At the Kitchen Table: The 1980s

Two historians of 20th century domesticity in Canada give you the dish on CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner!

Welcome back to part three of our mini-series reviewing CBC’s new show, Back in Time for Dinner!

 

Andrea’s Review

“Everything glowed in the 80s.”

Another week, another decade. This episode was both fun and frustrating. Fun mostly because we’ve reached a time period that I recognize, though, to be fair, I was still a little kid in the 80s. So there was more than a little nostalgia here for me, although I have to admit that I have never owned or played with Nintendo (or any gaming console).  And, once again, the Campus family is the best part of the show. I am especially in love with Tristan, who came up with the quote at the top of this review. And girl, your bangs were on point! Aaron was similarly adorable this episode, and I was really pleased to see that they spent more time featuring him than in previous episodes. I also recognize that this week’s episode, and likely next week’s, will be especially challenging due to both the lack of research on the subject as well as having to fight against your own memories of the era.

However, as I’ve said previously, I still think that this could have been so much better. Have you ever seen a movie or television show based on The Time Machine? Since I grew up in the 90s, the Wishbone episode based on the book is the one that sticks out most in my mind, but I digress. Basically, once the operator inside the time-machine and has activated it, an amorphous bubble appears around them, insulating person and machine from the flow of time. Once they have completed their skip forward or backwards in time, the bubble disappears, and person and machine now reappear, untouched, in their new time period.

At this point, you may be wondering what in the world I am talking about or what type of medications I may be on. The reason I bring this up is because it is the best metaphor that I can think of for describing how Back in Time for Dinner has treated Canadian history, particularly in the latter episodes. In this case, their house (though really kitchen and living/dining room) acts as a time-machine, transporting the Campus family from era to era, in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, without consideration of the issues of historical significance and context, or the problem of reductionism.

 

Historical Significance

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you are likely familiar with the concept of historical thinking, particularly as put forward by the Historical Thinking Project. One of the key skills involved in historical thinking is being able to determine historical significance, or evaluate which aspects of the past are the most important. This is an extremely subjective thing, since what is important depends largely upon perspective. What’s more, the things that are deemed historically significant in one time and place can be significantly different those in another. However, the main point remains: part of being a historian involves assessing the relative importance of historical events.

The issue of historical significance is important for Back in Time for Dinner because, as a television show, writers and producers need to make decisions about what to include and what to exclude. In a normal television show, the most important factor is usually entertainment. But when it comes to historical shows, the issue of significance is also relevant. Given the limited time frame, it makes sense to talk about those events that made the most significant impact on the lives of Canadians. At least, that’s what I think.

Which is why I was so puzzled by the episode on the 1980s. It does not make sense in my head that you could do an episode on this decade, and not include a discussion of at least one of these things:

• Terry Fox
• Iran Hostage Crisis
• 1980 Referendum on Separation
• Repatriation of the Constitution
• Charter of Rights and Freedoms
• Rick Hansen
• Ecole Polytechnique Massacre
• Meech Lake

I did not think that it was possible to do an episode on Canada in the 1980s without mentioning any of these events or persons. But it appears I was wrong. Oh so wrong. I do understand the issue of limited time in television episodes, but this week’s episode of Back in Time for Dinner had time to feature two different board games, two different video game consoles, Tristan having coffee, and Bob Ross. In the grand scheme of things, I think Terry Fox had a bigger cultural impact that Bob Ross (though if you read Jenny Ellison’s fantastic piece listed below, this is largely due to mythologizing). Something is not quite kosher here.

Context

This is related to a second larger issue with the show that is based on a lack of understanding about the importance of context. You may want to pause now, since as a social historian, I am unlikely to repeat this again: you cannot understand the social and cultural history of a time without also understanding its political context. (And in case you think I’ve lost my social history mind, I would specify that the opposite is true.) In other words, you cannot divorce a person from the events going on around them, both nationally and internationally. Back in Time for Dinner did a better job in this respect in the earliest episodes, talking about how WW2 impacted the lives of ordinary Canadians for example. But the same is no less true of events like the Repatriation of the Constitution or the 1980 Quebec Referendum. Moreover, by the 1980s, people were more and more connected to the larger world through the medium of television. While there are always people who resist this (teenagers), that doesn’t mean that these larger events don’t have an impact on their lives.

