Tourism Toronto's "How to eat..." guides: a global city's map to culinary colonialism

By focusing on Toronto as a “global city” (Sassen, 1991), the main objective of this Major Research Paper is to examine the contradictory relationship between Toronto’s discourse of “food multiculturalism” (Flowers & Swan, 2012) and processes of “culinary colonialism” (Heldke, 2003). This paper will use Tourism Toronto’s “How To Eat...” guides as a case study of Toronto’s discourse of food multiculturalism. Through critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how Toronto’s discourse of food multiculturalism depends on colonial assumptions that commodify its racialized immigrants and diaspora as the Other. Consequently, this paper finds that Toronto’s global city strategy is critically linked to culinary colonialism. Furthermore, this paper conceptually builds on culinary colonialism by emphasizing food adventuring as a performative act of the Other. Within this context, these guides also operate as an intimate map for individual eaters to perform ‘the Other’ through food. Key Words: Global city; Food Multiculturalism; Culinary Colonialism; Performance Theory; Critical Discourse Analysis