This week was a Canadian whirlwind for me and some of my colleagues, as we celebrated the publication of a special Food section devoted to the pleasures of Canadian cuisine with live journalism events in Toronto and Montreal. On Monday night I led a discussion at the University of Toronto, with David Sax and the subjects of his story about a rise in Syrian food businesses in Toronto; the following morning I made my way to Montreal to interview the restaurateur David McMillan at the Corona Theater in Little Burgundy. The conversations were nuanced and deeply interesting, and the questions we took from the audiences indicated to me a real and abiding interest in the particulars and particular charms of Canadian cuisines, the plural intended: a nation of immigrants and indigenous peoples that sees its reflections on its plates.

McMillan in particular was fascinating on this point, an Anglophone native of Montreal with a fierce, almost separatist take on the importance of French culture in the province, who still pointed out that French Canadian cooking has roots in Britain as well. “Ours is a cuisine of the occupied,” he said. There were murmurs of approval in the audience before him.

For myself, I was struck most by the passion of all those we spoke to, onstage and off, for the culture of Canada’s foodways. We went to Canada knowing we had a few stories to tell. I return to New York knowing there are dozens and dozens more. All of us on the Food desk, and all those of us who work in our bureaus in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, hope to tell them soon and over the course of many years to come.