 

Reductionism

Which brings me to my final issue: reductionism, or the process of reducing a complex event or phenomenon to simple terms. This is exactly what Back in Time for Dinner does: it reduces the Canadian experience of the 1980s to life inside the house, history presented in the most simplistic way possible. A great example of this is their treatment this week of Body Break. Don’t get me wrong here, I absolutely love Hal and Joanne, even if they always make me feel guilty for not getting more exercise or eating more fruits and veggies. And of course, I now have the damn song stuck in my head. But the showrunners failed to mention that Body Break was merely one aspect of the ParticipACTION program. They are not one and the same. Rather, ParticipACTION was a government program designed to promote healthy living in Canadians. The program started in the 1970s, and was revived in 2007. This was a national program that sponsored community-based fitness initiatives, provided physical education programs to schools, and was intricately connected to Cold War fears about the physical fitness of Canadians. Seriously, go check out the article listed below to find out more. My point is that trying to reduce ParticipACTION to Body Break is like reducing all pizza to Hawaiian pizza. It just doesn’t work. Also, that is a disgusting combination (#UnpopularOpinion).

Get Out of the Time-Machine

All of this is to say that history is like life: messy and complicated. It’s not designed to be neatly packaged into a 43 minute broadcast. But there are ways of doing it that are much more historically accurate, and, to my mind, more entertaining. You just can’t make some of this stuff up.

Of course, I couldn’t let you go without at least one cute story from my mom. (Btw, she liked this episode a lot better). So back in the 80s, apparently my dad was a big spender (my mom said he spent $1000 on a Betamax. That’s in 1980s money), and he bought a microwave as soon as they were available. As soon as he did, my grandfather (his father) would walk all the way over from his house (about 45 mins to an hour) all the time so that my mother could make him a bacon sandwich in the microwave. He would just randomly appear on the balcony in the backyard, in all seasons, and peer in the window. My grandmother wouldn’t allow bacon in her house (she mostly kept kosher), so he relied on my mom and the microwave. (My mom refuses to cook bacon on the stove, since it’s so messy).

 

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Kesia’s Review

The 1980s episode of Back in Time for Dinner was dull and even more surface level than any of the eras previously explored by the show. As Andrea noted, a lot happened in the 80s of incredible importance to the foundation of a present day Canada. This lack of substance likely has a lot to do with the fact that there is very little historical scholarship on the 80s (and 90s, and really the 70s) in Canada in comparison to the first three episodes. My question then is, why do a show where three episodes have almost no scholarly research to draw from? Why did they not start this show with the 1910s, or even 1920s? Of course, as a historian of the early-20th century I probably would have found a lot of stuff really frustrating, but there would have been a lot more to draw on for properly framing and contextualizing life and food.

At this point one of my biggest issues with the show has to be its general focus on gimmicky trends that don’t add much to the episode. Again, these are very surface level and suggest a lack of critical analysis. Back in Time for Dinner decided to feature certain trends in the 1980s, like smoothies/power-shakes and sushi that weren’t big until until the 2000s. Hal Johnson even said this in the episode! It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to feature trends that actually took over 20 years to work their way into mainstream culture. The whole point of this show is to talk about the way people actually ate and lived in each decade! This was what I liked so much about BBC’s Back in Time for Tea – they didn’t just give a family a dishwasher right when they were available or change their 20s kitchen into a 30s kitchen right away – they showed the gradual change by slowly changing the kitchen to reflect the realities of a family in relation to their social, political, economic, and geographical situation.

The trends didn’t just stop with style in this episode. I really have to take issue with this focus on “gourmet” home-cooking. I don’t have a problem with them featuring this trend, but I do have a problem with them spending the majority of the episode’s food segments on it. It seems highly unrealistic to portray everyday families with two working parents, like the Campuses, constantly cooking “gourmet” in their homes. Trends don’t necessary tell us a lot about what was actually happening within people’s homes on a daily basis. Perhaps a home-cook might give some fancy cooking a go to impress out of town guests or a date, but I am very sceptical about saying that this was the norm for the 1980s. The grilled cheese and tomato soup seems way more accurate for a regular weeknight. (Also I wish they had discussed the use of the No Name brand…)

When I think about food in the 1980s, I cannot help but think of Jean Paré’s Company’s Coming cookbooks, the first of which (150 Delicious Squares) was published in 1981. I had really hoped that these books would feature in the 80s episode. Paré’s cookbooks featured everyday ingredients and simple to follow directions and they were wildly popular in Canadian homes. Both of my parents were given Company’s Coming books for Christmas gifts in the 1980s and they have amassed quite the collection of them over the years. The recipes in these books border on gourmet, but were really more focused on food types and simplicity over style. The second book published was “Casseroles.” Surely that tells you something about the types of meals people were eating in their homes. I feel fairly confident in saying that Company’s Coming has had not only an enormous impact on the Canadian home foodways over the past 30 years, but is also incredibly useful in tracking the changing food trends and sensibilities of the “mainstream” Canadian that Back in Time for Dinner seems so eager to create.

