By Kimberley Moore & Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg
with: Rhonda Hinther, Jo McCutcheon, Ian Mosby
Chairs | Présidence : Janis Thiessen and Kimberley Moore
In 2018, Janis Thiessen (History, University of Winnipeg) and Kimberley Moore and Kent Davies (Oral History Centre, University of Winnipeg) refashioned a used food truck into a mobile oral history lab: the Manitoba Food History Truck. They travelled Manitoba together, conducting and archiving oral histories about the province’s food with the people who make, sell, and eat it. They interviewed restaurant owners, beer brewers, grocers, farmers, scholars, and chefs in their kitchens and businesses, online, and on board the truck. They conducted nearly seventy interviews and tasted everything from Winnipeg’s “Fat Boys” to Steinbach’s perogies to Churchill’s cloudberry jam.
One of the many public history outcomes of this oral history research is Mmm…Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Foods We Eat (Thiessen and Moore, University of Manitoba Press, 2024). An innovative combination of history, recipes, maps, archival records, biographies, and full-colour photographs, the book has a companion website featuring ArcGIS maps, Story Maps, and podcast episodes. Food history becomes a lens to examine the broader history of Manitoba and Canada: food security and regulation, Indigenous foodways and agriculture, capitalism’s impact on the agri-food industry, the networks between food producers and retailers, as well as gender, ethnicity, migration, and colonialism.
Janis Thiessen and Kimberley Moore will present an interactive roundtable on mmm…Manitoba, featuring commentary by three major scholars in Canadian food, labour, Indigenous, and public history: Rhonda Hinther, Jo McCutcheon, and Ian Mosby.
Books will be available for purchase at COHDS. We look forward to seeing you there!
