{"id":53,"date":"2026-05-15T11:56:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T15:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/foodpolicy\/?post_type=chapter&p=53"},"modified":"2026-09-25T10:06:57","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T14:06:57","slug":"how-can-culture-be-measured-toward-operationalizing-cultural-food-security","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/foodpolicy\/chapter\/how-can-culture-be-measured-toward-operationalizing-cultural-food-security\/","title":{"raw":"3. A Table for All: Reimagining \u201cCulturally Appropriate Food\u201d Through an Interdisciplinary Dialogue","rendered":"3. A Table for All: Reimagining \u201cCulturally Appropriate Food\u201d Through an Interdisciplinary Dialogue"},"content":{"raw":"

Abstract<\/h2>\r\nThe concept of \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d has gained traction in institutional and policy settings as a marker of equitable service delivery. However, it is often narrowly framed around the needs of those whose \u201cculture\u201d is considered too \u201cforeign\u201d to the dominant culture. In this chapter, we interrogate these limitations through an interdisciplinary dialogue between health communication and dietetics. Drawing from our research with diasporic communities in Toronto, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, we trace how culturally appropriate food is often treated as a special need, namely a \"cherry on top\" of presumed neutral, middle-class Anglo-European food norms, rather than as central to food security, identity, and belonging. We argue that prevailing approaches position culture as the property of the Other, rendering dominant foodways normal. Rather than offering a fixed definition of cultural appropriateness, we reframe culture as a dynamic, relational, and political process shaped by and shaping systems of power, including race, class, gender, ability, and migration. While it remains uncertain whether \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d can be a truly transformative concept, we contend that meaningful work in food security, food education, and health professional practice must begin by acknowledging the cultural values embedded within dominant frameworks, and by challenging the notion that cultural foodways are additional rather than foundational.\r\n

I - Introduction<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nIn recent years, the concept of \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d has gained traction across institutional and policy settings as an important consideration in delivering equitable services. However, the concept has become almost synonymous with the needs of those whose \u201cculture\u201d is considered too \u201cforeign\u201d from dominant, mainstream culture. Within this framework, sensitivity to cultural appropriateness is expected to help service providers (from dominant cultural backgrounds) serve clients (from non-dominant cultural backgrounds) more effectively. Despite its well-intentioned gesture, this framing narrows both the scope and the potential of the concept. It assumes that culture is static, that only certain populations have culture and attendant concerns regarding food, and that culturally appropriate food is a temporary bridge to assimilation rather than a fundamental aspect of food security and identity for all.\r\n\r\nThis chapter calls into question such limited interpretations. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue, we, two scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds \u2014 health communication and dietetics \u2014 explore how \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d has been defined, deployed, and constrained. Drawing from our research with diasporic communities in Toronto, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia, we trace how culturally appropriate food is often treated as a \"special need\" rather than a structural issue with broad social and political implications.\r\n\r\nWe position this work as both a critique and an invitation. Rather than offering a unified definition of cultural appropriateness, we seek to unpack the term, stretching and reworking it to explore what it might mean when cultural foodways are viewed as a dynamic, relational practice that touches all eaters, not just those categorized as immigrants, refugees, or newcomers.\r\n\r\nWe suggest that cultural appropriateness should be understood not as an afterthought, but as a central dimension of food security, professional practice, and individuals\u2019 sense of belonging to the community. It is not simply about adding \u201ccultural foods\u201d to institutional menus, but about questioning the normative standards that define what counts as appropriate, and for whom,<\/em>\u00a0in the first place. We assert that cultural appropriateness is not a hurdle to overcome on the path to assimilation, but a lens through which to understand the politics of taste, identity, and inclusion.\r\n

II - Disciplinary Palates and Positionalities<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nOur disciplinary and socio-cultural locations deeply shape how we understand the term \u201ccultural appropriateness.\u201d While we both engage with food, health, and equity as researchers and practitioners, we do so from distinct academic traditions, disciplinary perspectives, and lived experiences that colour our approaches.\r\n\r\nYukari Seko <\/strong>approaches food through the lens of critical health communication, drawing on research situated in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that explores the intersections of migration, food, and family practices. As a first-generation immigrant to Canada from Japan and a parent raising a child in Toronto, Yukari's personal lived experiences are intricately tied to her academic inquiry. From a disciplinary perspective, mainstream health communication has historically leaned toward behavioural intervention, for example, designing campaigns to improve health literacy and shape individual choices related to public health. This framing often overlooks how systemic power structures shape whose choices are rendered possible. Inspired by a culture-centred approach in critical health communication (e.g., Dutta, 2018; Dutta et al., 2013), Yukari\u2019s work resists this reductionist impulse, instead foregrounding how discourses construct and perpetuate health disparities, including through ideas of culturally appropriate food.\r\n\r\nJennifer Brady<\/strong> is a Registered Dietitian and an Associate Professor in Women\u2019s and Gender Studies and the School of Nutrition and Dietetics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. With academic roots in nutrition science, biology, communication, cultural studies, and feminist theory, her work is interdisciplinary and critical. As a White, disabled, settler woman born to parents of British heritage and raised in suburban Toronto, she brings a learned rather than lived experience of racialized and colonial inequities to her work. Her professional background in dietetics has provided firsthand experience with how institutional food systems and health professional practice often sidestep issues of race and racism while deploying culture and cultural foodways as variables to manage.\r\n\r\nOur dialogue grows both from convergence and friction. While we share a deep passion for food justice and food security, our respective disciplines often talk past each other when it comes to culture. In dietetics, culture is frequently framed as a barrier to proper nutrition or as an add-on to enhance \u201ccompliance\u201d with nutrition care recommendations (Thornton et al., 2022). It is treated as supplementary, rather than a fundamental element of food security. In health communication, culture is sometimes treated as noise or as a barrier to effective health messaging (Harrington & Record, 2024). In both disciplines, culture is often reduced to a static object rather than approached as a living, shifting terrain shaped by power. Rarely is culture recognized as something that continuously evolves through the daily doings of all people, not just the racialized or Othered (therefore \u201cvulnerable\u201d) subjects of intervention. Instead, we argue that culture is a dynamic space we all co-habit and co-produce, rather than something one either possesses or must navigate.\r\n\r\nIn the sections that follow, we weave together critical reflection, disciplinary analysis, and sustained interdisciplinary dialogue. This reflective, collaborative method drew inspiration from Fink & Miller\u2019s (2014) dialogical inquiry into their lived experiences as scholars and active users of a digital media platform. Following their approach, we met three times via video conferencing and recorded the conversations to support iterative listening and reflection. In these exchanges, we first traced how the concept of culture operates across our disciplinary and professional practices related to food security, attending to both points of overlap and tension. Returning to the recordings, we collectively interrogated whether \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d functions as a meaningful construct. We explored how culture might be reimagined in research and practice to advance not only the needs of those labelled \u201cdiverse\u201d but the broader project of equitable food systems. Our goal in this chapter is to emancipate the concept of cultural appropriateness from its current confines and reposition it as a vital, evolving element of food security for all.\r\n