My other issue with the heavy attention placed on “gourmet” home-cooking has to do with the absence of a clear gender analysis. First of all, they chose to focus on Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche but they didn’t explain what the point of the book was. (I had to Google it myself, and I still don’t really understand what side the author was on.) Not explaining what the book was about and why it was important makes it clear that this show is aimed at, as Tristan and Aaron said several times, nostalgia over actual education.

If we want to go really deep here, and we do, the rise of gourmet cooking in the home is directly related to the rise of the chef as a celebrity. As Andrew Friedman explores in his book Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll, the 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of American chefs who dared to be different from the traditional French cooking. Friedman argues that they were informed by the wildness and freedom of the culture they grew up in as Boomers. (Listen to Friedman’s interview on Taste of the Past.) I see an obvious connection here between these new “cool” celebrity chefs and the rise of gourmet food in the home. Cooking as a profession has been traditionally male and has been a challenging world for women to break into. (I was myself discouraged against becoming a chef in high school when a youth leader told me that she had left her chef job because kitchens were a rough place for women.) With media attention given to these men who cooked professionally, it stands to reason that gourmet cooking at home would have been considered an acceptably masculine activity. But it would have to be gourmet and meant to impress rather than an activity that actually made a contribution to a family’s regular routine. Gourmet cooking in its most traditional sense is masculine, where as cooking as care is feminine.

My final thought for today is related to the use of experts on this show. I noticed that “Back in Time for Dinner” has featured only female experts both professional and academic on food and household related activities. I honestly really like this, but do find myself wondering what is behind the decision. Given that Back in Time for Dinner’s thesis seems to revolve around the liberation of women from the kitchen in the last half the the 20th century, they have drawn heavily on the separate spheres ideology (which is of course an outdated analysis). I am concerned that they are further perpetuating separate spheres by having featured only female academics on traditionally female topics. I applaud CBC’s feminism here, but it would be great to see women used as experts on fields outside of “women’s topics” more widely on the network. Perhaps I am uneasy because they are reflecting some of the gendered divisions of expertise that have continued to be prevalent in the historical field.

I’m sure the 90s will be interesting to watch, given that we will be moving to a time period that both Andrea and I remember.

 

Sources:

• Andrew Friedman, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession (New York: Ecco, 2018).
• Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre, Taking the heat : women chefs and gender inequality in the professional kitchen (New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press 2015).

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Conversation

A: So what were all of these feels you mentioned?

K: Largely I felt “MEH” about this episode. It was kind of disappointing for me. There was so much that could have been said about gender as men moved into the kitchen. And it was so fad heavy!

A: I kinda felt that a lot of the things they mentioned as being introduced in the 1980s didn’t come into general use until much later. First time I encountered sushi, I was like 18.

K: Oh me too! This isn’t the first time they did that either. TV dinners in the 50s was odd given not many people had TVs until the 60s. I didn’t know about sushi until I was 18 either – and that was in 2010…

A: I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love sushi. But even in Montreal it wasn’t common until the early 2000s.

K: I would trust no sushi in Camrose.

K: I did enjoy the Body Break people, but again Hal even said it, the smoothie thing wasn’t big until recently. So why bring all these just barely started trends?

A: And meanwhile… no fucking PARTICIPACTION????? Why brings on Hal and Joanne if they weren’t going to talk about Participaction too???? Of course, now I have the body break song stuck in my head.

K: Ahahaha yes, me too! I don’t remember participation. Its like we can’t talk about anything of substance in this show. Like, here is the surface level, fun thing from this decade. Tristan and Aaron mentioned nostalgia several times – which was spot on.

A: They are way too smart for this show. I don’t understand why they wasted time talking about those friendship pins, which several people have told me weren’t a thing, and doing two different kinds of video games, and not talk about some of the things that characterized the 80s in Canada. Nice fly by of Expo 86, which radically changed the nature of Vancouver.

K: Oh totally. Just too many games in general this episode! They also had battleship and Trivial Pursuit. I remember my dad talking about going from Alberta to work for Expo 86. And also they barely talked about the 88 Olympics, which Calgary is still trying to relive.

A: I do have a cute story for the blog post about my grandfather and microwaves though.I’ll type it out here.

K: Great 🙂 (OMG that is adorable. LOVE)

A: He did it occasionally when I was old enough to remember. He walked everywhere. My mom told me the story, because I had totally forgotten. She did like this episode better, but felt that men of her generation still rarely booked. And I think the fact that the a book named Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche was bestseller should have been a tip off.

K: A guy I went on a date with had that book in his apartment because his family thought it was a funny joke. I regretted not reading it today.

A: hehehehe I bet you could still find a copy somewhere! Ironically though, my husband looooves quiche.

K: as he should – cheese and eggs in a pie shell is so yummy.

A: I actually can’t stand quiche. 😛 I don’t like eggs.

