5 Arab-Canadian Foodscapes and Authenticity
Michael Akladios
Visiting diverse Middle Eastern restaurants across the Greater Toronto Area, one quickly discovers that they all feature tabbouleh on the menu. As an Egyptian, I had never eaten tabbouleh until I started my undergraduate degree at York University in Toronto. It is not part of the Egyptian tradition. Interestingly, while Syrian and Lebanese emigrants found their way to Egypt in large numbers throughout the mid- to late-nineteenth century, this side-dish never made its way into mainstream Egyptian cuisine, and especially, the average family kitchen. However, in North America it has come to be defined as “authentically” Middle Eastern.
The first time I tried tabbouleh, I was with a group of friends from various ethno-cultural backgrounds. When I asked what kind of salad that “green dish” was, I was met with confused expressions. The person across the table asked me: “I thought you were Egyptian?” Somehow, not knowing what tabbouleh was made my very claim to “Egyptian-ness” questionable. This simple appetizer had come to define what it meant to be Middle Eastern in the western imagination. Meanwhile, Egyptian kushari will never be found in a restaurant in the GTA. Eaten since at least the nineteenth-century, this famous staple of Egyptian cuisine will only be found in family kitchens and mosque and church festivals. This dish, central to my own memories of ‘home’, remains confined to the familial private sphere and community cultural festivals.
Why is something as seemingly simple as food so influential to the average Canadian’s conception of the Middle East and its culture? Food carries messages about class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and identity. Food is not only what is materially before us or the raw ingredients which go into making a particular dish: it has symbolic significance. For food historians, two terms encapsulate the relationship between food and culture. First, “foodways” represent the connection between ethnicity and food. Foodways can often be a point of social contact and outreach, a way of expressing identity, and a tangible way to remember ‘home’. Second, “foodscapes” represent the culinary cultures of a place. If foodways are the material and cultural significance of food to a group’s identity, then foodscapes are the physical manifestations of culture across space in the proliferation of ethnic restaurants, markets, grocers, food festivals and street-corner vendors.1 How, then, have Syro-Lebanese foodways come to dominate public (commercial) foodscapes in Toronto and successfully push out other Middle Eastern immigrant groups’ distinctive ethnic cuisines?
Traditionally, the ‘Arab world’ comprises 22 countries and territories which speak Arabic. These territories occupy an area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean in the southeast. From 186