Cultural food security<\/h3>\r\nYukari<\/strong>: To start, I think it is worth reviewing the existing discussions over cultural food security and how it relates to our discussion on cultural appropriateness. Since the late 1960s, food security approaches have shifted their focus from nation-states to households and individuals, and from addressing large-scale hunger crises (i.e., regional famines) to chronic household- and individual-level hunger and its links to poverty and social disparities. In the early 1980s, Amartya Sen (1981) argued that food insecurity is caused not by shortages in food supply but by inequalities built into food distribution mechanisms.\r\n\r\nThis reframing gradually moved the focus from food supply to access and equity, paving the way for rights-based frameworks. This approach emphasizes that access to food is not a matter of charity but of justice, grounded in basic human rights. Although the United Nations declared the human right to adequate food as early as 1966 in its International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966), the policy framework did not clearly establish cultural rights to food or the importance of culturally appropriate food. The early right-to-food approach focused primarily on access to food and the means of its procurement (Courtis, 2007), thereby rendering cultural adequacy an optional choice.\r\n\r\nIn 2008, Elaine Power wrote a seminal paper introducing the concept of cultural food security in the context of Indigenous foodways. She highlighted that understanding Indigenous food (in)security required attention not only to income or market access, but also to traditional food harvesting, intergenerational knowledge, and community sharing practices. Power argued that \u201ctraditional\/country food\u201d is integral to cultural health because it has \u201csymbolic and spiritual value, and is central to personal identity and the maintenance of culture\u201d (p. 96). She coined the term \"cultural food security\" as an essential layer of food security, shifting the conversation beyond nutritional intake and affordability to encompass food\u2019s social and cultural meanings. This resonates with the fourth pillar of CSFS\u2019s 5As framework, Acceptability<\/em>, which refers to access to culturally acceptable food obtained in ways that uphold dignity and human rights (CSFS, 2025).\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>I want to note that Power\u2019s (2008) original concept focused exclusively on Indigenous people\u2019s food security, emphasizing the importance of ensuring access to food that aligns with Indigenous identity, values, traditional knowledge, and connection to land and water. Intriguingly, the concept of cultural food security was quickly adopted in research on immigrants and refugees. For example, Moffat et al. (2017) draw on Power\u2019s framework to explore how food insecurity is shaped by limited access to \u201cfamiliar, fresh-tasting, less processed, and safe\u201d cultural foods (p. 24). They highlight how high prices and lack of variety in cultural food options contribute to what they call food nostalgia<\/em>\u2014a longing for foods that remind people of home.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>These studies matter because they emphasize the cultural dimensions of food security, especially the emotional and symbolic aspects shaped by people\u2019s cultural milieu. However, what stands out to me is how quickly cultural food security came to be positioned as a unique need for immigrants and refugees. I am often puzzled by the literature on food security, which claims that \u201cAccess to cultural foods has a positive effect on the physical health and emotional well-being of immigrants and refugees\u201d (Stansbury, 2025, p. 98). I have no doubt that migrant populations may experience unique challenges in accessing culturally appropriate food due to, for example, limited availability of key ingredients, financial constraints, or a lack of ethno-cultural supply chains. I do remember my early days in Canada, when I had to take a 50-minute bus ride to an Asian supermarket to buy a bottle of Japanese Worcestershire sauce. Further, for refugees and migrants forcibly displaced from their homelands, cultural food could be particularly important in preserving emotional, social, and intergenerational ties to their homes.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, I cannot help wondering: Why is this logic of cultural food security applied only to immigrants and refugees? Why is there an assumption that the cultural needs of all Canadian-born people are always-already met, just because they were born and raised in Canada? Why don\u2019t we talk about how cultural food access supports everyone\u2019s<\/em> well-being?\r\n\r\nAlso, here is where things get messy. In both academic literature and policy documents, terms such as \u201cculturally appropriate,\u201d \u201cculturally acceptable,\u201d and \u201cculturally preferred\u201d are used interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. But they do not. Stansbury (2025) argues that \u201cculturally acceptable\u201d food often refers to what is tolerated or passable. \u201cCulturally appropriate\u201d food, on the other hand, implies alignment with people\u2019s deeper food values, practices, and identities. It is not just about what is eaten, but about what should be eaten, what feels right and nourishing.\r\n\r\nThis distinction matters because the current framing often treats culture as a matter of taste rather than a necessity. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024) defines \u201cculturally preferred foods\u201d as \u201csafe and nutritious foods that meet the diverse tastes and needs of customers based on their cultural identity. For example, people who identify with Muslim or Jewish religious traditions may want foods that are Halal or Kosher, respectively.\u201d Putting religion and culture aside, reducing these deeply meaningful practices to preference, I think, erases the power they hold in people\u2019s lives. In my ongoing research on Meals on Wheels food delivery programs across Ontario, one volunteer who delivers Kosher meals to Jewish seniors told me, \u201cKosher is not a choice or preference. It is the only food they can eat. It is the food they grew up with, the food they trust.\u201d That statement struck me hard. Cultural appropriateness is not about accommodating people\u2019s tastes or preferences. It is about honouring tradition, identity, and dignity; as the United Nations General Assembly (2020) states, everyone has the right to eat every meal with dignity.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Exactly. And what often gets lost in the literature is the fundamental difference between Power\u2019s (2008) original framing of cultural food security in the context of Indigenous foodways and its application to immigrants and refugees. For many Indigenous peoples, traditional foods are inseparable from their land, language, and community. In contrast, immigrant communities most often access cultural foods through commercial channels in the land of settlement, such as Canada. These are often imported market foods, rather than country foods, in Power\u2019s terminology. This distinction matters. It complicates simplistic calls for self-sufficiency, such as encouraging immigrants to grow their own food, which may not be feasible or even desirable for many people navigating complex post-migration lives in Canada with limited access to land or precarious housing. Obviously, not all cultural ingredients can be grown in Canada, even if seeds, land, and financial resources are available.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, I think these nuances often get lost in public health frameworks, where cultural considerations are folded into checklists rather than deeply embedded into systemic design.\r\n\r\nYukari:<\/strong> Right. The concept of food sovereignty further complicates our discussion. In 1996, La Via Campesina defined food sovereignty at the World Food Summit as the \u201cright of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food<\/em> produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems\u201d (La Via Campesina, n.d., our emphasis). From this perspective, culturally appropriate food is not just a component of food security, but a right to define and control one\u2019s food systems. This includes the ability to choose, grow, and prepare food in ways that are meaningful to one\u2019s community, resisting the homogenization of diets under industrial and institutional systems. However, I do not think it would directly apply to diasporic communities in Canada with limited agency over land and agricultural systems.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Relatedly, we have to be cautious about equating \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d food with notions of \u201cauthentic\u201d or \u201ctraditional\u201d diets. For political reasons, the food sovereignty movement defines culturally appropriate foodways as synonymous with traditional foodways, which cultural imperialism and colonialism have marginalized. But people\u2019s foodways evolve as they move, adapt, and raise families in new places. What is \u201cappropriate\u201d is often hybrid, flexible, and deeply personal. When we insist on fixed definitions of cultural food as traditional food, we risk reifying tradition in ways that can be exclusionary or impractical.\r\n\r\nYukari:<\/strong> Regarding what you just said, we should pay attention to how foods have been culturally appropriated and repurposed, and how they will be in the future. You introduced me to Lenore Newman\u2019s (2017) book, Speaking in the Cod Tongues,<\/em> which beautifully captures the wide regional diversity of so-called Canadian cuisine.\r\n\r\nNewman (2017) shows how local chefs across Canada have integrated fresh, local ingredients into their cultural recipes, giving rise to several \u201cCanadian\u201d dishes, such as the BC roll, poutine, Nanaimo bars, pea soup, and tourti\u00e8re<\/em>. One important point Newman makes is that \u201ccuisines collide and hybridize\u201d (p. 88). I love the example of Canadian Chinese dishes, which often adapt traditional recipes to local ingredients, blending cooking techniques and flavour profiles from multiple cultures. Think about ginger beef or chop suey; these are not artifacts of an \u201cauthentic\u201d Chinese cuisine, but new creations born out of strategic culinary adaptation tailored to the Canadian palate.\r\n

