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SETTING THE TABLE: Food, Fusions, and Welcoming Communities
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I was born in the countryside…in the district of Vihiga in western part of Kenya.
My mom was a very, very welcoming woman.
She raised us to be able to embrace whoever comes in and to take them in as family.
Jane Omollo, Sault Ste. Marie
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I was born in Trinidad. Trinidad and Tobago.
My great-grandfather came from Hong Kong as a businessman and he married my great grandmother, who was a Carib princess.
Trinidad was known as the most cosmopolitan country in the world. So, I grew up with people from all cultures, races.
leZlie lee kam, Toronto
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I was born in Penang, Malaysia. I have one brother. I come from a Buddhist family and at home, we spoke Hokkien and Malay.
And I was sent to a Methodist Girls’ School. I have classmates who are Muslims… And there are Hindus.
Even though it’s a Christian school, it’s just open up to other people.
Siew Lin Polk, Edmonton
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Emily Burton
Oral Historian
Emily Burton (EB): My name is Emily Burton. I am an oral historian at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. I was born in Peru, and food has always been a meaningful part of my cultural identity. A favourite Peruvian dish is lomo saltado, or stir-fried beef. It is a fusion between local ingredients, like the potato, and the method of sautéing beef first used by Chinese chefs in Lima in the nineteenth century. After a trip to Peru, lomo saltado also became my son’s favourite Peruvian meal. He now makes a Canadian version: tofu saltado.
This video explores similar food experiences through three people I have had the pleasure to meet and interview: Jane Omollo, leZlie lee kam, and Siew Lin Polk. We learn about their experiences through the lenses of memory, migration, and family and community in Canada.
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Memory, Migration, Family and Community
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MEMORY
Food “is much more for us than a necessity of our physical being: it defines who we are and what we refuse to be.”
Robert Scott Stewart, Food for Thought.
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Ugali, Chicken Stew, Chapati: What is Kenyan Food?
Jane Omollo
Jane Omollo (JO): We had very simple meals growing up…So, most of the time the main meal will be ugali, and ugali was made from the cornmeal, and you could cook ugali with a bunch of many things. It would either be with a vegetable stew, a beef stew, a fish stew, a chicken stew. Where I come from…We are known for loving chicken and people like to cook chicken a lot, but the chicken will always go with vegetables…We also loved to cook chapati—chapati. Our cooking has been heavily influenced by the Indian cooking…Many people ask me, “What is the Kenyan food?” I say, “I don’t know what to say, because it’s been a blend of all the cultures that have been in Kenya for years and years.” So, you’ll find the British cuisines will be part of our meal, the Indian cuisine will be part of our meal, and then the traditional things that people planted.
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Sharing Meals in a Working Class Trinidadian Family
leZlie lee kam
leZlie lee kam (llk): We were working-class. My father was working-class, but he always made sure we had three meals a day and a little treat once a week…Well, my father was very strict about us having meals together. So even if we didn’t see each other during the day, we all came home for lunch…So, we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, and we always waited until my father came home.
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Home Economics, Peranakan Chinese, and Laska in Malaysia
Siew Lin Polk
Siew Lin Polk (SLP): Children are not allowed to be in the kitchen…So we learned cooking at school…Home-Ec. That’s how we learned our cooking of different dishes. And it could be British cooking or Malaysian cooking…We are called the Peranakan Chinese…Our food are in fusion with the locals. So it’s not very Chinese but very spicy. It’s very different from the food in China. One of my favourite dishes is laksa, which is a fishy soup with noodles and, what are called, mint in it, which, which is good when you have a cold.
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MIGRATION
“Food can cross space unlike almost anything else, passing through geographic borders.”
Beth M. Forest & Greg de St. Maurice, Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place, and Taste.
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Groceries and School Lunches: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Sault Ste. Marie.
Jane Omollo
JO: The volunteers are involved almost in everyday life…“Would you like to go grocery shopping? Which places have you been? Okay, I’ll take you to Food Basic, I’ll take you to No Frills.”… They help when school starts to go in and tell the parents, “This is how we pack a lunch for a child in Canada.” Maybe they never had to pack a lunch where they came from, or maybe lunch was provided at school…To me, it’s a win-win for everybody because we as volunteers are able to learn from the newcomers; the newcomers are also able to learn from us. So, it’s a cross-cultural learning for everybody.
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Hot and Spicy: Food Fusions in Toronto
leZlie lee kam
llk: So, I like hot and spicy. So, I cook my own kind of Trini-style food, but coming from Trinidad we are used to eating Chinese food and Indian food, but with a Trini flavour. So those are my two favourites, Indian and Chinese. And now I love Thai food. Anything that’s hot and spicy. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of doubles? So, doubles are our Trini street food. So, they’re two little deep-fried, um, patties, like little crepes made from chickpea flour, what we call chana. And in the middle is curried chickpeas. Curried chana…so that’s, it’s like a two, three-biter. And, so those are the two things that are my favourites, doubles and Dim Sum. And everything in between that’s hot and spicy.
