Two historians of 20th century domesticity in Canada give you the dish on CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner!
Photos courtesy of Susan Eidinger. Please do not reproduce.*
Welcome back to part three of our mini-series reviewing CBC’s new show, Back in Time for Dinner!
Andrea’s Review
As Kesia notes below, I’m not sure if the episodes are getting better, or I’m enjoying them more due to increasing or decreasing familiarity. Regardless, I did enjoy this episode, and the Campus family was once again delightful. I wish we all had people who looked at us the way that Tristan looked at her new dishwasher. Also, cheese is the best food ever, and I think we should officially rename the 1970s, ‘the Decade of Cheese.’
Since we’ve reached the 1970s, I thought it would be interesting to see what my mother, Susan Eidinger, thought of this episode, since she got married in 1976 (and no, I will not tell you how old she is, because I’d like to keep on living). Yes, I do realize I’m being a hypocrite by asking my mother after ranting about the difference between history and nostalgia. The first words out of her mouth were: “that was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.” She gave them credit for the phone, Kraft Dinner, the dishwasher, and the fondue. And my dad (Gordon) apparently approved of the hockey segment. But the rest was a non-starter. As my mother explained, this was more like a stereotype of the 1970s than anything else, one that made them all look really stupid. She seemed most offended by how women were portrayed, particularly the “Suzy Homemaker” style. I had to look this up, because I don’t speak 1970s, but Suzy Homemaker was a line of toys for girls to learn about what it was like to be a good housewife, including mini functional household appliances (blenders, washing machines, etc…). My mother, who does not consider herself a feminist in any way shape or form, resented the way in which Tristan’s whole world seem to revolve around taking care of her family. Women were not so one-dimensional, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that young women in this era were often motivated to “not end up like their mothers.”
But my mother also made a couple of other interesting observations that tie in with my thoughts on this week’s episode. She seriously objected to the clothing worn on the show, referring to it as stereotypical. As she noted, people wore the same things then that they do now: jeans and t-shirts. And lest you think my mother was merely unfashionable, you should know that she was a buyer for Holt Renfrew in the late 1970s, and decided what got sold in the children’s department. When I joked that I could not imagine my grandmother wearing bell bottoms, my mother replied that she wore tailored trousers, thank you very much. This brings me to my first issue: the show is treating the decades and the people within them as discrete and separate categories. Time may move on, but people don’t necessarily do the same. That’s why your grandparents’ house is probably stuck in the 1980s, and your mother still likes scrunchies. I still like the Spice Girls, though I understand that they are cool again. The trends and fads of our youths tend to stay with us, and, as we age, we don’t necessarily keep up with the changing times. So while the clothing worn by the children of the Campus family may have been somewhat reflective of reality, it is unlikely that a married couple with teenaged children would also have worn the same kinds of polyester leisure suits. Nor would the home decor, or even the food, change quite so dramatically. I’m an 80s baby, but I distinctly remember the wood panelling in my parent’s home (still do not understand…) and I regularly ate sloppy joes (which I can’t stand).
Second, as Kesia will discuss in more detail below, the show is extremely Ontario-centric. When my mother remembers the 1970s, her experiences are coloured by the mailbox bombings, the FLQ Crisis, the Montreal Olympics, and the election of Réné Levesque and the Parti Québecois. And yet none of these events were mentioned, despite the fact that there were national implications for all of them. Can you really talk about the 1970s and not mention any of these, or Trudeau’s famous “Just watch me” speech? These seem like strange lapses, especially given the time spent on Tristan and Val figuring out conversions between metric and imperial (couldn’t someone just given them a chart?) or Tristan not understanding how to use a glass ketchup bottle (even I know how to do that). But this points to a larger issue both in terms of defining Canadian culture and research on Canadian history: a very strong dividing line between Quebec and the rest of Canada. As an Anglophone (former) Montrealer, I’ve long found it frustrating that the experiences of Quebec are mostly left out of pan-Canadian discussions. I could go into a very long-winded discussion here about language, nationalism, and culture, but I will simply state that we cannot understand the Canadian experience without talking about Quebec.