Culturally Appropriate Food<\/h3>\r\nJennifer:<\/strong> Building on what we have discussed so far, let me reflect on how I have learned about the term \u201cculturally appropriate food.\u201d I first encountered the term through dietetics training, usually in the context of working with immigrants or newcomers (i.e., immigrants who have been in Canada for less than 5 years). It was framed as a professional skill set, part of the broader \u201ccultural competence\u201d model that has become foundational across health professions, and defined as \u201ca set of consistent attitudes, knowledge, skills, behaviours and policies required to effectively meet the needs of all the people we serve\u201d (Nova Scotia Health Library, 2024). Sounds inclusive, right?\r\n\r\nHowever, in practice, this framework is rooted in deficit thinking. Cultural appropriateness is treated as something \u201cwe\u201d (the professionals whose culture is seemingly presumed to be the norm) provide to \u201cthem\u201d (the newcomers whose culture is different from the norm), a gesture of support that assumes cultural needs belong exclusively to non-Western others.\r\n\r\nAnd honestly, the implication was clear: cultural needs are something those not from here (i.e., newcomers) have<\/em>, something we might accommodate if we have the time or resources. It was not framed as essential, more like a nice \u201ccherry on top\u201d of the more essential need for calories and nutrients.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>That phrase, \u201ccherry on top,\u201d really sticks with me. It captures how culture is treated as optional rather than foundational. From a critical health communication lens, culture can never be a cherry on top. We understand culture not as something some people \u201chave,\u201d and others do not, but as something all humans are immersed in, as the water fish swim in. We move through powerful cultural currents without always recognizing them. It is the very structure that shapes what we eat, how we eat, and how we value food.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Absolutely. If culture is like the water that we swim in, then the dominant understanding of food security is part of that same water, steeped in Western values and assumptions that feel natural and even neutral.\r\n\r\nWhen I teach dietetics students, I strive to guide them through unpacking these assumptions. The idea that Canadian-born people are culturally \u201csettled,\u201d that their food preferences are met because of a perceived sameness, is incredibly simplistic. It ignores the cultural diversity of settler Canada and pretends that food norms are neutral or universal. They are not.\r\n\r\nCultural diversity comprises national, regional, linguistic, and religious\/spiritual heritage and identity, as well as across socio-economic classes, generations, and moral or ethical affiliations. This array of differences is overlooked in current thinking about what is \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d at an individual level, as is what we might think of as representational forms of cultural food security, such as those that could be included in public health messaging.\r\n\r\nAn illustrative example of these limitations, which I have explored elsewhere, involves two comic illustrations: Atlantic Canada\u2019s Food Guide<\/em> and Eating Well with Cape Breton\u2019s Food Guide<\/em>, both of which satirize Canada\u2019s Food Guide<\/em> (Brady, 2022). These satirical responses highlight the cultural divide between what Canada\u2019s Food Guide<\/em> depicts as healthy eating and the foods that are socially, economically, historically, and culturally meaningful to Eastern Canadians. These cultural divides are particularly relevant in dietetics, a field primarily concerned with advising others on what to eat. In this piece (Brady, 2022), I draw on the well-worn idiom \u201cyou are what you eat\u201d to challenge readers: if we agree with it, what does it mean to tell people what to eat? Are we not, then, telling them who we think they should be when we tell them what they should and should not eat?\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>\u201cYou are what you eat\u201d is such an intricate idiom! Related to this, I also feel there is often a lack of recognition of diasporic foodways, especially among second- and third-generation immigrants or people of mixed heritage. In my research on lunchbox shaming<\/em> faced by children of Asian immigrant backgrounds in Toronto schools (Seko et al., 2025; Seko et al., 2023; Seko et al., 2021), I learned that children\u2019s school lunchboxes reflect ongoing negotiations among household members. While wishing to preserve traditional foodways, many parents adopted their lunch-making practices to accommodate children\u2019s evolving preferences. They incorporate new food items or add a \u201cWestern spin\u201d to their traditional recipes. Rather than rigidly preserving traditions, these families approached lunch-making as a flexible, habitual practice responsive to the family\u2019s evolving tastes. Both heritage and habitual eating shape their food practices.\r\n\r\nVallianatos and Raine (2008) describe this beautifully, noting that \u201cimmigrant women value their habitual cuisines, and through continuation of their culinary practices, evoke and connect with \u2018home\u2019 and all the sensory and emotional experience that this conjures\u201d (p. 317).\u00a0 And yet, they observed that non-recent immigrants more often speak of their foodways with nostalgia than recent arrivals do. There is a complexity there; cultural appropriateness is not just about maintenance but also about reinvention.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Echoing what you just said, I have supervised an international student from China as she completed her Master\u2019s thesis (Chen, 2024). For her Master\u2019s research, she used photovoice to explore the experiences of international Chinese students studying in Nova Scotia in accessing culturally familiar foods. What her work highlights is the effort, thoughtfulness, intention, and agency her participants exercised to intentionally expand what is culturally appropriate for them as young international students, most living on their own for the first time, in a food culture that differs in many ways. Contrary to much of the literature on dietary acculturation, which often positions newcomers as passive objects who lament the loss of \u201ctraditional diets\u201d (e.g., the Healthy Immigrant Effect), her participants actively sought out new food experiences in crafting a sense of what is culturally meaningful food as individuals, as well as a community of international students whose Chinese identity and foodways varied with their home provinces and regions.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>My former master\u2019s student has also done an amazing project by cooking her Chinese-Jamaican grandmother\u2019s recipe (Chong, 2022). She drew inspiration from your article Cooking as Inquiry<\/em> (Brady, 2011) and recreated her grandmother\u2019s cassava pudding using ingredients available in Toronto. Because it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, she delivered the pudding to her grandmother at a seniors\u2019 residence. Cassava pudding may not be the first dish that comes to mind when thinking about her grandmother\u2019s Chinese heritage, but it is an important, symbolic dish for her family. Cultural appropriateness is often complicated and deeply nuanced.\r\n\r\nLooping back to our previous conversation on \u201ctraditional\u201d and \u201cauthentic\u201d dishes, so much of what is missing in the dominant framework is the notion that cultural appropriateness is not static. Although there is no doubt that food traditions play a key role in maintaining cultural identity in many diasporic groups, \u201cculturally appropriate foods\u201d are not a fixed set of dishes from \u201cback home.\u201d They are shaped by migration, adaptation, intergenerational memory, and ongoing changes in everyday life. Reducing it to a \u201ccultural foods\u201d checkbox on menus flattens the deep emotional, relational, and political work that food does. Moreover, limiting it to immigrants and refugees overlooks the fact that cultural food security is not a special need but applies to all Canadians.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Agreed 100%. Although the meanings and experiences of culturally appropriate food and food security among immigrants and refugees are unique, I think the emphasis on these populations belies two important concerns that, in my view, require greater consideration in the literature on cultural food security. First is the conflation of culture, race, and the impacts of racism on how we understand \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d and what we consider to be culturally meaningful historically and contemporarily. A second concern is that cultural foodways, and thus what is culturally appropriate, are diverse across socio-economic classes, regions within Canada, religions and spiritualities, and generations.\r\n\r\nYukari:<\/strong> Interesting! Let us unpack the first one. What comes to my mind is Psyche Williams-Forson\u2019s (2022) book, Eating while Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,<\/em> which delineates a long and twisted history of food shaming against Black foodways.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Yes, Williams-Forson\u2019s work is notable for many reasons, one being that it elaborates the multiplicity and nuances of Black food cultures in the United States and, contrary to popular narratives that focus on food scarcity and deprivation, shows them to be sites of resistance, ingenuity, belonging, and joy historically and contemporarily. Throughout her work, Williams-Forson approaches food as an inherent site and means of communicating power. In Eating While Black<\/em>, she specifically addresses food shaming, which emerges from assumptions that conflate all Black people in the U.S. with a singular cultural food heritage and an unchanging set of dishes, such as fried chicken and collard greens cooked with pork, often collectively identified as soul food. Dominant food culture widely derides these foods as scraps\u2014bits no one else wanted to eat\u2014and, today especially, as unhealthy. These assumptions about the singularity of Black identity and food culture sustain systemic anti-Black racism, white supremacy, sexism, and classism expressed through the surveillance and shaming of Black people\u2019s food and bodies.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>What struck me most in Eating While Black <\/em>is when Williams-Forson (2022) recounts a conversation with her family friend who said, \"You're forgettin' something\u2014all Black people ate scraps\u201d (p. 23). It is a poignant reminder that gastro-surveillance does not just come from outside; it is often internalized. She traces how the long history of food shaming has led some African Americans to view traditional soul foods as unhealthy, unclean, or even embarrassing. She shows how class-based messages about \"proper\" eating told Black people they needed to correct their foodways to fit white norms, even though they were never fully accepted.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Williams-Forson\u2019s (2022) work also reminds us that when we essentialize food culture in pursuit of what is \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d or \u201ctraditional,\u201d we err in historicizing people and food cultures, freezing them in the past and rendering them irrelevant in today\u2019s globalized foodscape. Moreover, the emphasis on what is \u201cappropriate\u201d or \u201ctraditional,\u201d particularly when discussing racialized and immigrant populations, reifies an enduring Otherness and vulnerability. Essentialist ideas about what, for example, is \u201cappropriate\u201d for Black people to eat imagine Black people and Black food cultures as quaint relics, out of step with modern food cultures, and even uneducated about prevailing health and nutrition concerns. Luppens and Power\u2019s (2018) work similarly highlights this by exploring the disconnect between health promotion recommendations for Indigenous people in Canada to eat \u201ctraditional\u201d foods and how Indigenous people themselves define that. Using photo-elicitation and interviews, the researchers found that what Indigenous people considered traditional foods included many items not featured in official health promotion materials, such as bologna!\r\n\r\nYukari:<\/strong> How about your second point about socio-economic, regional, spiritual, and generational diversity within the concept of cultural appropriateness?\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>To talk about this, I can share my personal experience. Food in Eastern Canada largely reflects its coastal geography and deep intergenerational poverty. Nova Scotia has been among the most food-insecure provinces for decades. I learned this when I moved from Toronto to Halifax, from a big multicultural city to a small city with relatively less racial and cultural diversity, and that is relatively distant from any other urban centres. This move highlighted for me the significant geographical differences among urban, semi-urban, and rural regions that necessarily shape the meaning of cultural appropriateness and the practicalities of accessing culturally diverse foods.\r\n\r\nAt the same time, relocating from Ontario to Nova Scotia taught me about the unique cultural and contextual diversity of foodways across Canada, even though I was already a dietitian schooled in \u201ccultural competence.\u201d I was amazed by the rich food culture, deeply rooted in Eastern Canada's socio-economic, historical, geographic, and political context (Brady, 2022). My lack of appreciation for the diversity and situatedness of food and foodways across Canada underscores my point about the limitations of \u201ccultural competence\u201d and \u201cculturally appropriate food,\u201d which, to me, obscures the need to talk about racism, colonialism, classism, and poverty.\r\n\r\nReflecting on Chen\u2019s (2024) work, my experience highlights the complexities of defining and applying cultural appropriateness in scholarly work and professional practice to advance food security and food justice. I think we need to grapple with what cultural appropriateness means for those who, like me, \u201ccome from away\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> rural populations with rich cultural food traditions rooted in deep connections to the land and socio-economic oppression.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>I see your point. Culturally appropriate food certainly fosters a sense of belonging not just to cultural or ethnic identity but also to class, community, and history. We can recall Bourdieu\u2019s (1984) theory of taste here; taste is not just about personal preference; it is a form of social distinction. What we grow up eating, and how we learn to value certain foods over others, shapes how we see ourselves in relation to other people. As you said before, \u201chealthy eating\u201d in dietetics often reflects middle-class, Eurocentric ideas of how to eat right. However, for many, cultural foodways do not fit neatly into that frame, creating a tension between nutritional ideals focused on the nutrient content of foods and cultural identity, which may also prioritize nostalgia, joy, love, comfort, heritage, and belonging.\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Indeed! And picking up on Luppens and Power\u2019s (2018) curious finding about bologna, there is an interesting cookbook created by a woman in Cape Breton titled Full of Bologna: A Collection of Cape Breton Classics<\/em> that illustrates the importance of thinking about cultural appropriateness and cultural food security for all people (Goodyear, 2024). Photographer Meagan McLeod compiled the cookbook with contributions from local residents, and it is sold at local pharmacies, with proceeds, ironically, going to food banks in the area. Cape Breton is a historically poor, working-class region of Nova Scotia. Bologna is a culturally meaningful food staple in Cape Breton, reflecting intergenerational poverty in that part of the province. Full of Bologna<\/em> is a really good example of how social and economic class shape food cultures. While nutrition recommendations may describe bologna as nothing more than a sodium-laden, carcinogenic, processed meat product, for some, it connects them to who they are.\r\n\r\nYukari:<\/strong> Super interesting! I would add that culturally appropriate food also plays a role in nation-building. I have argued elsewhere (Seko et al., 2023; Seko et al., 2025) that we should not forget that national school food programs serve as an ideological state apparatus through which nation-states teach what national cuisine should look like, taste like, and how it should be eaten. As Moffat and Gendron (2019) argue, state-sponsored food projects, such as national school meal programs, can foster gastro-nationalism.\r\n\r\nWhile the exclusion of cultural and religious minorities should never be accepted, I personally do not think it is a bad thing that school food serves as a vehicle for teaching and developing national, regional, or local food identities if done collaboratively. Schools always teach students a selective body of knowledge based on what the national or provincial governments consider important for their future citizens to learn. Why not teach them national, regional, or local foodways?\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>Yes, as your work on lunchbox shaming<\/em> has shown, public school curricula, school food programs, and even individual teachers play complex roles in shaping school food cultures. I am thinking about the story shared by one of your participants, who attributed her short stature to the many lunches she skipped due to lunchbox shaming. Your work illustrates the vital connection between what has been the predominant concern of food security research, biological and nutritional inadequacy, and how this is shaped by racism and cultural bias. It is also an example of what some call the biochemistry of discrimination (Dong, Gee, & Beltram-Sanchez et al., 2023), which refers to how the social experience of discrimination literally gets under the skin and can have lifelong emotional and biophysiological impacts.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>Adding to considerations of race and class that we have already spoken about is gender, and even more broadly, intersectionality. Voluminous literature shows that foodwork is highly gendered, and that women tend to experience higher rates and severity of food insecurity in unique ways (Bellows et al., 2016; McIntyre et al., 2007). In the literature on cultural food security, gender is rarely considered, and when it is, the focus tends to be on gender-based divisions of foodwork and cultural labour. For example, although all foodwork is culturally rooted, research shows that among newcomer, immigrant, and refugee families, women tend to assume particularly important roles as guardians of cultural foodways within families and communities (Moffat et al., 2017).\r\n\r\nJennifer:<\/strong> True. In the work I have been involved in, women\u2019s roles in newcomer families pose particular challenges and require support. The women my colleagues and I interviewed said they may not drive or have access to a vehicle and had to spend a great deal of time navigating the city by bus, often with children in tow, to visit ethnic grocers scattered throughout the city.\r\n\r\nYukari:<\/strong> This kind of work on the gender-based division of labour is important, but what has yet to be explored in the cultural food security literature is how gender is \u201cperformed\u201d or constructed through the doing of cultural food work both within immigrant and non-immigrant families, as well as intercultural and intergenerational families. Likewise, intersectional analyses that consider gender, race, class, migration, disability, and other aspects of identity and power are absent in this body of work.\r\n

