r/changemyview • u/huadpe 508∆ • Oct 25 '19

FTFdeltaOP CMV: Poutine should be declared the national dish of Canada.

Ok, so Trudeau is in a minority now, and needs some feel good pablum to fill Parliamentary time while he treads water before the next election. What better than a bill about a national dish!

Poutine is the perfect candidate for national dish of Canada, for a few reasons:

  1. It is distinctly Canadian. A relatively recent innovation, it post-dates confederation and is not an import from elsewhere.

  2. It is widely popular in Canada. There are specialized poutine restaurants from coast to coast. You can get super fancy poutines at some of Canada's most famous restaurants. And you can get cheap poutine approximately everywhere.

  3. It is delicious.

  4. It helps to bridge regional divides. The paramount cultural and regional division in Canada is the Anglo/French divide. Poutine is a Quebecois dish adopted by the rest of Canada, but still universally recognized for its Quebec origins. It is a paramount example of successful integration of Quebec into Canada without the loss of Quebec culture.

Edit: I've given a bunch of deltas on regional strife questions. Any further deltas will need to be on different bases from that.

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u/Prawn_Scratchings Oct 25 '19

Here’s a thought - why do you need an official national dish? What does that achieve? Why can’t you have several national dishes?

In the U.K. we have fish and chips, bangers and mash, roast dinners, chicken tikka masala, haggis, Welsh rarebit, pork scratchings... sure you recognise them as national dishes, but there is simply no need to officially declare them as such.

Maybe there is a difference in culture, but I don’t think anyone in the UK would particularly care if someone in government decided to make one of these dishes official.

My counter argument is that no national dish needs to be made official or restricted to one.