










































Storm Days 
Playing with Food and Time 
By: Diane Tye 

 
Folklorists have explored the many ways that food connects us to the past and how it articulates 
family, ethnic and regional identities (see Brown and Mussell 1984) but what of its temporal 
connections to the present? Unlike holidays that have long histories of very particular food rituals 
associated with them, such as turkey at Thanksgiving or fruitcake at Christmas, storm days—those days 
when schools and offices are shut down because of a snow storm—are connected to a variety of foods 
rather than codified by a particular dish. The foodways that characterize these snow days—which 
usually amount to three or four days during a winter in St. John’s, Newfoundland—contrast to other 
holidays. They highlight procurement, consumption, and most significantly, preparation, rather than 
elements such as presentation that are usually associated with ritual meals (Yoder 1972 in Long 2000). 
Taking up anthropologist David Sutton’s position that foodways have much to teach us, not only at 
‘loud’ ritual occasions but in the pragmatic, ritualized aspects of everyday life (Sutton 2001:28), in this 
research note I reflect on the meanings of food prepared and consumed by twenty-four people during a 
storm day in St. John’s, Newfoundland on March 7, 2012 (see list of foods at end of research note). 
Eighteen replied to an email query I sent out on March 8th to faculty, students and staff of the Folklore 
Department at Memorial University asking what they had eaten during the storm the day before. A 
similar question posted on Facebook garnered four replies. Finally, I also draw on two callers to 
“Crosstalk,” an open line show on CBC radio aired March 7th. Both were children who described food 
they had eaten or prepared during the storm. Roland Barthes writes that when we buy an item of food, 
consume or serve it, we do not manipulate a simple object in a purely transitive fashion; “this item of 
food sums up and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies” (1997:21). Here I 
draw on the eating experiences of these twenty-four people (identified by pseudonyms) to ask what 
the food prepared and eaten on storm days signifies and in particular what it tells us about the 
relationship of food to time. 

 

Embracing Timelessness 

The beauty of a snow day is, of course, that everything is cancelled; there is nowhere to go and no 
outside commitments to keep. Unable to leave your house, and often with the next day’s 
responsibilities either met or temporarily suspended (I can’t finish my paper because all my books are 
at the university), the day belongs to you rather than those who usually buy your time. With the 
demands of Goffman’s front region temporarily lifted, you can set your own agenda in ways that 
privilege back region pleasures: sleeping in, staying in your pajamas all day, or reading a book just for 
fun. For a day, as one ten-year-old claimed, “You don’t really keep track of time” (Crosstalk 2012). 
This breakdown in routine results in one of the greatest gifts of the snow day, time slows down. 



Food and food-related activities contribute significantly to an altered sense of time. In his classic essay 
on the symbolic representation of time, anthropologist Edmund Leach suggested that the modern 
notion of time embraces repetition. Leach writes, “every interval of time is marked by repetition; it 
has a beginning and an end which are ‘the same thing’” (1963:126). Our inner biological or circadian 
clock may be mainly entrained by the repetition of light/dark cycles but it is also strongly affected by 
the repetition of daily feeding cycles (Mendoza 2006:127). The sense that time slows down on a snow 
day can be linked in part to an abandoning of the usual meal structure. For example, Martha described 
her family members as being “on their own” for breakfast and lunch followed by “a simple meal” for 
supper. Further freedom can come with the consumption of unconventional meals: Paula’s lunch was 
Doritos— “lots of them.” If we did not know already, Mary Douglas’s famous essay, “Deciphering a 
Meal,” taught us that Doritos do not constitute a meal. Douglas persuasively argued that a meal 
conforms to a formula: a stressed main course and two unstressed courses (1997:43). Doritos do not fit 
the formula; they are lunch but not a “real” lunch. 

Edmund Leach also noted that people see themselves positioned in the time process as oscillating 
between opposites: day and night or life and death (1963:126). On snow days, the normal emphasis on 
dinner as the day’s most significant meal is disrupted. For several of the people I spoke with about the 
March 2012 storm, breakfast, the first meal of the day, rather than the last, was what they invested 
most time and effort in. Anna described a storm day as “a good excuse for a ‘weekend breakfast,’ 
pancakes, bacon, eggs, etc.” Cathy and Michael detailed the preparation of elaborate breakfasts. 
Cathy reported, “I decided that a storm day was a good day to make special breakfast (because you 
can take your time with food prep and eating, on storm days), so I made chocolate crepes. With 
bananas and yogurt and chocolate shavings. Deeelicious! My other thought when I woke up was to make 
French toast but I’ve made that more recently than crepes, and I wanted to make something I don’t 
usually make.” Michael wrote: “I made Red River cereal with raisins and dried apricots, and yogurt 
(This takes too long to prepare for a usual weekday breakfast, and my wife is not keen on it anyway, so 
I’d say this counts as storm-related). And my usual toast and marmalade, and of course the usual strong 
coffee, without which nothing can happen.” These breakfast meals challenge Mary Douglas’s formula of 
what constitutes a proper meal. What is this meal? Is it breakfast? Lunch? Supper? As well, eating 
breakfast later in the day than one would normally may contribute to a sense of time slowing down and 
of a day that is just beginning even though hours are passing. 