Reimagining Culturally Appropriate Food<\/h3>\r\nYukari: <\/strong>Now we are arriving at a critical question: What could it mean to emancipate \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d from the current \u201ccherry on top\u201d frameworks?\r\n\r\nJennifer: <\/strong>This question returns to my concern about \u201ccultural competence\u201d as the dominant framework in health professional practice. As I said before, cultural competence typically means knowing about Others (Stubbe, 2020) and, specifically in dietetics, knowing what foods Others traditionally eat (Thornton et al., 2022). Throughout our conversation, we were concerned about culture being treated as a \u201ccherry on top\u201d of biomedically defined dietary and health interventions.\r\n\r\nThus, emancipating \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d from dominant frameworks means, through our knowledge and practice, embracing a dynamic understanding of culture as intimately intertwined with power. In other words, and as I have written about throughout my work, socially just dietetic practice requires structural competence (Metzl & Hansen, 2014). That is, the knowledge, skill, and confidence to redress the systemic, upstream inequities that engender health disparities while inequitably distributing the means, including nutritious, identity-affirming food, to manage or recover from disease. Other dietitian-scholars, many associated with Critical Dietetics, have drawn on work by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and public health scholars who have elaborated critical and feminist perspectives on food security and health equity, including those at the CSFS.\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>I would add that the idea that only \u201cimmigrants, refugees and newcomers\u201d need culturally appropriate food, thus requiring special treatments, is a deeply colonial construct. Emancipating cultural appropriateness means recognizing that food choices of white, middle-class Canadians are also cultural, not neutral, not the default. Imagine if we asked, \u201cWhat is culturally appropriate food for Anglo-Canadian seniors in long-term care homes?\u201d instead of treating their meals as universal and everyone else\u2019s as \u201ccultural.\u201d And what about people of mixed heritage?\r\n\r\nJennifer:<\/strong> Great questions! Drawing on another piece of work by Williams-Forson (2014), we might also ask how our approaches and actions to advance food security foster \u201ccultural sustainability.\u201d Williams-Forson defines culture as an \u201cactive process\u201d carried out through food and includes finding familiar foods, innovating new foods and food combinations, establishing food systems built on different cultural values and priorities, exercising culturally rooted understandings of health and well-being, all while \u201cproduc[ing] and reproduc[ing]\u201d diverse cultural identities. To me, cultural sustainability offers greater conceptual flexibility than \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d and prompts consideration of what cultural well-being means in (re)thinking food security at the individual, household, and systems levels.\r\n\r\nDietitians working in long-term care homes and other institutional settings often design menus that meet nutrition guidelines for resident populations. Although I do not practice in food service, as a dietitian, I am concerned with our professional responsibilities to consider the meaning of food in people\u2019s lives beyond its nutritional value. Work by scholars in feminist food studies (Brady et al., 2025), including Williams-Forson, as we mentioned, urges us to explore this topic further. For example, in light of Williams-Forson\u2019s ideas, I would add to your questions by asking: how can \u201cculturally sustainable\u201d institutional food service reflect nutrition and health as dynamic, evolving cultural practices? I think potential answers to these questions must go beyond simply adding culturally diverse dishes to institutional menu offerings, which is how cultural differences are addressed today. Looking forward, this might mean treating all menu options as cultural artifacts rather than those perceived as not fitting traditional Canadian cuisine. What may aid this shift is a paradigm called \"cultural humility,\u201d proposed in response to the limitations of cultural competence I mentioned earlier, though it has not yet been widely adopted across health professions education and practice. One important facet of cultural humility is its emphasis on reflexivity and ongoing learning rather than on knowing the other, as in the cultural competence approach. Cultural humility invites us to consider our own worldview as culturally rooted, which may de-centre \u201cCanadian food\u201d in institutional food settings (Lekas et al., 2020).\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>Although I am not 100% sure about whether cultural sustainability can be an optimal framework for policy, I see your point and potential implications for practice. If we take culture seriously, it would transform what we expect from public institutions. Institutional food settings, like schools, hospitals, long-term care homes and prisons, must confront their colonial underpinnings. Rather than designing one-size-fits-all menus, these institutions can integrate a co-design approach with communities from the get-go. Imagine school lunch programs that not only meet basic nutritional standards but also actively reflect the foodways of the local community, whether that is South Asian dishes in Brampton or Acadian cuisine in Nova Scotia. It would mean asking who decides what is on the menu<\/em>, and who gets a say in defining the \u201cappropriate\u201d repertoire of dishes for school lunches<\/em>.\r\n\r\nJennifer:<\/strong> In this process, we must be careful about tokenism - it means we cannot just invite communities to \"consult\" after the menu has already been decided. True community-based co-design would require sharing decision-making power from the very beginning by asking communities what foods matter to them, how they want them prepared, and whom they trust to prepare them. It also demands that institutions not only listen to but also be willing to relinquish control over what constitutes \u201chealthy\u201d or \u201cappropriate\u201d food. As Canada prepares to launch its national school food program, it can benefit from learning from collaborative food governance models in other countries, such as Brazil\u2019s School Meal Council, which ensures participatory decision-making at the local level (Silva et al., 2023).\r\n\r\nYukari: <\/strong>Yes, and in a related vein, we should reimagine food procurement and preparation systems. Institutions may claim it is too costly to diversify menus or to source specific ingredients, but those claims often reflect whose needs are treated as standard and whose are considered extra. Beyond that, we need to rethink how we approach food education. Too often, nutrition education frames white, middle-class food practices as the default and everyone else\u2019s as needing to adapt or improve. What if we flipped that?\r\n

III - Conclusion<\/h2>\r\nOur interdisciplinary dialogue has drawn on academic literature, lived experiences, and our respective disciplinary backgrounds to trouble and invite further reflection on the meaning and potential of \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d as a concept. Such interdisciplinary dialogue is crucial for sharing insights and highlighting gaps created by cross-purposes among disciplines, particularly those arising from different epistemological standpoints, such as those between the health and social sciences and the humanities. Our purpose has been to fundamentally rethink cultural appropriateness vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> prevailing discourse, which often essentializes, historicizes, and Others culture as a static feature of identity to be treated as a \u201ccherry on top\u201d of the presumed normalcy, singularity, and neutrality of middle-class, Anglo-European diets in applied contexts, such as health professional practice, institutional food services, and school food programs. More specifically, we reframe culture as a dynamic, relational, and fundamentally political process in which we all<\/em> participate, shaped by and shaping intersecting systems of power, including race, class, gender, ability, and migration. Whether \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d proves transformative or ultimately limiting remains to be seen. Nevertheless, we argue that any meaningful pursuit of food security, food education, or health professional practice must begin with a commitment to understanding that our frameworks are themselves deeply infused with cultural values and priorities.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n

