abstinence from food and drink from sunrise to sunset during the forty days of Lent, a practice not otherwise followed in the Catholic tradition.29 Another example of hybridization can be seen with the House of Friendship food bank in the Waterloo Region, which now receives food donations from a local Hindu temple, a local Sikh gurdwara, and the Muslim Shi’a community. In addition, a sectarian Sikh farming community fifty kilometres away regularly sends truckloads of produce to this food bank during the summer. This self-professed ‘Christian’ food bank has willingly been adopted and altered by members of other faith traditions. In sum, not only are Christians being nourished by the presence of other religious traditions, and not only are Christian expressions of food charity likely to be interdenominational, as noted above, but traditional forms of Christian charity are also being transformed into multi-faith expressions.30

Conclusion

Food remains intertwined with Canadian Christian life in ways that reflect the old practices and beliefs as well as the changes brought about as a result of the increased diversification of Canadian culture. With fewer Christians attending church services, fewer restrictions imposed on adherents, and fewer women spending long hours in the kitchen (their place not often replaced by men), the traditional religious connections to food are changing for many Christians who grew up in this country – including Aboriginal Christians, many of whom are now nurturing their pre-Christian religious traditions, at the same time as their traditional food sources are increasingly threatened by environmental changes.

The central Eucharistic feast is not usually celebrated by the whole community, the days of long fasts for many are a thing of the past, and the huge Sunday and religious feast-day dinners have become potlucks and take-outs that rarely include the whole extended family. Moreover, lingering after service to share food and drink is an opportunity taken up by a minority, and the donations at work or at the door to the United Way and the Cancer Society often replace Christian calls for food charity. Indeed, the Canadian components of the categories with which we began this case study have all become more complex.

One result of this complexity is that food is no longer as divisive a force as it once was between Christian groups. Many churchgoing Canadian Christians share in ‘worldwide communion day,’ a Sunday when Christian churches across the world are conscious of having a shared Eucharist, and Christians also work together to address social inequities.31 On the whole, the Catholic-Protestant feuding that so marked the first centuries of Canada no longer resonates with the intensity it did before.

Canada’s increasing degree of secularization has also meant a shift of food from the category ‘religion’ to ‘ethnicity,’ to the extent that one can make this distinction. With that shift has come increased celebration of difference. The turkey and meat pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the ham for Easter, are becoming more cultural than religious artefacts – as are the religious holidays themselves. Canadians tend to be more interested, for example, in tasting ‘local Mennonite food’ or supporting the Mennonite sale of Fair Trade coffee, than they are in attending Mennonite religious services.

So how is the religious role of food affected by the rise of secularism, the growing ethnic diversity among Christians, and the increasing presence, visibility, and interactions of Canadians belonging to multiple religious groups? First, we are witnessing movement in two opposite directions: while many Canadian-born Christians are moving away from some of the previouslyheld links between food and religious life, immigrants on the whole are reinscribing those links, in diverse ways. Second, food traditions or ‘ethnic markers’ associated with a wide array of immigrants, including ones attached to religious traditions, are becoming accepted into the food culture of the larger secular society. Third, there is considerable interreligious exchange in this country, leading to greater awareness of religious food restrictions and fasting as practised by Muslims, Jews, and Hindus – resulting at times in unexpected partnerships, such as the attraction of young Christians to vegetarianism, fed not only by the environmental movement but also by immigrant Hindu, Sikh, and Jain religious food practices that are gaining more public exposure. In short, Canadians are experiencing intercultural exchanges and movement in several directions – with food so often at the centre, serving as a mirror to the past and the present.

