Margaret Atwood on Fictional Foodies in conversation with Mark McWilliams
We’re over the moon (appropriately for this year’s subject) that Margaret Atwood has agreed to address us in our fortieth anniversary year on Fictional Foodies. As one of Canada’s best…
Chef Skye Gyngell: Fresh From the Farm Today
Skye Gyngell says: “When I think of creating a meal, I always find myself starting from the same place. I cast my mind back to memories, very often of my…
Dinner chat
One of the most important qualities of a successful meal is that it inspires good conversation. Let's make this one worldwide, large table by turning your cameras on!
Panel 1 – Hunger & Memory
War, poor governmental planning, and the shock of Covid-19 have all created food shortages and hunger amongst wide swaths of humanity. This panel explores imagination, a mental act of creating…
Panel 2 – Identities
Food can be a marker of national, regional or local identity, and can also maintain strong ties to home for diasporic populations. These papers investigate different ways in which food…
Panel 3 – Science & Technology
Whether in traditional technologies, such as home-based food preservation, laboratory efforts to create plant-based alternatives to animal foods, or theories in the fields of of psychology and neuroscience dealing with…
Panel 4 – Pedagogy
Teaching about food is hot. Whether on a vocation level in helping students to imagine their relationship to food, providing a template for the experienced chef to first create dishes…
Panel 5 – Innovating on Tradition
Gastronomy is constantly evolving, and the speed of change has been magnified in our globalizing world. This panel explores how traditional and iconic dishes in Indian, Singaporean, and Persian culinary…
Panel 6 – Food as Politics
Diplomatic gastronomic gifts (whether consumed literally or only with the imagination), productive exchanges between French and Russian chefs based on the political Franco-Russian Alliance of the turn of the twentieth…
Panel 7 – Gastrocriticism
Literature is replete with culinary references and descriptions, some of quotidian life, others of questionable, or at least unusual, connections to reality. All of these culinary images contain underlying messages…
Panel 8 – Food of the Other
Just as food can unite people in shared identities, it can also erect walls that define The Other, as this panel demonstrates. How does a food move from one enjoyed…
Panel 9 – Material Culture & Design
The modernist adage, ‘form follows function,’ implies that design is teleological, a mechanical application of obtaining an efficient result. But what is the role of imagination? This panel explores contemporary…