I also continue to be frustrated that they only discuss ethnic diversity within the context of food. While I applaud the fact that an academic (Dr. Jo Sharma) was featured, Back in Time for Dinner once again glossed over the more problematic history in favour of showing how “multicultural” Canadians were becoming. Except, that’s not quite how it worked. While Canada was definitely more inclusive (not many white Canadians would have been eating Indian food in the 1940s, for example), this kind of multiculturalism is what is referred to as “song and dance” multiculturalism. Essentially, there was a lot of emphasis placed on cuisine and folk dances, particularly around folk festivals. But this was limited to a surface level understanding of different ethnic cultures, and really more of a trend than anything else. The fact that yoga, paisley, and Indian food became more mainstream was more a product of the commodification of Indian culture than anything else, based on orientalist attitudes about the “exotic east.” I would have vastly preferred if the show had discussed what it was like for Tristan’s Pakistani family to live in Canada during this time period.
Finally, I do want to briefly mention the limits of Canadian historiography (the study of the study of history). There is a lot of discussion about what counts as “history.” In general, the guidelines are anything that was before twenty years ago. But in realistic terms, historians have only recently begun doing comprehensive research on the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. What’s more, there are far fewer Canadian historians than, say, American historians, so there are still many, many areas where there is absolutely no academic research at all. It will be interesting to see the impact that this has on the show moving forward. And yes, my mother has promised to watch the 1980s episode.
*Yes, those are real pictures of my family in the 1970s. Please forgive the less-than-ideal quality, since my mom basically took pictures of these pictures with her iPhone. In clockwise order, the people are:
- Image 1: Dad, maternal grandmother, Mom
- Image 2: Parents
- Image 3: Mom
- Image 4: Dad (when asked what he was doing, my mother said, putting things in the trunk…)
- Image 5: My paternal grandparents, my dad, and my great-grandmother
- Image 6: Parents
- Image 7: Jewish Parents
Kesia’s Review
The 1970s episode of Back in Time for Dinner was interesting and had some great moments. I particularly enjoyed Tristan fangirling about Ron McLean and her dishwasher. I was starting to wonder if the episodes are getting better or if my lack of knowledge about the 1970s from a historical perspective was making things seem better than they are. After I took some time to think about what I do know about the 70s, it was clear that a lot of the same issues we’ve noticed from the start of the series have just continued in various different areas as we move forward in time.
The biggest thing I noticed with this episode was a lack of cohesion. Which I know is a weird thing to say, considering one of my issues with the show has been its general painting of decades as monolithic in terms of style in food, dress, and design. Mostly what I mean by this is that each episode exists on its own – there is no follow through on ideas from one decade to another, besides maybe women’s liberation. For example, at the top of this episode Rota narrates, “The economy was in a tailspin, and with inflation and unemployment rising, the once free and rebellious baby boomers were now focusing on their futures.” While there isn’t really anything wrong with this statement except, like I said in the last post, the boomers in the 60s were concerned with the future, they were just concerned with it in a different way than they are in the 70s. Besides that, they haven’t really discussed much about the Baby Boomers on the show as a generational group. And, as a millenial, it is against my nature to say this; the boomers really are an important force for the shaping of not only the social and cultural zeitgeist of the second half of the 20th century, but its economic and political climate. As Doug Owram points out, as the largest cohort of people in Canada (before the millenials) the general focus of society followed and evolved with the concerns of the Baby Boomers. Given the lack of examination of the importance of Baby Boomers to the 1960s, it seems out of place to start talking about them as influential in the 1970s, especially considering the age span of Baby Boomers covers around 20 years.
In addition to these episode to episode cohesion issues, I think that the 1970s episode picked up a lot of ideas, but didn’t follow them through within the episode. This again is a side-effect of the way the show has been set up to create a rather monolithic experience of each decade. This of course doesn’t lend itself well to explaining the importance of changes between or within each decade. In particular, this episode began by setting the 1970s up as a decade of hard economic times. However, this idea is not really used for more than explaining that it was a reason some married women might decide to work. There is no explanation of what caused these hard economic times (oil price increases 1973-4 and again in 1979-80, high interest rates post 1977, and the surplus of labour as more Baby Boomers began to work), how things fluctuated over the decades, or really how these challenging times affected home life or food. Besides just saying that ground beef was a cheap meat that went a long way, Back in Time for Dinner didn’t really put the Campus family through much of a hard time.