References<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nBellows, A. C., Valente, F. S. L., Lemke, S., & N\u00fa\u00f1ez Burbano de Lara, M. D. (Eds.). (2016). Gender, nutrition, and the human right to adequate food: Toward an inclusive framework<\/em>.<\/a> Routledge.\r\n\r\nBourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste<\/em>. Harvard University Press.\r\n\r\nBrady, J. (2022). The contested terrain of what it means to eat healthy<\/a>. In D. Szanto, A. Di Battista, & I. Knezevic (Eds.), Food studies: Matter, meaning & movement<\/em>. Food Studies Press.\r\n\r\nBrady, J. (2011). Cooking as inquiry: A method to stir up prevailing ways of knowing food, body, and identity<\/a>. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 10<\/em>(4), 321\u2013334.\r\n\r\nBrady, J., Parker, B., & Power, E. (2025). Feminist food studies<\/a>. Oxford Bibliographies in Food Studies<\/em>.\r\n\r\nCenters for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Consider Community and Regional Food Preferences<\/em><\/a>. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\r\n\r\nCentre for Studies in Food Security. (2025). The 5As of food security<\/em><\/a>. Toronto Metropolitan University.\r\n\r\nChen, X. (2024). The experiences of accessing a sufficient quantity and quality of culturally appropriate foods among international Chinese university students in Nova Scotia<\/em><\/a> [Master\u2019s thesis, Mount Saint Vincent University]. MSVU Institutional Repository.\r\n\r\nChong, C. (2022). You are what you eat: Exploring a Chinese-Jamaican foodway<\/em><\/a> [Master\u2019s thesis, Toronto Metropolitan University].\r\n\r\nCourtis, C. (2007). The right to food as a justiciable right: Challenges and strategies [PDF]<\/a>. Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, 11<\/em>, 317\u2013337.\r\n\r\nDong, T. S., Gee, G. C., Beltran-Sanchez, H., Wang, M., Osadchiy, V., Kilpatrick, L. A., Chen, Z., Subramanyam, V., Zhang, Y., Guo, Y., Labus, J. S., Naliboff, B., Cole, S., Zhang, X., Mayer, E. A., & Gupta, A. (2023). How discrimination gets under the skin: Biological determinants of discrimination associated with dysregulation of the brain\u2013gut microbiome system and psychological symptoms<\/a>. Biological Psychiatry, 94<\/em>(3), 203\u2013214.\r\n\r\nDutta, M. J. (2018). Culture-centered approach in addressing health disparities: Communication infrastructures for subaltern voices<\/a>. Communication Methods and Measures, 12<\/em>(4), 239\u2013259.\r\n\r\nDutta, M. J., Anaele, A., & Jones, C. (2013). Voices of hunger: Addressing health disparities through the culture-centered approach<\/a>. Journal of Communication, 63<\/em>(1), 159\u2013180.\r\n\r\nFink, M., & Miller, Q. (2014). Trans media moments: Tumblr, 2011\u20132013<\/a>. Television & New Media, 15<\/em>(7), 611\u2013626.\r\n\r\nGoodyear, S. (2024, November 7). The world may be full of baloney, but so is this Nova Scotia cookbook<\/a>. CBC, As It Happens<\/em>.\r\n\r\nHarrington, N. G., & Record, R. A. (2024). Health communication: Research and practice for a diverse and changing world<\/em> <\/a>(2nd ed.). Routledge.\r\n\r\nLa Via Campesina. (n.d.). The definition of food sovereignty<\/em><\/a>.\r\n\r\nLekas, H. M., Pahl, K., & Fuller Lewis, C. (2020). Rethinking cultural competence: Shifting to cultural humility<\/a>. Health Services Insights, 13<\/em>.\r\n\r\nLuppens, L., & Power, E. (2018). \u201cAboriginal isn't just about what was before, it's what's happening now\u201d: Perspectives of Indigenous peoples on the foods in their contemporary diets<\/a>. Canadian Food Studies \/ La Revue canadienne des \u00e9tudes sur l\u2019alimentation, 5<\/em>(2), 142\u2013161.\r\n\r\nMcIntyre, L., Williams, P., & Glanville, N. T. (2007). Milk as metaphor: Low-income lone mothers\u2019 characterization of their challenges acquiring milk for their families<\/a>. Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 46<\/em>(3\u20134), 263\u2013279.\r\n\r\nMetzl, J. M., & Hansen, H. (2014). Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality<\/a>. Social Science & Medicine, 103<\/em>, 126\u2013133.\r\n\r\nMoffat, T., & Gendron, D. (2019). Cooking up the \u201cgastro-citizen\u201d through school meal programs in France and Japan<\/a>. Food, Culture & Society, 22<\/em>(1), 63\u201377.\r\n\r\nMoffat, T., Mohammed, C., & Newbold, K. B. (2017). Cultural dimensions of food insecurity among immigrants and refugees<\/a>. Human Organization, 76<\/em>(1), 15\u201327.\r\n\r\nNewman, L. (2017). Speaking in cod tongues: A Canadian culinary journey<\/em><\/a>. University of Regina Press.\r\n\r\nNova Scotia Health Library. (2024). Cultural competence<\/em><\/a>.\r\n\r\nPower, E. M. (2008). Conceptualizing food security for Aboriginal people in Canada<\/a>. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 99<\/em>(2), 95\u201397.\r\n\r\nSeko, Y., Wong, V., Juando-Prats, C., Rahouma, L., Yu, J., & Henry-Noel, N. (2025). Feeding children while Asian: Immigrant families\u2019 experiences with school lunches in Canada<\/a>. Canadian Food Studies \/ La Revue canadienne des \u00e9tudes sur l\u2019alimentation<\/em>.\r\n\r\nSeko, Y., Juando-Prats, C., Wong, V., Rahouma, L., Yu, J., & Henry-Noel, N. (2023). Lunchbox shaming: Recollections of school lunchtime by young Canadians of Asian descent<\/a>. Food, Culture & Society, 27<\/em>(2), 382\u2013400.\r\n\r\nSeko, Y., Rahouma, L., Reeves, C. T., & Wong, V. (2021). Unboxing the bento box: An arts-informed inquiry into Japanese families\u2019 experience at Canadian school lunchtime<\/a>. Canadian Food Studies \/ La Revue canadienne des \u00e9tudes sur l\u2019alimentation, 8<\/em>(3).\r\n\r\nSen, A. (1981). Poverty and famine: An essay on entitlement and deprivation<\/em>. Oxford University Press.\r\n\r\nSilva, E. A. D., Pedrozo, E. A., & Silva, T. N. D. (2023). National school feeding program (PNAE): A public policy that promotes a learning framework and a more sustainable food system in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil<\/a>. Foods, 12<\/em>(19), 3622.\r\n\r\nStansbury, T. S. (2025). Immigrant communities in Canada and the right to culturally appropriate food<\/a>. Lakehead Law Journal, 6<\/em>(2), 97\u2013116.\r\n\r\nStubbe, D. E. (2020). Practicing cultural competence and cultural humility in the care of diverse patients<\/a>. Focus: The Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry, 18<\/em>(1), 49\u201351.\r\n\r\nThornton, H., Melton, T., Johnson, C., & Belleny Lewis, D. (2022). Evolving beyond the world foods course: Creating racially and ethnically inclusive educational spaces for dietetics students<\/a>. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 122<\/em>(11).\r\n\r\nUnited Nations General Assembly. (2020). The right to food in the context of international trade law and policy: Note by the Secretary-General<\/a> (A\/75\/219)<\/em>.\r\n\r\nUnited Nations. (1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights<\/em>.<\/a>\r\n\r\nVallianatos, H., & Raine, K. (2008). Consuming food and constructing identities among Arabic and South Asian immigrant women<\/a>. Food, Culture & Society, 11<\/em>(3), 355\u2013373.\r\n\r\nWilliams-Forson, P. A. (2022). Eating while black: Food shaming and race in America<\/em>. UNC Press Books.\r\n\r\nWilliams-Forson, P. (2014). \u201cI haven\u2019t eaten if I don\u2019t have my soup and fufu\u201d: Cultural preservation through food and foodways among Ghanaian migrants in the United States<\/a>. Africa Today, 61<\/em>(1), 69\u201387.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n ","rendered":"

Abstract<\/h2>\n

The concept of \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d has gained traction in institutional and policy settings as a marker of equitable service delivery. However, it is often narrowly framed around the needs of those whose \u201cculture\u201d is considered too \u201cforeign\u201d to the dominant culture. In this chapter, we interrogate these limitations through an interdisciplinary dialogue between health communication and dietetics. Drawing from our research with diasporic communities in Toronto, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, we trace how culturally appropriate food is often treated as a special need, namely a “cherry on top” of presumed neutral, middle-class Anglo-European food norms, rather than as central to food security, identity, and belonging. We argue that prevailing approaches position culture as the property of the Other, rendering dominant foodways normal. Rather than offering a fixed definition of cultural appropriateness, we reframe culture as a dynamic, relational, and political process shaped by and shaping systems of power, including race, class, gender, ability, and migration. While it remains uncertain whether \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d can be a truly transformative concept, we contend that meaningful work in food security, food education, and health professional practice must begin by acknowledging the cultural values embedded within dominant frameworks, and by challenging the notion that cultural foodways are additional rather than foundational.<\/p>\n

I – Introduction<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In recent years, the concept of \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d has gained traction across institutional and policy settings as an important consideration in delivering equitable services. However, the concept has become almost synonymous with the needs of those whose \u201cculture\u201d is considered too \u201cforeign\u201d from dominant, mainstream culture. Within this framework, sensitivity to cultural appropriateness is expected to help service providers (from dominant cultural backgrounds) serve clients (from non-dominant cultural backgrounds) more effectively. Despite its well-intentioned gesture, this framing narrows both the scope and the potential of the concept. It assumes that culture is static, that only certain populations have culture and attendant concerns regarding food, and that culturally appropriate food is a temporary bridge to assimilation rather than a fundamental aspect of food security and identity for all.<\/p>\n

This chapter calls into question such limited interpretations. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue, we, two scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds \u2014 health communication and dietetics \u2014 explore how \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d has been defined, deployed, and constrained. Drawing from our research with diasporic communities in Toronto, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia, we trace how culturally appropriate food is often treated as a “special need” rather than a structural issue with broad social and political implications.<\/p>\n

We position this work as both a critique and an invitation. Rather than offering a unified definition of cultural appropriateness, we seek to unpack the term, stretching and reworking it to explore what it might mean when cultural foodways are viewed as a dynamic, relational practice that touches all eaters, not just those categorized as immigrants, refugees, or newcomers.<\/p>\n

We suggest that cultural appropriateness should be understood not as an afterthought, but as a central dimension of food security, professional practice, and individuals\u2019 sense of belonging to the community. It is not simply about adding \u201ccultural foods\u201d to institutional menus, but about questioning the normative standards that define what counts as appropriate, and for whom,<\/em>\u00a0in the first place. We assert that cultural appropriateness is not a hurdle to overcome on the path to assimilation, but a lens through which to understand the politics of taste, identity, and inclusion.<\/p>\n

II – Disciplinary Palates and Positionalities<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Our disciplinary and socio-cultural locations deeply shape how we understand the term \u201ccultural appropriateness.\u201d While we both engage with food, health, and equity as researchers and practitioners, we do so from distinct academic traditions, disciplinary perspectives, and lived experiences that colour our approaches.<\/p>\n

Yukari Seko <\/strong>approaches food through the lens of critical health communication, drawing on research situated in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that explores the intersections of migration, food, and family practices. As a first-generation immigrant to Canada from Japan and a parent raising a child in Toronto, Yukari’s personal lived experiences are intricately tied to her academic inquiry. From a disciplinary perspective, mainstream health communication has historically leaned toward behavioural intervention, for example, designing campaigns to improve health literacy and shape individual choices related to public health. This framing often overlooks how systemic power structures shape whose choices are rendered possible. Inspired by a culture-centred approach in critical health communication (e.g., Dutta, 2018; Dutta et al., 2013), Yukari\u2019s work resists this reductionist impulse, instead foregrounding how discourses construct and perpetuate health disparities, including through ideas of culturally appropriate food.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Brady<\/strong> is a Registered Dietitian and an Associate Professor in Women\u2019s and Gender Studies and the School of Nutrition and Dietetics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. With academic roots in nutrition science, biology, communication, cultural studies, and feminist theory, her work is interdisciplinary and critical. As a White, disabled, settler woman born to parents of British heritage and raised in suburban Toronto, she brings a learned rather than lived experience of racialized and colonial inequities to her work. Her professional background in dietetics has provided firsthand experience with how institutional food systems and health professional practice often sidestep issues of race and racism while deploying culture and cultural foodways as variables to manage.<\/p>\n

Our dialogue grows both from convergence and friction. While we share a deep passion for food justice and food security, our respective disciplines often talk past each other when it comes to culture. In dietetics, culture is frequently framed as a barrier to proper nutrition or as an add-on to enhance \u201ccompliance\u201d with nutrition care recommendations (Thornton et al., 2022). It is treated as supplementary, rather than a fundamental element of food security. In health communication, culture is sometimes treated as noise or as a barrier to effective health messaging (Harrington & Record, 2024). In both disciplines, culture is often reduced to a static object rather than approached as a living, shifting terrain shaped by power. Rarely is culture recognized as something that continuously evolves through the daily doings of all people, not just the racialized or Othered (therefore \u201cvulnerable\u201d) subjects of intervention. Instead, we argue that culture is a dynamic space we all co-habit and co-produce, rather than something one either possesses or must navigate.<\/p>\n

