The Inuit’s Offer to Canada’s Black Governor General: Food, Power, and the Deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss’ “Culinary Triangle”

Abstract

This article revisits when former Canadian Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, consumed raw seal heart at an Inuit community feast. This event provides important insight about cultural meanings around food and the power relationships imbued in culinary traditions. It also provides an opportunity to investigate how food has been theorized in academic research, and how this scholarship is potentially complicit in the derisive responses directed at Jean, most notably in the structural anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. By deconstructing Lévi-Strauss’ logic of binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture, civilized/uncivilized) in the “Culinary Triangle” model and applying his binary assumptions to Jean’s behaviour and the ensuing media and public responses, it becomes apparent how Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical model reflects dichotomous thinking in contemporary Western societies that engenders marginalization and misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples and their cultural practices. These power structures are produced from a single epistemic centre—the Western centre which undermines the cultural values and social position of those outside of the Western imaginary. The purpose of this article is to revisit how Canadian and European news sources discursively constructed the event and investigate how Lévi-Strauss’ binary food analysis inadvertently contributes to the perpetuation of power imbalances between Indigenous and Western perspectives.