9 July – 1 August 2021 online
This year it was still different
For the second year running, the worldwide pandemic required that we transform our annual gathering into a virtual symposium where participants around the globe could join our community remotely. We missed our customary real life gathering St. Catz – but we managed to re-shape the Symp as an on-line version based on Zoom that was fully interactive, meaningful, and enjoyable.
With the help of our congenial web designers at Igloo, and employing user-friendly technologies, our new space allowed for a broad and diverse audience (including many who might otherwise not be able to journey to Oxford) to experience and contribute our mission to change the conversation, expand the table, and improve the plate.
It has been a fantastic opportunity to fulfil our mission to change the conversation, expand the table, and improve the plate.
Our 2021 on-line Symposium began on July 9th with a flurry of concentrated activities over what was designated “The Weekend”. Replicating the event at St Catz, we unlocked recorded materials in real time BST, including keynote addresses, paper presentations, chefs’ videos and other materials.
We also scheduled breaks for virtual coffees, teas, meals and hanging out in the bar, stretching well into the evening: refreshment breaks that offered opportunity for live chats with fellow Symposiasts. In short, the weekend of July 9th-11th proved itself as much of a marathon as the in-person event at St. Catz.
Thereafter, a three week “Conference” not only offered Symposiasts the opportunity to view or review all content at a more relaxed pace, but we also scheduled daily live discussions with all our paper presenters and invited chefs, Wiki-edits, Sifter-edits, and two hands-on Kitchen Lab events.
The Symposium concluded on Sunday, 1st August, with the Grande Finale. Starting with an imaginative video that delivered the essence of the topic for 2021, followed by a final Plenary to sum up the events of the previous three weeks, rousing finish with the selection by public vote of the topic for 2024, and a chance to bid fellow-Symposiasts farewell.
Take a closer look at Jake Tilson’s wonderful poster for the 2021 Oxford Food Symposium.
Priya Mani’s report:
I am a virtual Symposium old-timer.
That is to say, a novice, uninitiated in the delights and warmth of the real gathering. But I know Symposiasts in untraditional ways, through the intimacy of Zoom – their bookshelf backdrops, a random pet that makes an appearance or the occasional presence of a spouse.
For forty years, I am told, friends and strangers have gathered in Oxford for a weekend steeped in food thinking. Many of us would have taken the train journey to Oxford in a typical year, and the 40th-year celebration in 2021 would have been a historic affair at St.Catz. We celebrated nonetheless in a pre-Symposium Zoom room hosted by Jill Norman, with many early symposiasts including Claudia Roden, Barbara Wheaton, Charles Perry, Harold McGee, Paul Levy, and Sami Zubaida, filling us with recollections and curious trivia of the Symposium’s simple beginnings.
But the power of this virtual gathering [471 attendees], its accessibility [39 countries, 100 new Symposiasts in 2021] and outreach to attract global talent [26 out of 55 papers presented were first-timers] is evident in its data!
The Symposium has been familiar to me mainly through its generous [public] Proceedings. Powering through the pandemic year, the Symposium has expanded its outreach. A new monthly newsletter [What’s Cooking; signup, if you haven’t already] and monthly virtual gatherings [Kitchen Table; the new season is starting soon]- all invite thought leaders to put relevant conversations on the table. Read more
Plenary sessions
Keynotes
Margaret Atwood
Fictional Foodies
Eric Rath
The Imaginary Cuisine of Medieval Japan
Rob Hopkins
What is to What If
Janet Beizer
Walking through our Gastronomies: Notes from an Imaginary Flâneuse
OFS Rising Scholar
Emily Martin
‘My dear Miss Eddington’: Reader Letters and Early Twentieth Century Food Media
OFS Young Chefs
Cordula Peters and Gaurish Shiyam
Tools
Wiki edit-a-thon
Food & (mostly) Women, led by Roberta Wedge, Polly Russell and Jessica Seaton.