Much of what is eaten on snow days mirrors the preparation of breakfasts in that it is more time 
consuming than what would be prepared on a usual weekday morning. For example, Michael also made 
a beef stew, Nina cooked up a pot of chili, and Cliff prepared a version of his favorite Cuban dish, 
Spanish-style chickpeas. He did this in a crockpot, starting the meal at 9:00 am and eating it for supper 
at 7:00 pm. Often food preparation on a snow day is slow. 

 

Play 



Within a larger context of timelessness, snow days create opportunities for play: bounded, voluntary, 
free, and satisfying activities that contrast to everyday responsibilities (see Huizinga 1950). There is 
time to do a crossword puzzle, watch a movie, or even play Monopoly. For some, food becomes part of 
this play. Time-consuming dishes like home-made pasta transform food preparation into recreation. 
Jennifer described spending part of the day on a labour intensive lasagne sauce because as she notes, 
“the storm day bought me some time I didn’t expect to have,” while Maggie’s room-mates devoted 
three hours to making home-made ravioli. Others engaged in recreational baking. Anna claimed, “I 
almost always bake something during a snow day” and several people spoke of often baking bread. 
During the March snow storm, Brenda made a cake which she served with blueberries, partridgeberries 
and yogurt; Alice made a batch of chocolate chip cookies “because she had time” and Eve baked 
oatmeal chocolate chip muffins. Eve, the mother of a one-year-old actually spent most of her day in 
the kitchen producing a series of elaborate dishes: “By 9:00 am I was resigned to being trapped in my 
kitchen for the rest of day. I say kitchen because we have an open living room/kitchen space which is 
now essentially one giant playroom for Sarah. I can’t read, I can’t watch TV, but I can bake and cook 
while still keeping an eye on Sarah.” In addition to muffins, Eve prepared a lentil nut loaf complete 
with home-made bread crumbs and made an Israeli couscous salad with roasted tomatoes and zucchini 
which had marinated in a Dijon vinaigrette. She also roasted beets. Although Eve’s daughter was too 
young to help, others baked as a shared activity: Maggie’s room-mates worked together to produce the 
home-made ravioli while an eight-year-old girl who phoned in to the open-line radio show, Crosstalk, 
was looking forward to making muffins with her mother that afternoon. 

Eve jokingly suggested that “the blizzard set me into some kind of survival cooking mode” but slowly 
made food does recall an earlier way of life. There is a sense in which people, like Michael with his 
homey beef stew that he claimed not to have made in many years, are playing at a more labour 
intensive type of home-making than they usually engage in. It speaks to the commemorative function 
of food identified by Barthes: “food permits a person…to partake of the national past,” Barthes wrote. 
He continued, “food frequently carries notions of representing the flavorful survival of an old, rural 
society that is itself highly idealized. In this manner, food brings the memory of the soil into our very 
contemporary life” (1997:24). 

Much of the food prepared during the March snow storm was simmered, baked or roasted. It as if this 
food, or even the smell of food baking or slowly cooking, provides psychological protection against the 
elements; in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, the roasting might bring us closer to nature, the power of which 
cannot be denied on a snow day. “Mon pays, ce n’est un pays, c’est l’hiver” (My country is not a 
country, it’s winter”) penned Québec songwriter Gilles Vigneault in his song that has achieved the 
status of a Canadian national anthem. Vigneault relies on the winter as a metaphor for aspects of 
Canadian life, including the cultural isolation of northern Quebec in the 1960s. But he also summons up 
positive connotations; he promises to remain faithful and hospitable like his father before him who 
built a home there. It is an approach echoed by Adam Gopnik in his 2011 Massey lectures, “Winter: Five 
Windows on the Season,” where he explores the central theme that “winter started as this thing we 



had to get through; it has ended as this time to hold on to” (Gopnik 2011). Gopnik’s “windows” include 
the recreational winter, the recuperative winter and the process of remembering winter. 

