IAN MOSBY, PhD

I recently had the pleasure of writing an article for the Globe and Mail on the stories that food tells us about Canada on it’s 150th birthday. It was fun to write and I was able to publicly express my extreme dislike of frozen donuts and my love for Cheezies and smoked meat sandwiches.

Link: We are what we ate: Canada’s history in cuisines 

Over the past year I’ve been lucky enough to talk to two of the best, most thoughtful interviewers in the country – Shelagh Rogers and Steve Paikin – about my book, Food Will Win the War. The conversations were both wide ranging and really fun.

Here’s a link to my interview on CBC Radio 1’s The Next Chapter With Shelagh Rogers from November 2015.

And here’s my interview on TVO’s The Agenda With Steve Paikin from May 2015:

This past year has been a busy one but, between doing scholarly research and writing, I’ve also tried hard spend some of my time doing what might be considered public history. If you’re interested, here’s just a few of the projects that I worked on throughout 2015.

“Food Will Win the War” at the Canadian Agriculture and Food Museum

This past summer I was offered the opportunity to guest curate a museum exhibit based on my book, Food Will Win the War, at the Canadian Agriculture and Food Museum in Ottawa. Needless to say, I quickly jumped on the chance. I had a great time working with the staff at the museum – particularly William Knight – and even loaned many of the artifacts used in the exhibit from my own personal collection. The exhibit opened in September 2015 and should be on until the Spring/Summer of 2016. You can find out more here.

Meeting With Residential School Survivors in Northern Ontario

Over the past year I’ve given many talks, but the most important of these have been to groups of residential school survivors and their families throughout Northern Ontario. The first of these events was connected to my Hayes-Jenkinson Memorial Lecture at Algoma University in January. In addition to giving a talk to the Algoma community on residential school nutrition experiments, I was also invited to sit on a panel with survivors of the Shingwauk Institute that was co-sponsored by the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association and the Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig. These were both powerful events that I’ll never forget.

I have also been asked by the Grand Council of Treaty #3 to participate in workshops for survivors and their families throughout Treaty 3 territory. The first of these events was in Kenora in July and I’m going to be participating in additional events at Fort Frances in October and Sioux Lookout in November. I’m hugely grateful for these opportunities and have learned so much listening to survivors, many of whom were part of the nutrition experiments at the St. Mary’s and Cecilia Jeffrey residential schools.

“Victory Gardening” in the Canadian Encyclopedia

I was also recently invited to contribute a Canadian Encyclopedia entry on the topic of Victory Gardens based on the research I did for Food Will Win the War. I really enjoyed the challenge of translating my work for a popular audience and it’s an honour to be included in an encyclopedia that I’ve used many times in my own teaching.

The Forgotten Parts of Food Culture: Unpaid Labour and Drudgery

Earlier this year I was also invited by 49th Shelf – a website created by the Association of Canadian Publishers together with the Canadian Publishers’ Council to promote Canadian books – to submit a more personal essay on food history. I chose to write an essay about my grandmother, gender and work that I called, “The Forgotten Parts of Food Culture: Unpaid Labour and Drudgery.” In it, I tried to turn some of my critical arsenal on my own family history, exploring my grandmother’s life through two of her most widely used cookbooks. It was a difficult exercise but helped change the way I think of my grandmother and her life as a young woman.

Over at ActiveHistory.ca, Crystal Fraser and I have just published a joint essay about Canada’s Indian residential schools and the politics of history. It was written as a response to an earlier Ken Coates essay (“Second Thoughts About Residential Schools“) that was published in the Dorchester Review. We challenge Coates’ account of the current residential schools historiography, particularly his argument that not enough has been done to capture the positive impacts of residential schools and that, “Perhaps it is time to refocus attention away from Residential Schools, the devastating impact of which is well known and the constructive elements largely ignored.”

To read the full essay, click on the link below:

Setting Canadian History Right?: A Response to Ken Coates’ ‘Second Thoughts about Residential Schools’

Dr. Schreiber of San Augustine giving a typhoid innoculation at a rural school, San Augustine County, Texas (LOC)

Over at ActiveHistory.ca, Jim Clifford, Erika Dyck and I have co-edited a series of posts on the topic of  “Infectious Disease, Contagion and the History of Vaccines.” This “#InfectiousHistory” theme week – as we dubbed it on Twitter – brought together some of the leading global historians of infectious disease and vaccination in order to provide some much needed context for contemporary debates and news stories that have proliferated following the return of infectious diseases like measles and ebola as major public health threats over the past year.

