Canada's National Food. Sort of.

So let’s talk Canadian Cuisine.

When I moved to Canada, one thing I wasn’t looking forward to was the food.  I have a prejudice, born from living in Minnesota for awhile.  I admit there are probably exceptions to this rule, but I generally find the colder the climate, the blander the food. 

I am not fond of bland food.  My favourite food in the world is Thai.  And I’m not talking about Pad Thai, the ubiquitous dish you can find in Asian Fusion restaurants.  My favourite dish is Panang Curry, a spectacular dish of chicken, vegetables, coconut milk, a curry paste of chiles, lemongrass and coriander (among other things), melded with peanuts, fish sauce and makrut lime leaves.  Love it or hate it, it is absolutely bursting with flavours. 

While in college in Minnesota, I was advised that if I found the food lacking in spice, I could “put a little butter on it.”  I generally declined.  But I began to form this theory that has been reinforced by decades of life.  Warmer climates, like Africa and warmer places in Asia, have spicier, more richly flavoured food.  The further from the equator you go, the more likely people are to grab Parkay and Hellman’s for a little variety. 

If I were to name the quintessential Canadian food, I would not immediately turn to the obvious choices.  The most obvious choice is Tim Horton’s, which is by far the most popular franchise restaurant in Canada.  There are three Tim’s I could walk to from my house, if I felt like it, and three more within five minutes’ drive.  For those of you who have never had the pleasure, Tim Horton’s is a breakfast place, not too dissimilar from Dunkin’ Donuts.  They have coffee my wife assures me it’s good; all coffee tastes like dirt to me), donuts, pastries, bagels, and the like.  They also have breakfast sandwiches, similar to what you’d find at McDonald’s or Burger King, and have recently tried to expand to things like pizzas, because they are desperate to prove they aren’t just for breakfast.

The problem with naming Tim Horton’s as the tentpole of Canadian food is that it isn’t particularly Canadian food.  Tim Horton’s started in Canada, but they have been infiltrating the U.S. for awhile now, and our Southern neighbors have barely noticed.  The food isn’t really any different from other franchises.  The thing that makes it truly Canadian is that it is named after a hockey player.  Is Tim Horton’s coffee really better to Canadian palates than Starbucks?  Maybe.  Or maybe it’s just that Canadians will frequent any store that’s connected to hockey.

The other rejected candidate it poutine.  For those who are uninitiated, poutine is a dish involving French fries, cheese curd, and gravy.  Stop judging!  I feel you judging!  Often referred to as the National Dish of Canada, it is most definitely not the National Dish of Canada.  I have been assured that it is ubiquitous in the province of Quebec, but I haven’t made it there yet.  You can occasionally find it on restaurant menus, but the place I most often see it is on the menu of U.S. franchises that are desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with Canadians.  I have seen poutine on the menu of both Burger King and A&W. 

If I were to sum up Canadian food in a single dish, it would be ketchup-flavoured potato chips.  No, I am not joking.  Potato chips flavoured with ketchup are in every snack food aisle.  I have been offered them by well-meaning friends and neighbors.  I have actually eaten them exactly twice.  The first time, I did it tentatively, and then immediately regretted it.  I tried it a second time about a year later, because I convinced myself that I didn’t hate it as much as I remembered.  I did.

Ketchup has a special place in Canada.  Soon after moving to Windsor, I saw a documentary on the CBC called The Ketchup War.  It told the tale of how in 2016, the megacorporation Heinz, which had a factory in Leamington, ON, decided to shut down its operations in Canada.  They figured it would just be cheaper to import ketchup from the United States.  Heinz apparently believed the Canadian people would be fine with imported ketchup. 

It turns out Heinz miscalculated.  Canadians began massing a Heinz boycott, switching to French’s instead.  Then, French’s decided to play the hero, and open a new factory in Leamington, rescuing the local workers, and saving the entire nation from the horror of imported American ketchup. 

Ketchup-flavoured potato chips are exactly what the name implies.  Have you ever had a picnic with burgers and potato chips, and had some of the ketchup drip from the burger onto the chips?  It isn’t like that.  There is too much ketchup flavour on the chips, so imagine instead that your seven-year old got ahold of the ketchup bottle, more or less emptied it onto their plate, and the chips have been floating in a non-Passover-related Red Sea for like an hour, and without thinking, you grab one of those chips and unwittingly stick it in your mouth.  Yeah, that’s what it tastes like. Somehow, the chips are simultaneously too bland and yet overwhelming at the same time.  That, my friends, is the essence of Canadian cuisine. 

OK, it’s possible I’m being too harsh.  After all, I did find a decent Thai restaurant in Windsor.  Also, because of the huge influx of immigrants from the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent, there is an absolute wealth of really good restaurants from those parts of the world.  If you want Shawarma, and you should, there is a good chance you’ll find a joint right next to the Tim Horton’s.  There are two really good Indian restaurants within walking distance of my house.  There is a pizza place called Antonio’s that offers a Hallal pepperoni pizza. 

It is possible, therefore, that ketchup-flavoured potato chips will soon be supplanted as the quintessential Canadian food.  Perhaps it will be kabob.  Maybe butter chicken (it has “butter” in the name after all!). 

Would it be too much to ask for it to become panang curry?  Yeah, probably.