New Book – Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada

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L. Sasha Gora, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025).

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Cover of Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada

Some questions you don’t forget. Or at least not for long.

Years before I knew about fields like food studies or the environmental humanities—the two disciplines that my scholarship now straddles—I had set my sights on becoming an art historian, a dream I chased one internship at a time. My first was at the Berlin dependence of a New Delhi-based contemporary art gallery, and so a couple of years later when my master’s program in museum studies required an internship semester, I used it as an excuse to trade in my black jeans for breezy kurtas, my milky coffee for spicy chai.

Trailing my museum time, I spent a couple of weeks in Delhi staying with family friends. One afternoon, while chatting about my hometown’s food scene, one of them asked me: “Where can I eat Indigenous food in Toronto? And what is Indigenous cuisine?” In between sips of chai, I paused, realizing I had no idea.

I’m a fourth generation settler and although the city raised me to be able to map the world based on dumplings and dough, I knew nothing about the food cultures of the lands and waters that are so much older than the country that is now called Canada.

These questions then followed me on each of my visits back home, and a similar one guides my book Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada. Why has Toronto, as well as other cities across the nation, hosted so few Indigenous eateries? And how do restaurants shape the environments they seek to represent?

Why has Toronto, as well as other cities across the nation, hosted so few Indigenous eateries? And how do restaurants shape the environments they seek to represent?

When I started this research in 2015, Toronto had one Indigenous restaurant. Two years later it had four, and now, the year the book has been published, that number is back down to one.

Reflecting on the relationship between wild plants and introduced animals, between Indigenous foodways and Canadian regulations, Culinary Claims examines how cuisines reflect social and political issues related to cultural representation and food sovereignty. How restaurants taxonomize flora and fauna as edible and the significance of this in light of the relocalization of foodways and what counts as “local” in a settler colonial state.

I chronicle the rise of Indigenous restaurants and their influence on Canadian food culture, engaging with questions about how shifts in appetite reflect broader shifts in imaginations of local environments. Ultimately, my book tells a new story of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, emphasizing the critical role that eateries play in Canada’s cultural landscape.

Culinary Claims hasn’t completely abandoned art history, the discipline that first shaped me as a scholar and how I study the world. In addition to archival images, contemporary artworks by the likes of Sonny Assu and Lisa Myers, Dana Claxton and Kent Monkman dress up the chapters. And it is a great honour that its cover is a detail of Adrian Stimon’s installation for the 2019 Toronto Biennale, Iini Sookumapii: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—a reminder of the types of conversations that tables host and of the questions that might turn into books.

Join the author, Dr. L. Sasha Gora, at the University of Toronto on Monday, October 6, 2025 at 5:00pm, where she will give The Northrop Frye Distinguished Lecture at Victoria College. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Feature Image: Sonny Assu Gwa’gwa’da’ka “Breakfast Series” 2006, installation, Seattle Art Museum. “Sonny Assu Gwa’gwa’da’ka ‘Breakfast Series’ 2006, installation, Seattle Art Museum” by rrevere is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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L. Sasha Gora

L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian with a focus on food studies, the environmental humanities, and contemporary art. In 2023 she joined the University of Augsburg, where she leads the Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment junior research group, funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria.

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