On February 11th, 2020, Dr. Alex Ketchum’s students visited the McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections at the McLennan Library in order to look at materials related to the history of food and gender. As part of the Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) 401 class on Food, Gender, and Environment, students are analyzing the ways that food accessibility and environmental threats are gendered, sexualized, and racialized within the global context. We began the course by studying the intellectual linkages between food, feminism, and environmentalism. For the rest of the semester, each week is devoted to seeing how topics such as water, seeds, labour, cookbooks, and more are gendered. The class also looks at social movements and activism that has tried to combat or ameliorate some of these issues. If you are interested in following along with the syllabus, a public version is available here.
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Ing, Ingalls, and Yearl began by explaining the materials available at each location and how students might access these materials. Elis Ing discussed how the cookbook collection focuses primarily on three areas: the cookbooks and materials of food manufacturers; community cookbooks; and domestic management and home economics. She showed examples such as the Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbooks, the Underground Gourmet Community Cookbook written by the Greater Vancouver Women’s Mining Association, and blender-based cookbooks. Dana Ingalls highlighted the MacDonald Library’s materials around food science, food preservation, and food production. Of particular interest were the seed packets from the MacDonald Seed Library. Students could touch the heirloom seed packets of the Montreal Market Melon (first cultivated by French settlers in Quebec and revived in the 1990s) and the Kahnawake Mohawk Bean.
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Mary Yearl explained how the origins of the Osler Medical Library meant that recipes against disease live alongside knowledge about food and cookery. From the large collection, Yearl shared a 7th century Assyrian tablet that had a recipe for eye health, bound medieval texts, early 20th century texts on vegetarianism, and the Our Last Meals: San Quentin Death Row Cook Book by Albert Ru-Al Jones (2016). After a demonstration on how to interact with old materials and how to protect book spines and the theory behind wearing or not wearing gloves at archives, the students could interact with the materials.
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Students will be writing blog posts, some of which will be shared on this blog, about what cookbooks teach us. While the students are not restricted to writing about the materials they interacted with during our class field trip, the experience at the McGill Library will shape their writings.
I am extremely grateful for the generosity of Elis Ing, Dana Ingalls, and Mary Yearl. What a great privilege to be able to learn from their expertise and interact with the materials they thoughtfully assembled! If you are interested in utilizing the materials at the McGill libraries and archives, see https://www.mcgill.ca/library
One unit of this course is dedicated to the theme of food and storytelling. Students have been asked to think about the politics of cookbooks. In class we have discussed questions such as: What can cookbooks teach us? Whose stories can we uncover? How can cookbooks shed led light on the social, cultural, economic, environmental, and climate conditions of the author’s context?
Texts by authors such as Kimberly D. Nettles-Barcelón, Gillian Clark, Emily Contois, Natalie Cooke, Elizabeth Driver, Jessica Kenyatta Walker, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Don Lindgren, Laura Schenone, Courtney Thorsson, Diane Tye, Margaret Visser, Psyche Williams-Forson have provided context to these discussions. For more information on how cookbooks can be used as scholarly resources, click here. Dr. Ketchum also lectured on histories of lesbian, queer, and feminist cookbooks within postwar American and Canadian cultures. The powerpoint is available here.
In order for students to conduct their own research and have a hands-on experience with historical cookbooks and food ephemera, the class visited McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections.
Texts by authors such as Kimberly D. Nettles-Barcelón, Gillian Clark, Emily Contois, Natalie Cooke, Elizabeth Driver, Jessica Kenyatta Walker, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Don Lindgren, Laura Schenone, Courtney Thorsson, Diane Tye, Margaret Visser, Psyche Williams-Forson have provided context to these discussions. For more information on how cookbooks can be used as scholarly resources, click here. Dr. Ketchum also lectured on histories of lesbian, queer, and feminist cookbooks within postwar American and Canadian cultures. The powerpoint is available here.
In order for students to conduct their own research and have a hands-on experience with historical cookbooks and food ephemera, the class visited McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections.
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| (from left) Dana Ingalls, Mary Yearl, and Elis Ing showing materials to the class |
McGill University is home to numerous archival and special collections. Elis Ing (of McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections), Dana Ingalls (of the McGill University MacDonald Campus Library), and Mary Yearl (of the Osler Library on the History of Medicine) generously spent the afternoon working with the students as each collection has material related to the subject of food.
Ing, Ingalls, and Yearl began by explaining the materials available at each location and how students might access these materials. Elis Ing discussed how the cookbook collection focuses primarily on three areas: the cookbooks and materials of food manufacturers; community cookbooks; and domestic management and home economics. She showed examples such as the Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbooks, the Underground Gourmet Community Cookbook written by the Greater Vancouver Women’s Mining Association, and blender-based cookbooks. Dana Ingalls highlighted the MacDonald Library’s materials around food science, food preservation, and food production. Of particular interest were the seed packets from the MacDonald Seed Library. Students could touch the heirloom seed packets of the Montreal Market Melon (first cultivated by French settlers in Quebec and revived in the 1990s) and the Kahnawake Mohawk Bean.
This period was followed by an information session of how to navigate the McGill Library and Archives websites in order to find further materials. Elis Ing spoke to the field of critical librarianship and the debates around subject headings. Ing recommended the chapter “What’s the Difference between Soul Food and Southern Cooking?” by Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Psyche Williams-Forson, Rebecca Sharpless for more about this topic.
Students will be writing blog posts, some of which will be shared on this blog, about what cookbooks teach us. While the students are not restricted to writing about the materials they interacted with during our class field trip, the experience at the McGill Library will shape their writings.
I am extremely grateful for the generosity of Elis Ing, Dana Ingalls, and Mary Yearl. What a great privilege to be able to learn from their expertise and interact with the materials they thoughtfully assembled! If you are interested in utilizing the materials at the McGill libraries and archives, see https://www.mcgill.ca/library