In 1980, a flyer from Chez Richelieu displayed fried chicken, eggs, sugar, bananas and pasta. What’s more normal ? The same advertising document for another supermarket, 42 years later, now offers 23 pages of products: ground bison, marinated keftas, poke bowls, five brands of microbrewery beer, bites of tofu in cashew sauce, frozen cubes of smoothie with spirulina, raw milk cheese from Île aux Grues, among other things.
As this striking contrast shows, the eating habits of Quebecers have changed a great deal over the past few decades. Our grocery lists have grown and our food balance sheet approach wanted to measure this flight.
The 2,400 foods purchased in our Montreal household in 2021 came from at least 47 countries.
I was born in 1986 and my parents often took me to warehouses in Montreal where they bought products that were then called “exotic” in order to supply their delicatessen located on the South Shore of Quebec. It is that Lebanese, Indian, Chinese and Italian products were hardly distributed outside the metropolis before the 2000s.
Sometimes we were asked if the bagels we were selling were donuts. Or that an aged cheese is brought back on the pretext that it was “not fresh”. Few people had heard of hummus, nachos, sesame oil, Indian-style butter chicken, or sriracha sauce. Without saying that these products have become universal, they are more and more commonplace.
The agri-food sector has never been so globalized and, paradoxically, the thirst for local products is only growing, in the wake of the pandemic which has given a boost.
Quebec is a distinct society in this area, having gone through this small quiet food revolution. The firm specializing in food data NielsenIQ has calculated that sales of Quebec agri-food products skyrocketed at the start of the pandemic, i.e. by 18% between October 2020 and October 2021. Year after year, this company insists on the “ distinct society” in Quebec… in food.
Culinary historian Michel Lambert has compared this trend towards the local to the emergence of agriculture in ancient societies. “When humans invented agriculture, they found it more practical to bring food closer to them than to be nomadic. It’s as if we had to rediscover it,” he said in an interview with Homework last December.
The condition of the modern eater is to have lost his bearings in relation to food. And we try to solve this problem of a food that no longer means anything.
A 2020 survey for Dalhousie University found that 17% of respondents had started growing fruits and vegetables at the start of the pandemic.
Why try to grow tomatoes when a deadly virus threatens? The new gardeners said they found this food “safer” than that of the store and tastier.
Underlying it, there may also be a quest for meaning. “The condition of the modern eater is to have lost his bearings in relation to food. And we try to solve this problem of a food that no longer means anything,” said Geneviève Sicotte, professor of French studies at Concordia University and specialist in the food imagination, recently in an interview.
She points to the writings of sociologist Claude Fischler who, in 1979, developed the concept of gastro-anomie, the absence of rules or order (nomos) in gastronomy. “Consider the current appetite of the industrialized West: although overfed, the developed countries are not satiated”, indicated in the opening of one of his scholarly articles on this question.
Why did you want to take stock, item by item, of the food we bought? No doubt also to find this desire for social ties and meaning that goes more and more through the stomach.