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Chicken Feet and Oyster Sauce: First Experiences in Rural Alberta
Siew Lin Polk
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Welcome to Oyen
Alberta Medicine Hat Oyen
SLP: Oyen is a town of a thousand population…two hours north of Medicine Hat…My first experience in Oyen, and there was a Hutterite colony, and the Hutterites came to know that I wanted chicken feet. So they say, well, they will bring the chicken feet, you know, to me. And I said, “Wow! Sure! I’ll have it.” And so they showed up with two hundred feet, which my husband has to chop the claws off for me. And, of course, I couldn’t finish all of them…With the chicken feet, I put in the crockpot with soya sauce and oyster sauce and onions, and you just let it just cook and then steam it for quite a while until you could eat the—I like the bones!
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FAMILY AND COMMUNITY IN CANADA
Food history is…more than what people ate or cooked and at what point in time; it is even more, perhaps, about what food and its attendant customs meant and mean.
Franca Iacoveta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp, Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History.
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ACCANO: Cooking for Community
Jane Omollo
JO: So we started ACCANO, which stands for African Canadian Caribbean Association of Northern Ontario, in the hope that it would unify all of us together. It started as a small organization with the families that were there…So, we had our first potluck and we, we decided to have it at the Sault Community Career Centre, and it was attended by about fifty people. That was big, because I didn’t realize that we would have fifty people come together. And so, we said: “Maybe every year we need to start doing something, one thing that brings all of us together.”…And Black History Month became a natural fit for everybody…And Sault College gave us their space to do our first Black History Month…We did all the cooking ourselves, so we went there early in the morning. They have a kitchen, they gave us a kitchen. We bought the food, we went there, we cooked and cooked. Everybody came together and we had a nice, wonderful time.
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Birthday Dim Sum and Chosen Family
leZlie lee kam
llk: Many of us who are older dykes, lesbians, gay, have been estranged from our biological families, so we have what we call chosen families…So, my chosen family, I have very, a circle of very close friends. An example that I use is, my birthday…So, I have this new tradition…we go for Dim Sum. So I invite the circle of friends who I know that I can pick up a phone and call any one of them, and the group just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and at my last Dim Sum birthday gathering, there were twelve people. Men and women. Yeah. So, I’m very lucky to have that kind of chosen family.
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Pierogies and Curry: Creating Community
Siew Lin Polk
SLP: I live in a community whereby they’re mostly Europeans. A lot of Ukrainians. And I learn to eat Ukrainian dishes—pierogies, which is one of my favourites. And also there are some sort of a English background, which is shepherd’s pie…And I came to love pumpkin pie...I learned to make pumpkin pie. Not shepherd’s pie, but uh—pierogi, no I tried, but it’s just not the same as Ukrainian cooking it themselves, making it. They just make it just perfect…I introduce curry to, to the Canadians, which they find very spicy. They find very funny that I love fish. I like to panfry eat the fish and eat the fins because they are so crispy. There are lots of interesting things that they get to know about me and me about them.
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FINAL THOUGHTS
Jane, leZlie, and Siew Lin all brought with them eating habits and food fusions from their places of origin, re-creating them in Canada as they added new ingredients to the mix—as well as new neighbours, new families, and new communities.
Memories from home, migration journeys, and new senses of belonging.
We come to enjoy the songs, we come to enjoy the food, we come to enjoy the togetherness, the fact that we can come together to celebrate a common thing.
Jane
Every now and then I’ll have a Trini lime at my home and do some Trini-style cooking…Trinis love to cook, but not for ourselves, for other people.
leZlie
I love different culture. And I love different kind of food…any kind as, as long as delicious.
Siew Lin
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SETTING THE TABLE: Food, Fusions, and Welcoming Communities
Thank you to Jane Omollo, leZlie lee kam, and Siew Lin Polk for generously sharing your reflections on food as part of your migration stories.
Thank you to research intern Alonso Rangel for your valuable contributions to the project.
Thank you to all Museum staff who also facilitated the video production in different ways.
SOURCES
Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21:
Oral History with Jane Omollo. (17.05.19JO)
Oral History with Siew Lin Polk. (14.11.25SL)
Oral History with Lezlie Lee Kam. (16.09.30LLK)
Photograph of Lezlie Lee Kam’s father, 1986. (DI2019.147.9)
Patrick Kingham. “Food History Literature Review.” CMIP Research Report, 2023.
Alonso Rangel. “Memories of/in adaptation: Food and Homemaking.” CMIP Oral History Report, 2024.
Additional Sources:
Beth M. Forest and Greg de St. Maurice. Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place, and Taste. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022 (pp. 3-4).
Franca Iacoveta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp, editors. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012 (p. 10).
Robert Scott Stewart and Susan A. Korol, editors. Food For Thought: A Multidisciplinary Discussion. Sydney: Cape Breton University, 2012 (p. 8).
Photographs of Lima coast and Emily and son in restaurant, 2016, courtesy of Emily Burton.
Photographs of Kenyan food courtesy of Jane Omollo.
Photographs of Sault Ste. Marie ACCANO dinners, courtesy of ACCANO via Jane Omollo.
Photographs of Toronto Dim Sum, 2025, courtesy of leZlie lee kam.
Photograph of the town of Oyen, Alberta, Canada, taken by Jonathan Koch, RPAP. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
Music: “Happiness” by Grand Project. Courtesy of Pixabey.
CREDITS
Interviewer: Emily Burton
Interview Videographers: Darryl LeBlanc, John Hillis
Video Production: Emily Burton, Darryl LeBlanc
Video Editing: Darryl LeBlanc
Countless Journeys. One Canada.