The Sifter
The cyberworld of cookbooks in a searchable database, presented by Barbara K. Wheaton and Charlie Rubin.
The Virtual FoodMuseum
Hungry Rabbits Jumping Through the Art World in Search of Some Proper Food.
Meals & Receptions
Friday Dinner
Fresh from the Farm Today
Devised by – Skye Gyngell and Rose Ashby of Spring Restaurant, London
Welcome drinks – Rheingau Riesling from Weingut Hamm in Winkel
Menu and Recipes:
Parsley and potato soup with creme fraiche
Farm leaves with marinated heirloom beetroots, summer herbs and elderflower dressing
Chicken paillard with sage, brown butter, capers and slow cooked courgettes
Strawberry galette with strawberry ice cream
Saturday Lunch
An Oceanic Haiku
Devised by – Junya Yamasaki and Yukiyasu Kaneko
Dish and recipe – Whole-Fish 3-day Curry
Drinks and recipes – Aquatic Water and Kelp & Apple Sour
Saturday Dinner
Cooking With Ashes
Devised by – Virgilio Martinez of Restaurant Central in Lima, Peru
Cocktail Hour High Up in the Andes
Dinner and recipes:
Sea Soil – Scallop chalaquita with kale-seaweed crisps, pickled sweet potato and cucumbers
Sacred Valley – Fermented cherimoya mousse with muna ashes & agave granita
Loma Forest – Braised goat with laminated tubers and pickled mashua
Extreme Altitude – Corn and elderberry puree with cancha crips and purple & yellow kiwicha
Sunday Lunch
Gönül Paksoy and the Young Chefs: When I Consider Everything That Grows
Devised by – David Matchett and Gamze Ineceli
Dishes and Recipes:
Cauliflower Trio by Andiswa Mqedlana
Buttermilk & Honey Sorbet, and Smoked mackerel, dandelion, nasturtium, hazelnut, yoghurt and soda bread by Caitríona Nic Philibín
Edible flower salad with lemon & honey vinaigrette and rosemary shortbread, and Chilled roasted tomato soup with nasturtiums and honeycomb by Cordula C. Peters
Siddu reimagined through figs and tart plums by Gaurish Shyam
New Jersey farmer’s necklace, crown and garden water by Shannon Compton
After dinner events
Nilesh Patel
A Love Supreme.
Ali Kenefick
Meaty Prepositions, Recipes for Human/Meat Relationships.
Añay Kachi
The Salt Workers of the Peruvian Andes, a Story of Hope and Resilience.
Parallel sessions & papers
Panel 1 – Hunger & Memory
— Eat, Lose, Imagine
— Imaginary Feasts: Virtual Meals in a Second World War Prison Camp and in COVID Times
— European TV Dinners
Panel 2 – Identities
— Waterloo Porridge and Plentiful Yorkshire Teas: Food and the Creation of Northern English Identities in Mid-Nineteenth Century Novels
— Food Reimagined: Diasporic Identity and Authenticity
— The Birth of a Legend: Mole de Guajolote and Mestizo Identity in the Imaginary of Post-Revolutionary Mexico
Panel 3 – Science & Technology
— Saving Food in Bulgaria: Imagining Hopeful Futures Through Quiet Food Sovereignty
— The Hen that Laid a Tofu Egg
— ‘Coming from a Place of Impossibility’: Imagining a World without Taste
Panel 4 – Pedagogy
— Cogito ergo sum meditati: I Think, Therefore I Imagine!
