Canadian Food History

Historical period

Indigenous food systems across every ecozone for millennia; Norse contact at L’Anse aux Meadows around 1000; the COD FISHERY drawing European boats to the Grand Banks from the early 1500s, before any settlement; New France from 1608 and the FUR TRADE, which ran on PEMMICAN supplied by Métis and First Nations and which is why the two economies were one; the Acadian deportation of 1755; the Conquest of 1759 and a French-speaking Catholic food culture persisting under British rule; Loyalist migration; the buffalo destroyed by the 1880s and the treaties and famine that followed; the railway and Prairie settlement; residential schools; the wheat economy and the Wheat Board; internment of Japanese Canadians in 1942; postwar immigration and multiculturalism as policy from 1971; the 1992 cod moratorium; and supply management, which still governs dairy, eggs and poultry and is argued about in every trade negotiation.