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Food festivals and conferences
Who knew how many and varied they could be? Google any food type nowadays and you’ll find a selection of organised activities around it. It’s spooky really. Here we are in a time when food traditions are disappearing; our ability and will to feed the planet’s out-of-control population are slipping badly; and technology is messing with flavour, quality and our faith in what we eat. And yet, just think of a food and there’s a cult of celebration around it. Is it kind of like clapping very very hard to bring Tinkerbell back to life? I hope not.
Bulgarian National Pepper and Tomato Festival (August). I see no reason why these two excellent vegetables (yes, I know, I know, tomatoes…) should not be celebrated, and even celebrated together.
Finally a time and place to pay homage to my favourite tuber: the seventh World Potato Congress will be held in Tours, France, 2008 – plenty of time to plan for this one. Call for papers for a simultaneous potato conference is already out. And don’t forget that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato. How will you celebrate?
The Big Cheese, in Caerphilly (July) (a little suspicious of this one: do falconry and fire eating really go with cheese?) And if that’s not silly enough, check out the Cheese Rolling contest in Gloucester (May)
A couple of Slow Food events I hope and plan to be able to attend this year: Slow Fish in Genova May 4-7, 2007 and Cheese, held in Slow Food’s home town of Bra, September 21-24, 2007.
And one I wouldn’t mind taking in for sure: The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, September 8-9, 2007. This year the topic is Food & Morality, taking its spin from Slow Food’s articles of faith:
- Food and quality – should food be good?
- Food and safety and the environment – should food be clean?
- Food and justice – should food be fair?
- Food and human nature – is it right to take pleasure in food?
As luck would have it I’ll be on the other side of the planet in May, when the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society meets up with the Association for the Study of Food and Society in Victoria – of all places – to talk about Changing Ecologies of Food and Agriculture.
And then (is it just me or are these organisation names getting a little unwieldy?) the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association is going to host a workshop on the subject of The Morality of Food as a Social Movement at the Collective Behavior and Social Movements conference in August.
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Semlas, trading cards, Madhur and fortified coffee
Some things that came across my in-box this week.
Following Shrove Tuesday / Pancake Day / Mardi Gras / Martedi Grasso, Merna sent me some news about Fat Tuesday in Sweden. She’d found an article about a treat I haven’t tried: semlas, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of eating too many desserts…
I was also intrigued by the idea of Artists Trading Cards. I don’t think I ever traded or collected cards in my youth – maybe it was a guy thing: they were mostly sports cards, weren’t they? So it’s apt there should be a sub-set of this genre just for women. Probably easier for artists than poets, unless you are cruel enough to shrink your type to size, or on the other hand maybe ideal for haiku writers.
Ruth sent along a review of Madhur Jaffrey’s new autobiography which sounds delicious. I am among the many who have enjoyed her recipes as I experimented with Indian food; she must be the only food writer with equal weight as an actress (or is it vice versa?) I liked the disclosure in the review that her mother taught her to cook by mail: I reckon there is a whole new generation now learning to cook by email or internet.
I am not quite sure what to make of fortified coffee though. Is there no indulgence that can’t be tampered with to make it seem more wholesome?
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Pig Week
Piggish in many ways. Started it off by snuffling and snorting my way through yet another cold. Surprised myself by getting up at 6.05 am on Tuesday to listen to Barbara’s Ideas program on pigs. And (thanks Gloria) enjoyed learning this was British Bacon Education Week. And of course we’re into the first week of the Chinese Year of the Pig, which the class will celebrate tonight, noses firmly in the trough, with a big Asian feed (thanks in advance Amy, Andy et al). One day perhaps I’ll get to the Bongseong Charcoal-broiled Pork Festival, or perhaps the Ballyjamesduff International Pork Festival, or one of the many American pork festivals: the Spamarama in Austin, TX sounds worth avoiding though. And if you want to see what 200 calories of bacon (and lots of other things) actually looks like on the plate, check out these pictures.
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