In the sections that follow, we weave together critical reflection, disciplinary analysis, and sustained interdisciplinary dialogue. This reflective, collaborative method drew inspiration from Fink & Miller\u2019s (2014) dialogical inquiry into their lived experiences as scholars and active users of a digital media platform. Following their approach, we met three times via video conferencing and recorded the conversations to support iterative listening and reflection. In these exchanges, we first traced how the concept of culture operates across our disciplinary and professional practices related to food security, attending to both points of overlap and tension. Returning to the recordings, we collectively interrogated whether \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d functions as a meaningful construct. We explored how culture might be reimagined in research and practice to advance not only the needs of those labelled \u201cdiverse\u201d but the broader project of equitable food systems. Our goal in this chapter is to emancipate the concept of cultural appropriateness from its current confines and reposition it as a vital, evolving element of food security for all.<\/p>\n

Cultural food security<\/h3>\n

Yukari<\/strong>: To start, I think it is worth reviewing the existing discussions over cultural food security and how it relates to our discussion on cultural appropriateness. Since the late 1960s, food security approaches have shifted their focus from nation-states to households and individuals, and from addressing large-scale hunger crises (i.e., regional famines) to chronic household- and individual-level hunger and its links to poverty and social disparities. In the early 1980s, Amartya Sen (1981) argued that food insecurity is caused not by shortages in food supply but by inequalities built into food distribution mechanisms.<\/p>\n

This reframing gradually moved the focus from food supply to access and equity, paving the way for rights-based frameworks. This approach emphasizes that access to food is not a matter of charity but of justice, grounded in basic human rights. Although the United Nations declared the human right to adequate food as early as 1966 in its International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966), the policy framework did not clearly establish cultural rights to food or the importance of culturally appropriate food. The early right-to-food approach focused primarily on access to food and the means of its procurement (Courtis, 2007), thereby rendering cultural adequacy an optional choice.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Elaine Power wrote a seminal paper introducing the concept of cultural food security in the context of Indigenous foodways. She highlighted that understanding Indigenous food (in)security required attention not only to income or market access, but also to traditional food harvesting, intergenerational knowledge, and community sharing practices. Power argued that \u201ctraditional\/country food\u201d is integral to cultural health because it has \u201csymbolic and spiritual value, and is central to personal identity and the maintenance of culture\u201d (p. 96). She coined the term “cultural food security” as an essential layer of food security, shifting the conversation beyond nutritional intake and affordability to encompass food\u2019s social and cultural meanings. This resonates with the fourth pillar of CSFS\u2019s 5As framework, Acceptability<\/em>, which refers to access to culturally acceptable food obtained in ways that uphold dignity and human rights (CSFS, 2025).<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>I want to note that Power\u2019s (2008) original concept focused exclusively on Indigenous people\u2019s food security, emphasizing the importance of ensuring access to food that aligns with Indigenous identity, values, traditional knowledge, and connection to land and water. Intriguingly, the concept of cultural food security was quickly adopted in research on immigrants and refugees. For example, Moffat et al. (2017) draw on Power\u2019s framework to explore how food insecurity is shaped by limited access to \u201cfamiliar, fresh-tasting, less processed, and safe\u201d cultural foods (p. 24). They highlight how high prices and lack of variety in cultural food options contribute to what they call food nostalgia<\/em>\u2014a longing for foods that remind people of home.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>These studies matter because they emphasize the cultural dimensions of food security, especially the emotional and symbolic aspects shaped by people\u2019s cultural milieu. However, what stands out to me is how quickly cultural food security came to be positioned as a unique need for immigrants and refugees. I am often puzzled by the literature on food security, which claims that \u201cAccess to cultural foods has a positive effect on the physical health and emotional well-being of immigrants and refugees\u201d (Stansbury, 2025, p. 98). I have no doubt that migrant populations may experience unique challenges in accessing culturally appropriate food due to, for example, limited availability of key ingredients, financial constraints, or a lack of ethno-cultural supply chains. I do remember my early days in Canada, when I had to take a 50-minute bus ride to an Asian supermarket to buy a bottle of Japanese Worcestershire sauce. Further, for refugees and migrants forcibly displaced from their homelands, cultural food could be particularly important in preserving emotional, social, and intergenerational ties to their homes.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I cannot help wondering: Why is this logic of cultural food security applied only to immigrants and refugees? Why is there an assumption that the cultural needs of all Canadian-born people are always-already met, just because they were born and raised in Canada? Why don\u2019t we talk about how cultural food access supports everyone\u2019s<\/em> well-being?<\/p>\n

Also, here is where things get messy. In both academic literature and policy documents, terms such as \u201cculturally appropriate,\u201d \u201cculturally acceptable,\u201d and \u201cculturally preferred\u201d are used interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. But they do not. Stansbury (2025) argues that \u201cculturally acceptable\u201d food often refers to what is tolerated or passable. \u201cCulturally appropriate\u201d food, on the other hand, implies alignment with people\u2019s deeper food values, practices, and identities. It is not just about what is eaten, but about what should be eaten, what feels right and nourishing.<\/p>\n

This distinction matters because the current framing often treats culture as a matter of taste rather than a necessity. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024) defines \u201cculturally preferred foods\u201d as \u201csafe and nutritious foods that meet the diverse tastes and needs of customers based on their cultural identity. For example, people who identify with Muslim or Jewish religious traditions may want foods that are Halal or Kosher, respectively.\u201d Putting religion and culture aside, reducing these deeply meaningful practices to preference, I think, erases the power they hold in people\u2019s lives. In my ongoing research on Meals on Wheels food delivery programs across Ontario, one volunteer who delivers Kosher meals to Jewish seniors told me, \u201cKosher is not a choice or preference. It is the only food they can eat. It is the food they grew up with, the food they trust.\u201d That statement struck me hard. Cultural appropriateness is not about accommodating people\u2019s tastes or preferences. It is about honouring tradition, identity, and dignity; as the United Nations General Assembly (2020) states, everyone has the right to eat every meal with dignity.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Exactly. And what often gets lost in the literature is the fundamental difference between Power\u2019s (2008) original framing of cultural food security in the context of Indigenous foodways and its application to immigrants and refugees. For many Indigenous peoples, traditional foods are inseparable from their land, language, and community. In contrast, immigrant communities most often access cultural foods through commercial channels in the land of settlement, such as Canada. These are often imported market foods, rather than country foods, in Power\u2019s terminology. This distinction matters. It complicates simplistic calls for self-sufficiency, such as encouraging immigrants to grow their own food, which may not be feasible or even desirable for many people navigating complex post-migration lives in Canada with limited access to land or precarious housing. Obviously, not all cultural ingredients can be grown in Canada, even if seeds, land, and financial resources are available.<\/p>\n

And yet, I think these nuances often get lost in public health frameworks, where cultural considerations are folded into checklists rather than deeply embedded into systemic design.<\/p>\n

Yukari:<\/strong> Right. The concept of food sovereignty further complicates our discussion. In 1996, La Via Campesina defined food sovereignty at the World Food Summit as the \u201cright of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food<\/em> produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems\u201d (La Via Campesina, n.d., our emphasis). From this perspective, culturally appropriate food is not just a component of food security, but a right to define and control one\u2019s food systems. This includes the ability to choose, grow, and prepare food in ways that are meaningful to one\u2019s community, resisting the homogenization of diets under industrial and institutional systems. However, I do not think it would directly apply to diasporic communities in Canada with limited agency over land and agricultural systems.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Relatedly, we have to be cautious about equating \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d food with notions of \u201cauthentic\u201d or \u201ctraditional\u201d diets. For political reasons, the food sovereignty movement defines culturally appropriate foodways as synonymous with traditional foodways, which cultural imperialism and colonialism have marginalized. But people\u2019s foodways evolve as they move, adapt, and raise families in new places. What is \u201cappropriate\u201d is often hybrid, flexible, and deeply personal. When we insist on fixed definitions of cultural food as traditional food, we risk reifying tradition in ways that can be exclusionary or impractical.<\/p>\n

Yukari:<\/strong> Regarding what you just said, we should pay attention to how foods have been culturally appropriated and repurposed, and how they will be in the future. You introduced me to Lenore Newman\u2019s (2017) book, Speaking in the Cod Tongues,<\/em> which beautifully captures the wide regional diversity of so-called Canadian cuisine.<\/p>\n

Newman (2017) shows how local chefs across Canada have integrated fresh, local ingredients into their cultural recipes, giving rise to several \u201cCanadian\u201d dishes, such as the BC roll, poutine, Nanaimo bars, pea soup, and tourti\u00e8re<\/em>. One important point Newman makes is that \u201ccuisines collide and hybridize\u201d (p. 88). I love the example of Canadian Chinese dishes, which often adapt traditional recipes to local ingredients, blending cooking techniques and flavour profiles from multiple cultures. Think about ginger beef or chop suey; these are not artifacts of an \u201cauthentic\u201d Chinese cuisine, but new creations born out of strategic culinary adaptation tailored to the Canadian palate.<\/p>\n

Culturally Appropriate Food<\/h3>\n

Jennifer:<\/strong> Building on what we have discussed so far, let me reflect on how I have learned about the term \u201cculturally appropriate food.\u201d I first encountered the term through dietetics training, usually in the context of working with immigrants or newcomers (i.e., immigrants who have been in Canada for less than 5 years). It was framed as a professional skill set, part of the broader \u201ccultural competence\u201d model that has become foundational across health professions, and defined as \u201ca set of consistent attitudes, knowledge, skills, behaviours and policies required to effectively meet the needs of all the people we serve\u201d (Nova Scotia Health Library, 2024). Sounds inclusive, right?<\/p>\n

However, in practice, this framework is rooted in deficit thinking. Cultural appropriateness is treated as something \u201cwe\u201d (the professionals whose culture is seemingly presumed to be the norm) provide to \u201cthem\u201d (the newcomers whose culture is different from the norm), a gesture of support that assumes cultural needs belong exclusively to non-Western others.<\/p>\n

And honestly, the implication was clear: cultural needs are something those not from here (i.e., newcomers) have<\/em>, something we might accommodate if we have the time or resources. It was not framed as essential, more like a nice \u201ccherry on top\u201d of the more essential need for calories and nutrients.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>That phrase, \u201ccherry on top,\u201d really sticks with me. It captures how culture is treated as optional rather than foundational. From a critical health communication lens, culture can never be a cherry on top. We understand culture not as something some people \u201chave,\u201d and others do not, but as something all humans are immersed in, as the water fish swim in. We move through powerful cultural currents without always recognizing them. It is the very structure that shapes what we eat, how we eat, and how we value food.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Absolutely. If culture is like the water that we swim in, then the dominant understanding of food security is part of that same water, steeped in Western values and assumptions that feel natural and even neutral.<\/p>\n

