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S L O W F O O D N AT I O N S
Late June North of the border, in Petite Italie, where everyone speaks French, it can be hard to remember where you are exactly. This was Montreal, outermost point on our elliptical vacation. Our Canadian relatives gamely asked what we wanted to see in their city, and we answered: Food! We wondered what was available locally here at the threshold (to our southerly way of thinking) of the frozen tundra. We lit out for Chinatown and Little Italy. Here, as in the United States, the best shot at finding locally based cuisine seems to involve seeking out the people who recently moved here from someplace else. We passed a few restaurants that advertised “Canadian food” along with the principal ethnic fare. Our hosts explained this meant something like “American” food, more an absence than a presence of specific character: not Chinese, not Italian. Is it true that “American food” means “nothing?” I pondered this as we walked down a street of Chinese shops where butchers pinned up limp, plucked ducks like socks on clotheslines (if your mind’s eye can handle socks with feet and bills). It’s easy enough to say what’s not American cuisine: anything with its feet still on, for starters. A sight like this on Main Street USA would send customers running the other way, possibly provoking lawsuits over psychological damage to children. As a concept, our national cuisine seems to be food without obvious biological origins, chosen for the color and shape of the sign out