Further, the cohesion issues I see with Back in Time for Dinner are also obvious within how they choose to portray the existence of an overall Canadian national identity and experience. As someone who grew up in Western Canada, one of my biggest pet peeves has always been the continual equation of life in Toronto or Ontario as the norm for Canada. The 1970s episode of Back in Time for Dinner has continued to promote the existence of cohesive “Canadian experience” without acknowledging that experience has regional, racial, gendered, and aged influences. This is particularly frustrating during the 70s, when Canadian regionalism had a huge impact on how Canadians related to themselves and each other. While the National Energy Program was not introduced until 1980, Albertans spent much of the 1970s concerned about world and Alberta oil prices and which level of government should benefit from the royalties and taxes. The fight between the federal and provincial governments fuelled feelings of Western Canadian alienation and severely impacted Albertans’ opinions of P.E. Trudeau and Liberal governments. The show uses events like the ‘72 Summit Series to suggest a fully unified Canadian identity, but blatantly ignores important events that created divisions that persist to this day.
Finally, lets talk about the food, which was also rather cohesive in this episode. Mac and Cheese. Cheeseball. Fondue. So much cheese. Why the 70s was so into cheese I don’t know, but I can get behind it. A lot of the foods featured in this episode were not dissimilar to the foods my family ate while I was growing up. (Ground beef in some kind of casserole was a Kvill house staple. Like Rota noted – a filling, cheap meat!) Also, it was nice to finally see Aaron in the kitchen, and to see the kids take their turn at tackling some kitchen tasks too!
My main beef here (haha) is with how the slow cooker was introduced and talked about in the episode. Slow cookers, as Max Ehrenfreund explained in his Washington Post article, really found their niche in the 1970s as working women realized that slow cookers allowed them to come home to a cooked dinner. By no means did slow cookers eliminate the pressure to prepare and provide an enjoyable and balanced meal to their families, but they did take some of the pressure off. Oddly, instead of directly referencing the link between the rising popularity of the Crock-Pot (patented in 1940 by a Jewish man as a way to slow cook a traditional Eastern European stew eaten on the Sabbath) and the rising number of women entering the workforce, Rota makes and unexplainable connection to comfort foods. This seems anachronistic. I can understand a present day association with slow cooked meals as comfort foods (which are really just foods that evoke nostalgia), but I think that this is more of a modern idea of food in the 70s than an association that existed at the time.
Overall, I think that this episode makes it clear that “Back in Time for Dinner” has taken a “separate spheres” mentality too far. Exploring Tristan’s job as a nurse in this episode while repeatedly ignoring Aaron’s occupation in every decade suggests that changes to diet and food culture were (and are) only influenced by women’s presence (or lack thereof) in the home. Which isn’t necessarily an incorrect concept, its just overly simplistic. Family economies have always been complex and economic, political, religious, gendered and cultural understandings of food have all played important roles in foodways at home.
I was hoping we could look forward to some more complexity with the 70s episode. Perhaps the 80s will go beyond the general trends and generic portrayal of the decade, but given what we’ve seen so far, I doubt it. I’ll have to go comfort myself with a cheeseball.
Recommended Readings
- Dominique Clément, “The October Crisis of 1970: Human Rights Abuses Under the War Measures Act,” Journal of Canadian Studies 41, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 160-186.
- Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2006).
- Greg Marquis, “Constructing an Urban Drug Ecology in 1970s Canada,” Urban History Review / Revue D’histoire Urbaine 42, no. 1 (Fall2013 2013): 27-40.
- Lynne Marks, Margaret Little, Megan Gaucher, T.R. Noddings, “A Job That Should Be Respected’: Contested Visions of Motherhood and English Canada’s Second Wave Women’s Movement, 1970-1990,” Women’s History Review 25, no. 5 (2016): 771-790.
- Eryk Martin, “The Blurred Boundaries of Anarchism and Punk in Vancouver, 1970-1983,” Labour/Le travail 75 (Spring 2015): 9-41.
- Lisa Pasolli and Julia Smith, “The Labor Relations of Love: Workers, Childcare, and the State in 1970s Vancouver, British Columbia,” Labor: Studies In Working Class History Of The Americas 14, no. 4 (December 2017): 39-60.
- Julia Pyryeskina, “‘A remarkably dense historical and political juncture’: Anita Bryant, The Body Politic, and the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Community in January 19782.” Canadian Journal Of History 53, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018): 58-85.
We hope you enjoyed our latest review of Back in Time for Dinner! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian History Roundup. See you then!
See our reviews of previous episodes:
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