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Fabien-Ouellet points to the darker history of poutine — long before it became a Canadian culinary darling — when Quebeckers grappled with the “poutine stigma.”

The dish was invented in the 1950s, but only started its rise to prominence in the past 10 years or so, helped along by inventive Quebec chefs and a youth nightlife culture that appreciated poutine’s virtues as a post-bar snack. In the in-between years, the rest of Canada (and France) snickered at the inelegant mix of fries, cheese curds and gravy, and used the dish to reinforce stereotypes of Quebeckers as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” Fabien-Ouellet said.

It also went through an uncomfortable phase in the early 2000s of being the stand-in for “junk food” in Quebec conversations about healthy eating.

“Every time we talk about junk food in the media in Quebec, it’s almost certain a poutine image that will come up,” he said.

Some in Quebec actually felt shame about poutine: “an embarrassing culinary invention that evokes an old complex of Quebec people’s inferiority.” And that sense of shame persists in some older Quebeckers.

“My parents and grandparents, when I talked about my work on poutine, they were saying, ‘Oh poutine? Why do you even talk about that?’ ” Fabien-Ouellet told the National Post.

“Poutine has been used at times to tarnish Quebec culture and undermine its legitimacy of self-determination as a nation,” Fabien-Ouellet writes in the paper, which was published in CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures. On Monday, his research will receive the Canadian Association for Food Studies’ Student Paper Award at the Congress at Ryerson.