You are Where You Eat: Ethnicity, Food and Cross-Cultural Spaces‪.‬

ABSTRACT/RESUME Food has long been regarded as a useful ethnic marker, a way of defining who we are. The connection of food to ethnic identity, however, is far from self-evident. This paper examines a number of Canadian literary works which deal with food, looking at the ways in which food, ethnicity, literature and cross-cultural spaces are treated. Canadian writers, the paper argues, see food hot only as defining who we are, but where we are in the diverse multicultural society of Canada. It locates us across "spacialized discourses," physically or geographically, in particular bodies, buildings, neighbourhoods, communities, regions, nations and the world as a whole; it also locates us in particular cultural spaces with important and sometimes problematic cultural boundaries. For these writers, food becomes yet another way of engaging the complex issues of individual belonging, group relations, gender, class, race and ethnicity, and the state of Canadian society and of the world as a whole.