When I teach dietetics students, I strive to guide them through unpacking these assumptions. The idea that Canadian-born people are culturally \u201csettled,\u201d that their food preferences are met because of a perceived sameness, is incredibly simplistic. It ignores the cultural diversity of settler Canada and pretends that food norms are neutral or universal. They are not.<\/p>\n

Cultural diversity comprises national, regional, linguistic, and religious\/spiritual heritage and identity, as well as across socio-economic classes, generations, and moral or ethical affiliations. This array of differences is overlooked in current thinking about what is \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d at an individual level, as is what we might think of as representational forms of cultural food security, such as those that could be included in public health messaging.<\/p>\n

An illustrative example of these limitations, which I have explored elsewhere, involves two comic illustrations: Atlantic Canada\u2019s Food Guide<\/em> and Eating Well with Cape Breton\u2019s Food Guide<\/em>, both of which satirize Canada\u2019s Food Guide<\/em> (Brady, 2022). These satirical responses highlight the cultural divide between what Canada\u2019s Food Guide<\/em> depicts as healthy eating and the foods that are socially, economically, historically, and culturally meaningful to Eastern Canadians. These cultural divides are particularly relevant in dietetics, a field primarily concerned with advising others on what to eat. In this piece (Brady, 2022), I draw on the well-worn idiom \u201cyou are what you eat\u201d to challenge readers: if we agree with it, what does it mean to tell people what to eat? Are we not, then, telling them who we think they should be when we tell them what they should and should not eat?<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>\u201cYou are what you eat\u201d is such an intricate idiom! Related to this, I also feel there is often a lack of recognition of diasporic foodways, especially among second- and third-generation immigrants or people of mixed heritage. In my research on lunchbox shaming<\/em> faced by children of Asian immigrant backgrounds in Toronto schools (Seko et al., 2025; Seko et al., 2023; Seko et al., 2021), I learned that children\u2019s school lunchboxes reflect ongoing negotiations among household members. While wishing to preserve traditional foodways, many parents adopted their lunch-making practices to accommodate children\u2019s evolving preferences. They incorporate new food items or add a \u201cWestern spin\u201d to their traditional recipes. Rather than rigidly preserving traditions, these families approached lunch-making as a flexible, habitual practice responsive to the family\u2019s evolving tastes. Both heritage and habitual eating shape their food practices.<\/p>\n

Vallianatos and Raine (2008) describe this beautifully, noting that \u201cimmigrant women value their habitual cuisines, and through continuation of their culinary practices, evoke and connect with \u2018home\u2019 and all the sensory and emotional experience that this conjures\u201d (p. 317).\u00a0 And yet, they observed that non-recent immigrants more often speak of their foodways with nostalgia than recent arrivals do. There is a complexity there; cultural appropriateness is not just about maintenance but also about reinvention.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Echoing what you just said, I have supervised an international student from China as she completed her Master\u2019s thesis (Chen, 2024). For her Master\u2019s research, she used photovoice to explore the experiences of international Chinese students studying in Nova Scotia in accessing culturally familiar foods. What her work highlights is the effort, thoughtfulness, intention, and agency her participants exercised to intentionally expand what is culturally appropriate for them as young international students, most living on their own for the first time, in a food culture that differs in many ways. Contrary to much of the literature on dietary acculturation, which often positions newcomers as passive objects who lament the loss of \u201ctraditional diets\u201d (e.g., the Healthy Immigrant Effect), her participants actively sought out new food experiences in crafting a sense of what is culturally meaningful food as individuals, as well as a community of international students whose Chinese identity and foodways varied with their home provinces and regions.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>My former master\u2019s student has also done an amazing project by cooking her Chinese-Jamaican grandmother\u2019s recipe (Chong, 2022). She drew inspiration from your article Cooking as Inquiry<\/em> (Brady, 2011) and recreated her grandmother\u2019s cassava pudding using ingredients available in Toronto. Because it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, she delivered the pudding to her grandmother at a seniors\u2019 residence. Cassava pudding may not be the first dish that comes to mind when thinking about her grandmother\u2019s Chinese heritage, but it is an important, symbolic dish for her family. Cultural appropriateness is often complicated and deeply nuanced.<\/p>\n

Looping back to our previous conversation on \u201ctraditional\u201d and \u201cauthentic\u201d dishes, so much of what is missing in the dominant framework is the notion that cultural appropriateness is not static. Although there is no doubt that food traditions play a key role in maintaining cultural identity in many diasporic groups, \u201cculturally appropriate foods\u201d are not a fixed set of dishes from \u201cback home.\u201d They are shaped by migration, adaptation, intergenerational memory, and ongoing changes in everyday life. Reducing it to a \u201ccultural foods\u201d checkbox on menus flattens the deep emotional, relational, and political work that food does. Moreover, limiting it to immigrants and refugees overlooks the fact that cultural food security is not a special need but applies to all Canadians.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Agreed 100%. Although the meanings and experiences of culturally appropriate food and food security among immigrants and refugees are unique, I think the emphasis on these populations belies two important concerns that, in my view, require greater consideration in the literature on cultural food security. First is the conflation of culture, race, and the impacts of racism on how we understand \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d and what we consider to be culturally meaningful historically and contemporarily. A second concern is that cultural foodways, and thus what is culturally appropriate, are diverse across socio-economic classes, regions within Canada, religions and spiritualities, and generations.<\/p>\n

Yukari:<\/strong> Interesting! Let us unpack the first one. What comes to my mind is Psyche Williams-Forson\u2019s (2022) book, Eating while Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,<\/em> which delineates a long and twisted history of food shaming against Black foodways.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Yes, Williams-Forson\u2019s work is notable for many reasons, one being that it elaborates the multiplicity and nuances of Black food cultures in the United States and, contrary to popular narratives that focus on food scarcity and deprivation, shows them to be sites of resistance, ingenuity, belonging, and joy historically and contemporarily. Throughout her work, Williams-Forson approaches food as an inherent site and means of communicating power. In Eating While Black<\/em>, she specifically addresses food shaming, which emerges from assumptions that conflate all Black people in the U.S. with a singular cultural food heritage and an unchanging set of dishes, such as fried chicken and collard greens cooked with pork, often collectively identified as soul food. Dominant food culture widely derides these foods as scraps\u2014bits no one else wanted to eat\u2014and, today especially, as unhealthy. These assumptions about the singularity of Black identity and food culture sustain systemic anti-Black racism, white supremacy, sexism, and classism expressed through the surveillance and shaming of Black people\u2019s food and bodies.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>What struck me most in Eating While Black <\/em>is when Williams-Forson (2022) recounts a conversation with her family friend who said, “You’re forgettin’ something\u2014all Black people ate scraps\u201d (p. 23). It is a poignant reminder that gastro-surveillance does not just come from outside; it is often internalized. She traces how the long history of food shaming has led some African Americans to view traditional soul foods as unhealthy, unclean, or even embarrassing. She shows how class-based messages about “proper” eating told Black people they needed to correct their foodways to fit white norms, even though they were never fully accepted.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Williams-Forson\u2019s (2022) work also reminds us that when we essentialize food culture in pursuit of what is \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d or \u201ctraditional,\u201d we err in historicizing people and food cultures, freezing them in the past and rendering them irrelevant in today\u2019s globalized foodscape. Moreover, the emphasis on what is \u201cappropriate\u201d or \u201ctraditional,\u201d particularly when discussing racialized and immigrant populations, reifies an enduring Otherness and vulnerability. Essentialist ideas about what, for example, is \u201cappropriate\u201d for Black people to eat imagine Black people and Black food cultures as quaint relics, out of step with modern food cultures, and even uneducated about prevailing health and nutrition concerns. Luppens and Power\u2019s (2018) work similarly highlights this by exploring the disconnect between health promotion recommendations for Indigenous people in Canada to eat \u201ctraditional\u201d foods and how Indigenous people themselves define that. Using photo-elicitation and interviews, the researchers found that what Indigenous people considered traditional foods included many items not featured in official health promotion materials, such as bologna!<\/p>\n

Yukari:<\/strong> How about your second point about socio-economic, regional, spiritual, and generational diversity within the concept of cultural appropriateness?<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>To talk about this, I can share my personal experience. Food in Eastern Canada largely reflects its coastal geography and deep intergenerational poverty. Nova Scotia has been among the most food-insecure provinces for decades. I learned this when I moved from Toronto to Halifax, from a big multicultural city to a small city with relatively less racial and cultural diversity, and that is relatively distant from any other urban centres. This move highlighted for me the significant geographical differences among urban, semi-urban, and rural regions that necessarily shape the meaning of cultural appropriateness and the practicalities of accessing culturally diverse foods.<\/p>\n

At the same time, relocating from Ontario to Nova Scotia taught me about the unique cultural and contextual diversity of foodways across Canada, even though I was already a dietitian schooled in \u201ccultural competence.\u201d I was amazed by the rich food culture, deeply rooted in Eastern Canada’s socio-economic, historical, geographic, and political context (Brady, 2022). My lack of appreciation for the diversity and situatedness of food and foodways across Canada underscores my point about the limitations of \u201ccultural competence\u201d and \u201cculturally appropriate food,\u201d which, to me, obscures the need to talk about racism, colonialism, classism, and poverty.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on Chen\u2019s (2024) work, my experience highlights the complexities of defining and applying cultural appropriateness in scholarly work and professional practice to advance food security and food justice. I think we need to grapple with what cultural appropriateness means for those who, like me, \u201ccome from away\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> rural populations with rich cultural food traditions rooted in deep connections to the land and socio-economic oppression.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>I see your point. Culturally appropriate food certainly fosters a sense of belonging not just to cultural or ethnic identity but also to class, community, and history. We can recall Bourdieu\u2019s (1984) theory of taste here; taste is not just about personal preference; it is a form of social distinction. What we grow up eating, and how we learn to value certain foods over others, shapes how we see ourselves in relation to other people. As you said before, \u201chealthy eating\u201d in dietetics often reflects middle-class, Eurocentric ideas of how to eat right. However, for many, cultural foodways do not fit neatly into that frame, creating a tension between nutritional ideals focused on the nutrient content of foods and cultural identity, which may also prioritize nostalgia, joy, love, comfort, heritage, and belonging.<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Indeed! And picking up on Luppens and Power\u2019s (2018) curious finding about bologna, there is an interesting cookbook created by a woman in Cape Breton titled Full of Bologna: A Collection of Cape Breton Classics<\/em> that illustrates the importance of thinking about cultural appropriateness and cultural food security for all people (Goodyear, 2024). Photographer Meagan McLeod compiled the cookbook with contributions from local residents, and it is sold at local pharmacies, with proceeds, ironically, going to food banks in the area. Cape Breton is a historically poor, working-class region of Nova Scotia. Bologna is a culturally meaningful food staple in Cape Breton, reflecting intergenerational poverty in that part of the province. Full of Bologna<\/em> is a really good example of how social and economic class shape food cultures. While nutrition recommendations may describe bologna as nothing more than a sodium-laden, carcinogenic, processed meat product, for some, it connects them to who they are.<\/p>\n