The meal in the crockpot connects the cook and/or those who eat it in a playful way to earlier 
generations of Canadians who have met the challenge of winter blizzards. It breaks down usual barriers 
of time to create commonality across centuries. The food helps to create a sense of communitas not 
only among members of a household who share it but among all those through Canadian history who 
battled extreme weather. We are in this together. It also contributes to an altered sense of time, and 
perhaps a sense of timelessness in that these are not the foods of our time. In contrast to the fast, 
industrial, convenience, ready-made, or prepared deli foods that characterize food consumption 
patterns in 2012 (see Jabs and Devine 2006), storm day food harkens back to an earlier time when food 
was made from scratch and at home. The dishes prepared and eaten on storm days help to create a 
time out of time. 

 

Nurturing 

Snow day food also makes temporal connections with more personal and less remote pasts. Consistent 
with Linda Kulman’s observation that people associate the consumption of simple foods with nostalgia 
(Kulman 2000), several people prepared simple food that signified their childhood. Judith made a 
breakfast dish for her husband and young child that she called "hole in the middle." She described it as 
“fried toast with the center torn out and a fried egg in the hole - lots of butter!” Jean reported, “I ate 
a peanut butter and banana sandwich on toast (which I rarely eat because I'm not a fan of bananas but 
it’s one of those foods that makes me feel like a little kid being taken care of again!)” Others made 
fried potatoes, a fried ham sandwich, and pasta with cheese, which although they did not link 
specifically to childhood may well have been connected to it. This may have been true for Judith as 
well when she ate several slices of home-made molasses bread and for the three people who baked 
chicken: crispy coated baked chicken, Shake n’ Bake chicken and baked chicken breast. Certainly there 
are childhood favorites among the dishes people described “usually making” on a storm day: 
shepherd’s pie, beef pot pie, macaroni and canned tomatoes, and other forms of pasta. Snow day food 
takes people back in time. It supports David Sutton’s argument that the transitory and repetitive act of 
eating is a medium for the more enduring act of remembering that is intricately connected to identity 
(Sutton 2001:2). Sutton contends that food creates the experience of synesthesia (the crossing of 
experiences from different sensory registers: taste, smell, and hearing) that allows individuals to 
“return to the whole” (Sutton 2001:17). Snow day food becomes an articulation of who we are, or 
maybe more accurately who we were but don’t want to forget. 

On the March 2012 storm day, an element of indulgence characterized much of the food and drink 
people consumed: chocolate crepes, fried scallops, brie and crackers, cupcakes, a nip of port, hot 
chocolate, tea with vanilla sugar, and coffee laced with liqueur. It is common to stock up on groceries 
the day before a winter storm is forecast—although power outages lasting more than a few hours are 



not usual, they are certainly possible—and stores are usually crowded. This means that cupboards are 
often well stocked with appropriate storm day foods. As Susan noted, “It is customary in my household 
that if we are expecting to have a snow day we stock up on junk food—chips, dip, munchies for the day 
and usually have pizza or hamburgers and fries or something like that.” It would be interesting to track 
eating habits over the course of a winter’s worth of storms to see of the nature of supplies purchased 
for a snow day change. The March storm at the focus of this paper was obviously very late, the last of 
three or four that year and Susan, as well as one other person in the group I’m drawing on, specifically 
mentioned they had not stocked up with the usual vigour. Nonetheless, the liminality of the storm day 
that means you are free to do what you want when you want to do it, extends to food (See Jabs and 
Devine 2006 for discussion of time and food choices). Most people described making and eating food 
that they enjoyed and regarded as special in some way. 

Because freedom and pleasure is found in snow day food, it provides insight into how context affects 
what constitutes “good” food or “comfort food” (Murcott 1993). At first glance, storm day food seems 
to challenge the findings of earlier studies that report a gendered breakdown in terms of what is 
considered comfort food (men prefer warm, hearty meal-related foods such as casseroles and soup 
while women opt for the more snack related foods such as chocolate and ice cream) as well as age 
preferences (younger people prefer snack-related comfort foods compared to those over fifty-five 
years of age) (See Wansinki et al 2003). Those findings certainly do not describe what the twenty-four 
people here ate during the March 2012 storm. On the other hand, these storm day experiences do 
support the idea that consumers continually incorporate manufactured products into “family 
traditions” (Wallendorf and Arnould 1991). During this blizzard, at least, both men and women and 
eaters of all ages combined modernity (in the form of store bought cookies or candy) with tradition (in 
the form of beef stew or baked chicken). 

