Food is far more than sustenance – and our relationship with the things we eat is complex. At its core, food is life-sustaining, but for some people with severe food allergies, it can also be life-threatening. Breaking bread can bring people together – and create great divides (pineapple on pizza, anyone?). It can offer comfort and act as an expression of faith or love, but it can also be a source of incredible stress and, in the wrong hands, a weapon.

What we eat has implications that extend far beyond our kitchen table and into the social, economic, environmental and cultural fabrics of our communities.

We asked five members of the MacEwan community to share their thoughts on all matters related to the food we eat.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of food?

Hoang: Joy! Community, togetherness, family and culture. Food is my favourite way to connect with others. Growing up in my family-run restaurant in Chinatown meant witnessing the community come together over food and the joy that good food brings. Food is also a beautiful entry point to learning about and appreciating different cultures and people. 

Dr. Romney: People. My mother’s Christmas cookies, a friend’s mother’s biscuits and, when I pull up carrots, my grandparents’ neighbour’s garden. Homer’s Odyssey, which is the story of Odysseus’ attempt to return home after 10 years at war and 10 years delayed by a series of bad hosts, is obsessed with the question of proper community and hospitality. To feed someone, particularly to feed them well, is to express care and to invite them into a community. 

Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard: Energy. When we eat, we disintegrate other organisms so that their energy can power our actions and their molecules become part of our bodies. Food connects us in the most intimate way possible with the organisms that surround us. Their death becomes our life. It is a thing of beauty and horror. There is a delicious duplicity to that.

Santiago: Excitement and comfort. Food brings excitement – through new culinary experiences. And it brings comfort – through familiar traditions. Both stem back to family, friends and community coming together and gathering.

Dr. Low: Thankful. I’m thankful for having food in my cupboards and fridge, and not being wasteful. I stick to simple comfort foods. A cup of soup and buttered toast puts a smile on my face on a Friday after work. 

The biggest food issues of our time?

Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard: I’m really not sure I can award the prize of “biggest food issue” to any one issue, but the extent of current food waste is a sign of how we fundamentally just don’t get it. We have come to take food for granted. We talk about food insecurity issues associated with inflation, for example. But to most in the Western world, food insecurity means having two meals a day instead of three. It does not mean watching your child die from hunger and having nothing to give them. There is fundamentally nothing more important than being able to feed our loved ones. 

Hoang: Social media trends play a big role in “popular” ingredients today. You see this with the current global matcha demand and shortage, as Japanese green tea is co-opted by big brands to meet demands driven by digital trends. It’s a problem when community members indigenous to the origin locations for ingredients can’t access their own natural product – an imbalance between appreciation and appropriation.

Dr. Romney: There is a dissociation between consumers and producers of food. In ancient Greek literature, like the Illiad, food and agriculture are enduring metaphors and ways of understanding the world, at a time when most of the population were farmers. There is a connection to food that is tangible and speaks not only to the raw materials of food – vegetables in the dirt, animals in the field, fruit on the vine – but also to the natural world, which sustains what will become food for human beings. 

Dr. Low: Food insecurity, particularly having less and less quality food to eat. Statistics Canada reported that 16.9 per cent of Canadians were food insecure in 2022 – single-income earners with kids and women are most likely to experience this. Learning on an empty stomach is a hard ask. 

How does history play a part in the food of the present?

Santiago: Take the little potato – a modern iteration of something we’ve had around for hundreds of years. We’ve learned lessons from past agricultural challenges, like the Irish potato blight, that help us understand the need for resilient agricultural practices. 

Hoang: Colonization has affected the globalization of cuisine. You have French influences in Vietnamese food and Indonesian cuisine in the Netherlands as just two examples. Colonization is so damaging in so many ways, but I find the integration of ingredients from one culture into another, to the point where those foods transform and become part of the cultural identity, so interesting. 

Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard: History has much to teach us about food security. In 1941, the humble onion became a gastronomic luxury item in the UK because its low price before the war had discouraged farmers from growing them. As the war demolished shipping routes that were taken for granted, onions became almost impossible to find and prohibitively expensive. A vegetable that had been a staple in everyone’s kitchens became a rare treat. In Canada, we are almost entirely reliant on imports of many fruits and vegetables that grow perfectly well here. Farmers choose not to grow them since a handful of other crops are thought to bring in better profit. The government does little to encourage diversification. 

Dr. Romney: Food and drink were used historically – as they are currently – as a form of social lubricant; wine from the Greek city-states, for example, formed part of a gift exchange economy with Gallic elites in the south of modern day France to help create the social and political networks to support trade between Greek settlements along the coast (the largest of which was Massalia, modern day Marseilles) and the Gauls living further inland. They were also used as weapons, as tools of colonialism and oppression, and those uses – the positive and the negative – have become set patterns for how humans can interact through food and drink now.

How do you see yourself reflected in the food you eat?

Hoang: So much of my cultural identity – all of ours – centres around food. The food we grew up with. Our mom’s recipes. The memories made around the kitchen table. I think of how the cultural food I eat connects me to my ancestors – our lives are so different, but these dishes passed on generation after generation remain the same. Food can be a mirror to ourselves and our heritage. It is comfort and home.

Santiago: I love being in the food business. It is noble and humbling to provide food for people. I also believe in the adage, “We are what we eat.” I believe in moderation and not depriving myself of the joy and pleasure that experiencing food can bring. What we put into our bodies translates directly into nourishment, and fuels how we think and feel. 

Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard: I owe my 48 years of life to the millions of organisms who have died so that I could go on living. I carry the biochemical echo of all those other beings within my body. As such, food is to me intricately linked to both gratitude and responsibility. I am grateful for their sacrifice, and so it is my responsibility to do something meaningful with the life they give me. 

What do you think the future of food will be?

Santiago: We continue to face the problem of getting enough to everybody. This is apparent in our own community – even in developed, wealthy countries, we have people without enough to eat. Figuring that out is priority number one. People everywhere have a right to healthy food and fresh water. 

Dr. Romney: Access to locally produced and sustainable food should not become (or rather, continue to be) a marker of higher economic and social class – dividing those with access to a garden and time to sustain it from those who don’t, separating those with the financial resources for locally produced food from those who rely on industrial food chains. 

Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard: The future of food will depend on whether we can change a sense of entitlement to one of gratitude, whether we can learn from history how quickly things can change and how important food is as the foundation for all life. The Green Revolution, understanding of the importance of microbiomes, and billions of dollars of research into new crop species and agricultural practices have given us the tools we need to make everyone’s future more secure. But like all tools, they only work if we use them. 

Final thoughts?

Dr. Romney: There is something to be said for bringing back communal eating spaces and taking meals together. Food is community, and for all of the contention of pineapple on pizza, eating food together in a shared space brings people together. Poetry that survives from ancient Greece talks about the symposium – a drinking party attended by adult, usually elite, citizen men – where community building took place while sharing food and drink. As we silo ourselves off in our offices to quickly inhale lunch before running off to our next meeting, we might ask how well we could manage the same.

Hoang: In this era of viral videos, rampant consumerism and food trends, I think we’re losing storytelling, education and understanding of the food ecosystem. That’s why the farm-to-table movement has been so important – knowing and appreciating what we’re eating, where our food comes from and how it’s prepared is critical in building a relationship with the things we eat.

Dr. Low: Food can promote mental health - we all need to eat. Simple foods can be a source of comfort.

Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard: Generations of farmers in both Canada and abroad have worked 16-hour days at below minimum wage to feed us. If they continue to get only little support to adapt to our changing physical and geopolitical climate, then we might discover the hard way just how wondrous food really is.

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MacEwan University is a diverse community with 2,528 faculty and staff supporting almost 19,000 students. We are proud of our more than 90,000 alumni in communities across Canada and around the world. We could only fit six voices into this piece, but we invite you to join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.