Nanaimo's Culture
The popularity of the bar in Nanaimo led local residents to mobilise to have it voted "Canada's Favourite Confection" in a National Post reader survey. In 1985, Mayor Graeme Roberts initiated a contest to find the ultimate Nanaimo bar recipe, and the recipe submitted by Joyce Hardcastle, a resident of Nanaimo, was unanimously selected by a panel of judges.
Recipes for similar desserts are found in various places and under various names in North America and Europe. The designation "Nanaimo Bar" is Canadian; Nanaimo Bar appears in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary but not in other language or dialect versions. 1988, Stephano's Bakery in Killaloe, Ontario, created a version of Nanaimo Bars that they sold on college campuses throughout Ontario. The term is also common in the American Pacific Northwest and has been used in places such as New York City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Sydney because of international popularization of the bar by the Seattle-based Starbucks coffee chain.
In the 2003 Christopher Guest movie A Mighty Wind, the character of Mickey Crabbe (a Canadian) says, ". . . I'd consider going home, making a nice tray of Nanaimo bars, lying in bed and watching TV--that's what I like doing".
In 2011 The Ron James Show, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, explored the origins of the Nanaimo bar in a "mockumentary" segment where James traveled to Nanaimo, British Columbia.
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“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)