What we consider family leisure, such as holiday celebrations, is actually a form of women’s work 
(see Bella 1992). Women often invest huge amounts of labour in recreating holidays because of their 
benefits for family identity. In contrast, snow days emphasize the importance of nurturing the self as 
much as strengthening familial bonds. Rather than contained in one single dish, snow day food 
emphasizes desired qualities and characteristics: the hot, the sweet, the baked or complex flavours 
slowly cooked. This food can nurture relationships with others in the home and with one’s past; its 
procurement, preparation and/or consumption are relational. It can also represent a time of personal 
freedom. As food that allows for both pause and play, it is restorative, feeding the soul and preparing 
bodies for return to the everyday world. 

 

Conclusion 

Storm day foodways function with the same temporal complexity as Pravina Shukla observed that 
clothing and adornment does for men and women in India. It allows individuals “[to] position 
themselves at once in different temporal realms, some broad and historical, others intimate and 



personal” (Shukla 2005:4). In the foods prepared and eaten during snow storms modernity and tradition 
merge; foods remembered from childhood include home cooked dishes and commercial foods and 
indulgences stretch from the refined nip of port to a home-baked cake to the purchased bag of Doritos. 
An example of Roland Barthes’s argument that “food has a constant tendency to transform itself into 
situation” (1997:26), the food prepared and eaten on storm days is more about process than an actual 
dish that has become codified as snow day food. It is more about what the food signifies big and small—
relaxation, childhood, home, the past, Canada—than the actual signifier: cupcakes, chicken, or chili. 
Through aspects, from method of cooking (roasting, baking, frying), temperature (warm or hot), and 
speed of preparation (slow), to meal structure (relaxed, breakfast or slowly prepared cooked dinner), 
and the food itself (high fat or high carbohydrate, complex flavours), these foodways connect us 
synchronically to those who share our home, diachronically to others who came before us, and 
symbolically to Canadians who have been shaped by the same harsh elements. Its lack of temporal 
fixedness mirrors the liminality of the storm itself that separates us from the rest of the world and 
temporarily frees us from time. Seen as an expression of critical nostalgia (Cashman 2006), food 
prepared and served on snow days speaks of the need for taking time for each other and for ourselves. 
 

Foods Eaten on Storm Day, St. John’s, Newfoundland, March 7, 2012 

Breakfast 
Holes in the middle 
Chocolate crepes with bananas, yogurt and chocolate shavings 
Red River cereal with raisins and dried apricots and yogurt, toast and marmalade and coffee 
Bacon and eggs 
Boiled egg and whole wheat toast 
Pancakes 
French toast 
Family members on their own. 
 
 
Lunch 
Nice salad 
Soup and sandwiches 
Scallops, pea pods, and fried potatoes, cheese and biscuits 
Diva Delights peppy pecan crisp bread and almonds 
Pasta with cheese 
Brie and rice crackers 
Fried ham sandwiches with yogurt 
Toasted peanut butter and banana sandwich 
Family members on their own 
Chili 



 
 
Supper 
Beef stew, bread and red wine. Cake with blueberries/partridgeberries and yogurt 
Home-made ravioli 
Pasta with bacon, mushrooms, peppers 
Spanish-style chickpeas in crockpot with garlic, onion, chipotle peppers, shredded sweet potato, cumin 
and spinach 
Shake n’ Bake chicken with basmati rice, fried broccoli, carrots, opinions, mushrooms, green and red 
peppers 
Crispy coated baked chicken with mashed potatoes and corn 
Chicken breast, salad, asparagus 
Perogies with fried onions, fried pork and sour cream 
Lentil nut loaf (with homemade bread crumbs); Israeli couscous salad (with roasted tomatoes and 
zucchini marinated in Dijon vinaigrette) 
 
 
Snacks 
Oranges 
Chocolate covered almonds, popcorn 
Purity jam jam cookies 
Muffins 

Sweet Chili Heat Doritos 
Cupcakes 
Carrot sticks 
Home-Made molasses bread toasted with butter and molasses 
 
 
Drinks 
Nip of Port 
Hot chocolate 
Disaronno in coffee 
Two cups of coffee and a cup of tea with new home-made vanilla sugar 
Hot chocolate 
 
 
Food people “usually” make and/or consume 
“Munchies like chips, dip etc and junk food like pizza or hamburgers and fries for supper” 
Shepherd’s pie or a beef pot pie 
Macaroni and canned tomatoes; Lipton’s chicken noodle soup; breakfast sausages; cereal, and pretzels 
Chili (one person had made it so many times they call it “storm chili”) 
Toast and tea 



Home-baked bread 
Drink or two 
“Comfort food”: cake or brownies, something warm and comforting usually pasta; weekend breakfast, 
eg. pancakes, bacon, eggs etc. 
“I usually bake something” 
 
 

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