Cuban food historian Andrew Huse dies at age 52
CBC investigation finds some big grocers promoting imported food with Canadian branding
FOOD NEWS
Like many shoppers these days, Stacey Dineen, who lives just outside Kitchener, Ont., is all-in on the buy Canadian movement. "Trump's comments about annexing Canada, wanting to make us part of the United States, boy, that really kind of lit something," she said. Dineen buys Canadian food whenever she can, but when she can't, she looks for imported products from outside the United States. And Canada's major grocery chains have jumped on the trend, running patriotic ads and pledging to help shoppers buy Canadian. But Dineen says she gets frustrated when grocers provide conflicting information about where a product comes from.
Last week, for example, she saw organic broccoli at her local Sobeys grocery store. A sign stated it was a "product of Canada," but the fine print on the tag said "produce of USA."
Andrew Huse, a historian whose voracious appetite for telling stories about food as an essential ingredient in culture led him on a quest to unravel the disputed origins of the Cuban sandwich, died on Aug. 20 at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 52.
His mother, Carol Elwood, said he took his own life. As an archivist and librarian at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Mr. Huse scoured the institution’s holdings of historical materials about the state in search of menus, recipes and other culinary artifacts that revealed the region’s history and culture. “I have always seen the library not simply as a passive repository for published material, but as an active, dynamic generator of unique content,” he said in a university blog post in 2020. After publishing a book on the history of the Columbia Restaurant — Florida’s oldest continuously operating eatery — and another on Tampa’s saloons and steakhouses, Mr. Huse turned to a spirited dispute over the birthplace of the Cuban sandwich.In one corner: Miami, with the country’s largest population of Cuban immigrants, who made their sandwich with ham, pork, Swiss cheese, mustard and pickle slices pressed between slices of chewy Cuban bread.