K: I ALSO DON’T LIKE EGGS unless they are super covered in something like cheese our sour cream

A: Je suis tres skeptique. Also, I’m too Jewish to eat cheese and bacon together. Gives me the willies.

K: See, this is what they are missing with these shows. The differences in cooking because of religious and cultural backgrounds.

A: (Jews are also an ethnicity. 😉 ) What differences? ::eyeroll::

K: (Right!) I was also really bothered by the focus on “gourmet cooking.” Too much of it and not enough of what families were probably cooking on a daily basis.

A: I cannot even imagine cooking a chicken in a microwave.

K: It sounds so gross. I don’t think you could get crispy skin on it. We did have a couple microwave cookbooks though. I got to take one when I moved to residence.

A: The food processor was a much bigger deal for my family. My mom had several cookbooks for that appliance, and I do remember it getting regular use. She also had a wok, and loved that TV show.

K: That is interesting! My mom also had an electric wok, but I have never heard of the show. It looked fun!

A: I think I remember the PBS version. Speaking of which, BOB ROSS!!!!!! I remember being so upset when I found out he died.

K: Wait, he died! I didn’t know that!

A: He died like 20 years ago. 😛

K: Wow… that is crazy how his shows stuck around.

A: 1995.

K: I was 3.

A: I was 11. 😛 But I loved his shows. They were so relaxing and pretty. But they’ve become big since then because of ASMR.

K: Right, I  do remember reruns on AccesTV in the 90s/2000s even. I don’t know I’ve ever heard of people actually painting to them.

A: I think people actually took his workshops and everything.

K: That would make sense, he seems like he was a nice instructor.

A: I could listen to that man talk for days. But, it’s not really a Canadian thing.

K: Ya. I am definitely all for talking about cross-border media etc., but I think that it needs to be clear what was and wasn’t Canadian and how some of these trends were more international/American. Its okay to say that Canada participated in American consumerism.

A: And why not talk about Canadian hits, like the Beachcombers.

K: Very good point. And Mr. Dressup 😛

A: Royal Canadian Air Farce started as a radio show in the 1970s.

K: Oh that show. I miss it still! AND KIDS IN THE HALL. Wait was that the 90s? Checked. Started 88.

A: The new ones on NYE just aren’t as good…. Um. I never watched Kids in the Hall. But it seems like this show’s theme is missed opportunities. Too much focus on the wrong stuff, not enough focus on the right stuff.

K: I concur. At this point its quite frustrating.

A: Bah humbug

K: Historians, we just can’t enjoy things.

A: We can’t enjoy poorly researched and inaccurate things. 😛

K: true – my kingdom for a great historical Canadian TV show that is accurate enough that I don’t want to tip stuff over.

A: Moral of the story: hire an actual historian and listen to them. And this includes both academic and public historians — people who are sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to do research accurately.

K: Hear, hear! (What is the right thing here… probably praise hand emojis.)

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Recommended Readings

• Catherine Carstairs, “’Roots’ Nationalism: Branding English Canada Cool in the 1980s and 1990s” Histoire Sociale 39, no. 77 (2006): 235-255.
• Jenny Ellison, “A ‘Unifying Influence on Our Nation;’ Making and Remaking the Meaning of Terry Fox,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 49, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 170-190.
• Marc-André Gagnon,  “Adieu le mouton, salut les Québécois!”: The Lévesque government and Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day Celebrations, 1976-1984,” in Celebrating Canada: Holidays, National Days, and the Crafting of Identities, edited by Matthew Hayday and Raymond Blake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 356-379.
• Victoria Lamb Drover,  “ParticipACTION, Healthism, and the Crafting of a Social Memory (1971–1999),” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 25, no 1 (2014) : 277–306
• Nicolas Matte, “Rupert Raj, Transmen, and Sexuality: The Politics of Transnormativity in Metamorphosis Magazine during the 1980s,” in We Still Demand: Redefining Resistance in Sex and Gender Struggles, edited by Patrizia Gentile, Gary Kinsman, and L. Pauline Rankin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), 117-136.
• Michael Poplyansky, “The Rootedness of Acadian Neo-nationalism: The Changing Meaning of le 15 août, 1968-1982,” in Celebrating Canada: Holidays, National Days, and the Crafting of Identities, edited by Matthew Hayday and Raymond Blake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 380-404.

*Special thanks to Matthew Hayday and Shannon Stettner for helping me find scholarly articles on this time period!

 

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That’s it for our penultimate review of Back in Time for Dinner! Special thanks to Gillian Leitch and Shannon Stettner again for their feedback on this week’s review, and to Gillian for the loan of her picture! We hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post. 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:

• The 1940s
• The 1950s
• The 1960s
• The 1970s