Below, I’ve included the introductory essay we wrote as part of this series as well as links to all of the different articles. It was a lot of fun to work with Jim and Erika and I think we can all agree that the contributors made the theme week a real success beyond any of our expectations.

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Cross-posted with ActiveHistory.ca

When I first heard Alvin Dixon’s voice I was driving along Dupont Avenue in Toronto with my partner, Laural, and our three-month-old son, Oscar. Dixon was talking to Rick MacInnes-Rae, who was filling in as the co-host of the CBC Radio show As It Happens. The interview was about Dixon’s experience at the Alberni Indian residential school (AIRS) where he had unwittingly been part of a recently uncovered nutrition experiment conducted by the federal government during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In addition to describing his memories of the experiment – in impressive and accurate detail – Dixon talked in a jarringly blunt manner about hunger and about the horrors of life in that notorious institution on the west coast of Vancouver Island. “It was totally inadequate food a lot of the time,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae. “I remember all of us kids having to steal fruit, steal carrots and potatoes so that we could roast potatoes somewhere off site on a fire and eat them – because we were never full when we left the dining room table.”

Dixon had long suspected that something had been done to them at the school. “As early as 20 years ago,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae, “I heard that there were these experiments from former students who worked in the kitchens.” And when asked what it said to him that his federal government was willing to do this, Dixon responded that it affirmed what he’d always believed: “That the federal government and most Canadians don’t give a shit what happens with us as First Nations people. They’re on our stolen lands, our holy lands and they’re not going to be happy until they have it all. They were trying to eliminate us. So that’s not surprising.”

By the end of the interview I was in tears – something that would happen with increasing frequency over the coming months as I met, corresponded with, and listened to the stories of survivors of these experiments and of Canada’s Indian residential school system more generally. While I’m still not sure what I expected to happen after I published my research on these experiments, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for how profoundly the strength, courage, and anger of survivors like Dixon would change my life and my perspective on what it meant to be an (active) historian. (more…)

The last few months have been a whirlwind, it seems, and I plan to write a long post about my experiences once I have a chance to catch my breath. In the meantime, I’ve been invited to give a number of talks across the country over the next few months. The first talks at Acadia University and the Millbrook First Nation (see below) were two of the most inspiring experiences of my academic career, so I’m looking forward to future talks. I’ll update this post as I get more information from the organizers.

LIST UPDATED 26 March 2014

I’m excited to see that my newest article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” has just come out in the May 2013 issue of the scholarly journal, Histoire sociale/Social History. 

This is the first piece of new, non-dissertation related research I’ve published since receiving my PhD and it was, without a doubt, the most difficult research project I’ve undertaken. But while the subject matter and the sources were often disturbing, I think that the story itself is one the needs to be told if Canadians hope to come to grips with the devastating impact of Canada’s colonial policies governing the lives of Aboriginal peoples.

I struggled to include all of the relevant arguments in the space allotted for the official abstract, so I’ve posted a somewhat extended abstract below that captures a bit more of what I think the paper is trying to say.

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Cross-posted with ActiveHistory.ca

History has a distinct taste. Actually, it also has a distinct smell, feel, sound, and look to it but – as a historian of food and nutrition – I always find myself coming back to the taste of history. No, I’m not talking about the musty, acrid taste of dust and mildew as you open up a long neglected archival box or that weird metallic aftertaste you get after sitting in front of a microfilm reader for way, way too long. History can also taste like molasses, cloves, nutmeg, raisins. You know, the good stuff.

At least this is what I tried to prove to the students in History 3240: Food History at the University of Guelph this past semester. Not only did I want to teach them about the versatility of food history as an entry point into the history of science, immigration, colonialism and gender – not to mention business, environmental, or political history. But I also wanted to prove to them that, as budding food historians, they should always make sure to actually eat their primary sources. (more…)