The Sifter: an informal workshop for the new and more experienced
The Sifter, brainchild and labour of love of longstanding Symposiast Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, is a free website for searching and comparing historical authors, their works and the details of their…
Mixed Emotions: An Installation: Live discussion with Carolyn Tillie
Moderated by David Matchett, this session offers the opportunity to probe more deeply into the role that objects play in rituals of remembrance, as well as to explore the artistic…
Finding Home – Live discussion with the panellists
Finding familiar foods when one is away from home, especially when part of a diaspora community, can challenge the outsider to find new ways of enacting innate rituals to…
Paradigm Shifts in Communicating Information – Live discussion with the panellists
The "discovery" of food as an academic subject and well as increasing prominence in popular culture and discourse has created new technologies, organizational structures, and venues for talking about…
Hospitality – Live discussion with the panellists
These papers explore how French writers have deeply engrained notions of what hospitality is (or should be) and have trained gimlet eyes on those opening their homes and establishments…
Wikipedia “surgery” redux
Wiki-editing session with Roberta Wedge have become an OFS tradition and ritual by now. Watch her basic video and then work directly under her tutelage to up your skills in…
Hollowed and Hallowed Traditions – Live discussion with the panellists
A cuisine is a structured culinary system with implicit and, occasionally, explicit rules that are understood by those in the group to delineate "us" from "them." In this time-zone…
Gastro-Ethnography – Live discussion with the panellists
These (partially) observational studies explore dining rules and rituals as expressions of life skills, whether metaphoric or literal. The Holocaust survivors (over)feed grandchildren to ward away acute hardships, the…
Lebanese Edible Rule Book: Rituals of Entertaining: Live discussion with Kamal Mouzawak and Tara Habis
Lebanon’s most prominent food activist and the founding-father of Lebanon’s first farmers market ‘Souk el Tayeb’, Kamal Mouzawak has been recipient to accolades such as Prince Klaus Laureate 2016 and…
Foreign Holidays – Live discussion with the panellists
Holiday foods are often thought the most conservative: certain foods (or their close analogues) must be eaten to commemorate tradition. But when populations move or new powers become a…
Racialized Environments – Live discussion with the panellists
Discourses around what we "should" eat can be metonyms for larger cultural issues. In the case of meat traditions versus vegetarianism/veganism, racial, religious, and social justice tensions lie just…
Bread: The Staff of Life – Live discussion with the panellists
Bread is central to Western cultures, whether through its profound and distinct religious meanings, its role as a staple food, or its diversity and use as an ethnic marker.…
