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Food is one of the most intimate ways we come to know a place. If our understanding of Canadian food is shaped by regional variation and local ingredients, its fullest expression comes at the scale of the neighbourhood.
Eating the Urban Wild leads readers on an unconventional food tour through the wild corners and everyday streets of Montreal. Natalie Doonan reimagines what it means to eat locally, inviting us to experience food not as the consumption of a single dish but as part of a vibrant, entangled ecosystem. From waterfowl hunting on the Lachine Rapids and sturgeon fishing in Lake Saint-Louis to Verdun’s cooperative gardens and aquaponics initiative, beekeeping, community cooking classes, independent grocers, and even fast-food restaurants, this work brims with sensory detail. We hear the voices of hunters, fishers, foragers, biologists, and the author’s own family and friends – all of whom reveal unexpected ways of relating to food. From these neighbourhood practices emerges a broader political and ecological resonance.
Against the backdrop of colonial capitalism, ecological degradation, and accelerating extinction, Eating the Urban Wild highlights communal efforts to cultivate biodiversity and imagines systems beyond extractive and industrial models, positioning food not as commodity but as relation. Poetic and intellectually rigorous, this work frames eating as communication across boundaries: between humans, animals, landscapes, and even the divine.
“From foraging to fishing to fast food, Doonan expertly guides us through a fascinating series of conversations and encounters that shed new light on the meaning of neighbourhood relations and place-based methods. A vital interdisciplinary resource connecting food, ecology, ethics, and belonging at the scale of a neighbourhood.” Elizabeth Miller, Concordia University
“Natalie Doonan’s debut book, Eating the Urban Wild, is a vivid, multi-genre account of one woman’s personal experience connecting with place, specifically the borough of Verdun in Montreal, through an exploration of its food. Facts and historical details dance with sketches and poems between scenes of the author’s experience in creating the work. It is also a rigorously researched academic text intertwining cultural and animal geographies with sensory and performance ethnographies. Doonan asks us to consider what it means to think of food as relational, and to see the unbreakable connection between place and food.” Montreal Review of Books