Yukari:<\/strong> Super interesting! I would add that culturally appropriate food also plays a role in nation-building. I have argued elsewhere (Seko et al., 2023; Seko et al., 2025) that we should not forget that national school food programs serve as an ideological state apparatus through which nation-states teach what national cuisine should look like, taste like, and how it should be eaten. As Moffat and Gendron (2019) argue, state-sponsored food projects, such as national school meal programs, can foster gastro-nationalism.<\/p>\n

While the exclusion of cultural and religious minorities should never be accepted, I personally do not think it is a bad thing that school food serves as a vehicle for teaching and developing national, regional, or local food identities if done collaboratively. Schools always teach students a selective body of knowledge based on what the national or provincial governments consider important for their future citizens to learn. Why not teach them national, regional, or local foodways?<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>Yes, as your work on lunchbox shaming<\/em> has shown, public school curricula, school food programs, and even individual teachers play complex roles in shaping school food cultures. I am thinking about the story shared by one of your participants, who attributed her short stature to the many lunches she skipped due to lunchbox shaming. Your work illustrates the vital connection between what has been the predominant concern of food security research, biological and nutritional inadequacy, and how this is shaped by racism and cultural bias. It is also an example of what some call the biochemistry of discrimination (Dong, Gee, & Beltram-Sanchez et al., 2023), which refers to how the social experience of discrimination literally gets under the skin and can have lifelong emotional and biophysiological impacts.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>Adding to considerations of race and class that we have already spoken about is gender, and even more broadly, intersectionality. Voluminous literature shows that foodwork is highly gendered, and that women tend to experience higher rates and severity of food insecurity in unique ways (Bellows et al., 2016; McIntyre et al., 2007). In the literature on cultural food security, gender is rarely considered, and when it is, the focus tends to be on gender-based divisions of foodwork and cultural labour. For example, although all foodwork is culturally rooted, research shows that among newcomer, immigrant, and refugee families, women tend to assume particularly important roles as guardians of cultural foodways within families and communities (Moffat et al., 2017).<\/p>\n

Jennifer:<\/strong> True. In the work I have been involved in, women\u2019s roles in newcomer families pose particular challenges and require support. The women my colleagues and I interviewed said they may not drive or have access to a vehicle and had to spend a great deal of time navigating the city by bus, often with children in tow, to visit ethnic grocers scattered throughout the city.<\/p>\n

Yukari:<\/strong> This kind of work on the gender-based division of labour is important, but what has yet to be explored in the cultural food security literature is how gender is \u201cperformed\u201d or constructed through the doing of cultural food work both within immigrant and non-immigrant families, as well as intercultural and intergenerational families. Likewise, intersectional analyses that consider gender, race, class, migration, disability, and other aspects of identity and power are absent in this body of work.<\/p>\n

Reimagining Culturally Appropriate Food<\/h3>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>Now we are arriving at a critical question: What could it mean to emancipate \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d from the current \u201ccherry on top\u201d frameworks?<\/p>\n

Jennifer: <\/strong>This question returns to my concern about \u201ccultural competence\u201d as the dominant framework in health professional practice. As I said before, cultural competence typically means knowing about Others (Stubbe, 2020) and, specifically in dietetics, knowing what foods Others traditionally eat (Thornton et al., 2022). Throughout our conversation, we were concerned about culture being treated as a \u201ccherry on top\u201d of biomedically defined dietary and health interventions.<\/p>\n

Thus, emancipating \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d from dominant frameworks means, through our knowledge and practice, embracing a dynamic understanding of culture as intimately intertwined with power. In other words, and as I have written about throughout my work, socially just dietetic practice requires structural competence (Metzl & Hansen, 2014). That is, the knowledge, skill, and confidence to redress the systemic, upstream inequities that engender health disparities while inequitably distributing the means, including nutritious, identity-affirming food, to manage or recover from disease. Other dietitian-scholars, many associated with Critical Dietetics, have drawn on work by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and public health scholars who have elaborated critical and feminist perspectives on food security and health equity, including those at the CSFS.<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>I would add that the idea that only \u201cimmigrants, refugees and newcomers\u201d need culturally appropriate food, thus requiring special treatments, is a deeply colonial construct. Emancipating cultural appropriateness means recognizing that food choices of white, middle-class Canadians are also cultural, not neutral, not the default. Imagine if we asked, \u201cWhat is culturally appropriate food for Anglo-Canadian seniors in long-term care homes?\u201d instead of treating their meals as universal and everyone else\u2019s as \u201ccultural.\u201d And what about people of mixed heritage?<\/p>\n

Jennifer:<\/strong> Great questions! Drawing on another piece of work by Williams-Forson (2014), we might also ask how our approaches and actions to advance food security foster \u201ccultural sustainability.\u201d Williams-Forson defines culture as an \u201cactive process\u201d carried out through food and includes finding familiar foods, innovating new foods and food combinations, establishing food systems built on different cultural values and priorities, exercising culturally rooted understandings of health and well-being, all while \u201cproduc[ing] and reproduc[ing]\u201d diverse cultural identities. To me, cultural sustainability offers greater conceptual flexibility than \u201cculturally appropriate\u201d and prompts consideration of what cultural well-being means in (re)thinking food security at the individual, household, and systems levels.<\/p>\n

Dietitians working in long-term care homes and other institutional settings often design menus that meet nutrition guidelines for resident populations. Although I do not practice in food service, as a dietitian, I am concerned with our professional responsibilities to consider the meaning of food in people\u2019s lives beyond its nutritional value. Work by scholars in feminist food studies (Brady et al., 2025), including Williams-Forson, as we mentioned, urges us to explore this topic further. For example, in light of Williams-Forson\u2019s ideas, I would add to your questions by asking: how can \u201cculturally sustainable\u201d institutional food service reflect nutrition and health as dynamic, evolving cultural practices? I think potential answers to these questions must go beyond simply adding culturally diverse dishes to institutional menu offerings, which is how cultural differences are addressed today. Looking forward, this might mean treating all menu options as cultural artifacts rather than those perceived as not fitting traditional Canadian cuisine. What may aid this shift is a paradigm called “cultural humility,\u201d proposed in response to the limitations of cultural competence I mentioned earlier, though it has not yet been widely adopted across health professions education and practice. One important facet of cultural humility is its emphasis on reflexivity and ongoing learning rather than on knowing the other, as in the cultural competence approach. Cultural humility invites us to consider our own worldview as culturally rooted, which may de-centre \u201cCanadian food\u201d in institutional food settings (Lekas et al., 2020).<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>Although I am not 100% sure about whether cultural sustainability can be an optimal framework for policy, I see your point and potential implications for practice. If we take culture seriously, it would transform what we expect from public institutions. Institutional food settings, like schools, hospitals, long-term care homes and prisons, must confront their colonial underpinnings. Rather than designing one-size-fits-all menus, these institutions can integrate a co-design approach with communities from the get-go. Imagine school lunch programs that not only meet basic nutritional standards but also actively reflect the foodways of the local community, whether that is South Asian dishes in Brampton or Acadian cuisine in Nova Scotia. It would mean asking who decides what is on the menu<\/em>, and who gets a say in defining the \u201cappropriate\u201d repertoire of dishes for school lunches<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Jennifer:<\/strong> In this process, we must be careful about tokenism – it means we cannot just invite communities to “consult” after the menu has already been decided. True community-based co-design would require sharing decision-making power from the very beginning by asking communities what foods matter to them, how they want them prepared, and whom they trust to prepare them. It also demands that institutions not only listen to but also be willing to relinquish control over what constitutes \u201chealthy\u201d or \u201cappropriate\u201d food. As Canada prepares to launch its national school food program, it can benefit from learning from collaborative food governance models in other countries, such as Brazil\u2019s School Meal Council, which ensures participatory decision-making at the local level (Silva et al., 2023).<\/p>\n

Yukari: <\/strong>Yes, and in a related vein, we should reimagine food procurement and preparation systems. Institutions may claim it is too costly to diversify menus or to source specific ingredients, but those claims often reflect whose needs are treated as standard and whose are considered extra. Beyond that, we need to rethink how we approach food education. Too often, nutrition education frames white, middle-class food practices as the default and everyone else\u2019s as needing to adapt or improve. What if we flipped that?<\/p>\n

III – Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Our interdisciplinary dialogue has drawn on academic literature, lived experiences, and our respective disciplinary backgrounds to trouble and invite further reflection on the meaning and potential of \u201cculturally appropriate food\u201d as a concept. Such interdisciplinary dialogue is crucial for sharing insights and highlighting gaps created by cross-purposes among disciplines, particularly those arising from different epistemological standpoints, such as those between the health and social sciences and the humanities. Our purpose has been to fundamentally rethink cultural appropriateness vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> prevailing discourse, which often essentializes, historicizes, and Others culture as a static feature of identity to be treated as a \u201ccherry on top\u201d of the presumed normalcy, singularity, and neutrality of middle-class, Anglo-European diets in applied contexts, such as health professional practice, institutional food services, and school food programs. More specifically, we reframe culture as a dynamic, relational, and fundamentally political process in which we all<\/em> participate, shaped by and shaping intersecting systems of power, including race, class, gender, ability, and migration. Whether \u201ccultural appropriateness\u201d proves transformative or ultimately limiting remains to be seen. Nevertheless, we argue that any meaningful pursuit of food security, food education, or health professional practice must begin with a commitment to understanding that our frameworks are themselves deeply infused with cultural values and priorities.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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