— Stirring Up Historical Imagination: Promoting the Teaching of History through Food-Based Pedagogy
— Teaching Cookery Gets Personal: Harnessing Imagination to Feed the Will to Learn
Panel 5 – Innovating on Tradition
— Chaat: Why India’s Beloved Snack Is also a Feat of the Imagination
— Singapore’s Rising Hawkers: Food, Heritage, Imagination, and Entrepreneurship
— Persian Tahdig: A Canvas for Culinary Imagination, Innovation, and Artistry
Panel 6 – Food as Politics
— Delicacies Real and Imagined: Food and Drink as a Diplomatic Gift
— Celebrating the Franco-Russian Alliance: French Chefs as Purveyors of Influence and Creators of Culinary Imagination
— Reading the Cookbooks of Communist Romania: A Very Intimate Defence
Panel 7 – Gastrocriticism
— Imagination and Food (and Drink) in the Novels of Iris Murdoch
— Food and the Irish Short Story Imagination
— Food, the Imagination, and Social Resistance in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek
Panel 8 – Food of the Other
— The Infidels’ Drink: Coffee Encounters and Transformations in Early Modern Malta
— Caste: The Main Character of Indian Food
— Fish and Foreigners: The Case of Hot Salmon in Early Modern England
Panel 9 – Material Culture & Design
— Defining Good Food Design through Case Studies from Turkey
— ‘Broiling is the poetry of cooking’: The Imaginative Symbolism of Gridirons and Broiling in Nineteenth-Century Food Writing
— The Cookbook Whisperer: How Maria Guarnaschelli’s Powers of Imagination Redefined Recipes
Panel 10 – Fantastical Worlds
— Food and Foodways in Science Fiction
— A Short History of Science Fiction and Fantasy Tie-in Cookbooks
— ‘Imagine a zoo …’ – Show and Surprise Dishes in German Medieval Cuisine, an Homage to the Medieval Chef
Panel 11 – Creating Personae
— Stories Full of Recipes
— Steak or Salad? Food, Gender, and the Victorian Imagination
— Have It Your Way: Elizabeth David and the Problem of Norman Douglas
Panel 12 – Utopian Agriculture
— Reconsidering the Culinary Imagination
— The Spiritual in the Sensual, the Sensual in the Virtual: Modern-Day Spirituality through a Community-Supported Farm
— New York’s Artisanal Oyster Farmers: Creating the Wild(ish) Oyster
Panel 13 – American “Exceptionalism”
— Big Cheese: Cheese and American Imagination
— Incredible Edibles: American History in Chocolate, Cheddar, and Confectionary Forms
Panel 14 – Episodes in the Birth of Mass Media
— ‘My Dear Miss Eddington’: Reader Letters and Early Twentieth Century Food Media
— Edibly Ever After: The Foods of Seventeenth Century French Fairy Tales
— A Conceit of Coney: Britain’s First Television Food History Programme – How Philip Harben Pulled a Rabbit out of a Castle to Imagine what Food Broadcasts May Have Looked like in Elizabethan Times
Panel 15 – Methodologies
— Imaginary Diets, Edible Masculinities: Pirate Food in History and Fiction
— Poetic Wisdom and Food for the ‘Savage Mind’: Greek Tamisos and Provençal Toma as Evidence of Ancient Celtic Cheesemaking
— Food as Fun and Fantasy in the Old Comedy of Ancient Athens
Panel 16 – French Gastronomy
— Making the Ordinary Exotic: The Role of Literary Imagination in the Rise of Gastronomic Tourism in Early Twentieth-Century France
— Food Looks like a Lady: Designing Gastronomy through Ritualized Seduction
— Materializing the Culinary Dreamscape: Maps, Guidebooks, and the Role of Terroir in (Re)Constructing the Myth of the French Gastronomic Utopia
Panel 17 – Globalizing Foods
— Imagination and Food in the Black Diaspora
— ‘Bileti’ to ‘Desi’: Global Foodways and the Re-Imagining of Bengali ‘Modern’ Cuisine in Late Colonial Bengal
— Boundary, Body, Ban: Moral Transformation of Gamey Flavour (yewei 野味) in China
Panel 18 – Gastronomic Utopias of the Medieval World
— Feast for the Soul: Food Imaginaries in a South Indian Performance
— The Curious Case of Nala’s Mirror on Cooking: Innovation in Medieval Indian Cookbook Writing
— Food in Sabbath Table Hymns: A Taste of the World to Come