NOTES

1 Reginald Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto:Stoddart, 2002), 85. For an overview of the demographics of Christianity in Canada, see Peter Beyer’s Appendix, in Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, eds., Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 437–40. The 2001 Census identified 12,793,125 Roman Catholics, spread across every province and territory (5,939,715 in Quebec, 3,911,760 in Ontario).
2 There is some overlap between these categories and those in Daniel Sack’s Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), which organizes the data under Liturgical Food, Social Food, Emergency Food, Global Food, and Moral Food. Sack’s categories effectively represent the American Protestant model; ours are more representative of the global connections between food and religion that we have found in our research, and we think they better represent the Canadian Christian experiences.
3 Paul, for example, taught: ‘Food will not commend us to God’ (1 Cor 8:8). A few Christian groups over the centuries have had dietary restrictions (e.g., Seventh Day Adventists), but they have been rare.
4 The important role of fasting throughout Christian history is well represented in David Grumett and Rachel Muers, Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 1–71. 
5 See Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009), for a study that highlights the significant role of this early Christian food ritual, while encouraging modern Christians to revitalize this ritual.
6 The term ‘Eastern Christianity’ is used here, as it is by Myroslaw Tataryn in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), to bring together ‘those branches of the Christian world that historically developed quite independent of both the ancient Church of Rome (Roman Catholicism) and the churches of the Reformation [Protestantism]’ (289). Eastern Christianity includes Orthodox communities, many of which come from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and India.
7 E.g., Ukrainian Daughters’ Cookbook, by the Ukrainian Women’s Association of Canada, Daughter of Ukraine Branch (Regina, SK, 1984). Research by Marlene Epp and others also shows that Canadian Mennonite women, in particular, since the early 1800s have integrated belief and religious identity through food. See ‘The Semiotics of Zwieback: Feast and Famine in the Narratives of Mennonite Refugee Women,’ in Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds., Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 314–40; Pamela Klassen, ‘What’s Bre[a]d in the Bone: The Bodily Heritage of Mennonite Women,’ Mennonite Quarterly Review 68 (1994): 229–47.
8 This interview was conducted in the House of Friendship building in Kitchener, Ontario, 10 Aug. 2006, as part of our ongoing research project on the religious role that food plays in people’s lives, across religious traditions and across the world. We have conducted well over 150 interviews over the last four years, across South and East Asia, North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, part of the Caribbean, and North America, and we are currently preparing a book that will address thematic differences and similarities within and between traditions.
9 For a broad history of the Salvation Army in Canada, see R.G. Moyles, The Blood and Fire in Canada: A History of the Salvation Army in the Dominion, 1882–1976 (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977).
10 Available at http://www.foodgrainsbank.ca/member_churches.aspx.
11 For background information see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).
12 These words come from what has come to be known as the Bouchard-Taylor Report, 139. Another relevant quote from that report is: ‘In our view, secularism comprises four key principles. Two of the principles define the final purposes that we are seeking, i.e. the moral equality of persons or the recognition of the equivalent moral value of each individual, and freedom of conscience and religion. The other two principles express themselves in the institutional structures that are essential to achieve these purposes, i.e. State neutrality towards religions and the separation of Church and State’ (135). This report, published in 2008, was commissioned by the Quebec government. See Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation, available at http://www.accommodements. qc.ca/documentation/rapports/rapport-final-integral-en.pdf.
13 Tracking the ‘no religion’ category in the 1981, 1991, and 2001 census figures, we see an increase from 7.4% to 12.3% to 16.2%. The results are difficult to assess since, e.g., many members of the large Chinese population in Canada typically choose ‘no religion’ because they have trouble isolating a single religious tradition to which they adhere. Nevertheless, the rise in this figure is significant.
14 The multiculturalism policy became a statute in 1988. The term is much more prevalent outside Quebec, which has had an ambivalent relationship to the notion of multiculturalism. The Bouchard-Taylor Report prefers the notion of interculturalism, which, in their view, ‘seeks to reconcile ethnocultural diversity with the continuity of the French-speaking core and the preservation of the social link’ (19).
15 For a challenge to the reality of multiculturalism, see Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 1994).
16 Muslims in Canada, e.g., made up 0.4% of the population in 1981 (98,000), 0.9% in 1991 (253,265), 2% in 2001 (579,640), and they are now estimated to make up 2.5% (785,700). Hindus and Sikhs in 2001 also had a combined figure of 557,615. A good number of Muslims are also Indian, some having come to Canada indirectly from East Africa.
17 This book is a sequel to their Religion and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: Pearson, 2005).
18 See the chapter by Myroslaw Tataryn, ‘Canada’s Eastern Christians,’ in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 287–329. There are currently about 650,000 ‘Eastern’ Christians in Canada, many having come in recent years from Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
19 Stuart Macdonald, ‘Presbyterian and Reformed Christians and Ethnicity,’ in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 174.
20 Solange Lefebvre, ‘The Francophone Roman Catholic Church,’ in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 105–6.
21 Macdonald, ‘Presbyterian and Reformed Christians,’ 184.
22 ‘The United Church of Canada: A Church Fittingly National,’ in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 211.
23 Bryan Hillis, ‘Outsiders Becoming Mainstream: The Theology, History, and Ethnicity of Being Lutheran in Canada,’ in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 271.
24 See Cathy C. Campbell, Stations of the Banquet: Faith Foundations for Food Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), for an example of a Winnipeg Anglican Church minister taking creative actions to raise awareness of global justice among her congregants.
25 Janet Poppendieck, ‘Want Amid Plenty: From Hunger to Inequality,’ in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 572–81. For more critical engagement with practices of charity, see also the two accompanying articles in that collection: Jennifer Clapp,‘The Political Economy of Food Aid in an Era of Agricultural Biotechnology’ en Flynn, ‘Street Credit: The Cultural Politics of African Street Children’s Hunger’ (554–71).
26 Tensions have run the highest in Quebec. The Bouchard-Taylor Report was commissioned to understand the sources and nature of these tensions, which intensifiedfrom May 2002 to February 2006 and led to a time of turmoil from March 2006 to June 2007, and to make recommendations on resolving them. Some of the incidents that generated these tensions emerged from differences in food culture, particularly over kosher laws with orthodox Jews; see 48–60 for a description of the main incidents.
27 See www.astrolabequebec.org.
28 For a related study of how Catholics in America are revisiting their fasting traditions, see Kathleen M. Dugan, ‘Fasting for Life: The Place of Fasting in the Christian Tradition,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63/3 (1995):539–48. For the significance of fasting in the broader U.S. Christian framework, see R. Marie Griffith, ‘“Don’t Eat That”: The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity,’ Gastronomica 1/4 (2001): 36–47.
29 Ironically, Muslim fasting during the month of Ramadan itself may have emerged in the seventh century from early Christian fasting practices. See Grumett and Muers, Theology on the Menu, 103–5, and Kees Wagtendonk, Fasting in the Koran (Leiden: Brill, 1978).
30 We see similar influences in the reverse, with Canadian Muslims, e.g., setting up food banks and shelters based on Canadian Christian models.
31 An example of this inter-Christian activity is See You Next Week: An Ecumenical Community Ministry in an Ontario Downtown (Kitchener: Community Ministry, 2007), that describes a decade of work by local Lutheran and United churches in providing Lenten Wednesday dinners at which both street people and church members sit to eat together.

By Michel Desjardins and Ellen Desjardins in "Edible Histories, Cultural Politics - Towards a Canadian Food History", edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek and Marlene Epp, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada, 2012, excerpts pp.70-82. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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