Wild Cuisine: Cookbooks, Culture and Claims of Authenticity
Gary Genosko

North American white hunting culture has produced a remarkable array of cookbooks and related food ideas and items around the butchering, preparation and cooking of wild game. These cookbooks occupy a niche in food culture and are directed at, and often authored by, members of a large population of hunters, fishers, rural and/or northern dwellers. These are defeminized cookbooks (a complex operation) for the masculine, largely white, working class, hunting culture of “outdoorsmen”. Within this range of cookbooks, however, one finds problematic expressions of this subculture’s relationship with First Nations traditions and practices. The study of this relationship is the task of my paper. The trope of wild cuisine, of wild men, often illustrated with simulated Native art and ersatz history is commonplace and constitutes the loss of Native sovereignty over representations of themselves. But within this line of cookbooks, one also finds First Nations authored cookbooks that blend traditions, appealing at once to “country” cooking and specific regional practices and histories; these latter regain and reformulate knowledge of animals and plants that has been displaced even beyond White hunting culture into the natural history-gastronomic botanical tradition of gathering wild plants that has strong roots in North American outdoor cultures (Euell Gibbons, Roger Tory Peterson, etc.). This paper poses the question of what it may mean for First Nations peoples to regain the representation of hunting, fishing and gathering traditions in the context of cookbooks and competitive food culture. Such a regaining must address the symbolic economy of the goodness of wild foods against statements made by First Peoples involved primarily as subjects in northern Canadian health research that connect disease with manufactured, store-bought items.

Gary Genosko