Mustard seeds for 250 people
Abi Aspen Glencross and Sadhbh Moore of The Sustianable Food Story introduce their lunch from the 2018 Symposium on Seeds.
1. Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background in food, and your current role?
The Sustainable Food Story burst into life one fateful afternoon when ebullient and chatty Abi Aspen Glencross came to meet the equally ebullient and possibly even chattier Sadhbh Moore at The Skip Garden, following an e-troduction by food campaigner Tristram Stuart.
Sadhbh grew up in a family of ecogastronomes on an organic homestead in rural Ireland where fishing, foraging, picking veg and herbs from the garden and baking bread were all part of the daily routine. She studied Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, gaining an academic perspective that reinforced the appreciation for how she was brought up. After working with Greenpeace, other environmental organisations and a stint living in rural India she gravitated back towards what made her heart sing; harvesting fresh produce and turning it into something to be shared with her community.
BBC Radio Four’s The Food Programme recorded an episode at the 2018 Symposium on Seeds. Featuring stories from edible acorns and the links between amaranth and cannibalism to the importance of seed banks and a project to bring back deliciousness to wheat. Listen here.
A family firm of long standing, artisanal butchery, local product, and absolutely no factory farming. Image source: Wikimedia
The fraught history of Germans eating horses
Volker Bach continues his occasional series on German historical recipes.
Culinary history has not enjoyed great regard in German academia. Scholars long viewed it as trivial, and errors abound even in relatively recent publications. There is one point, though, that every medieval historian in the country is aware of: the church banned the eating of horsemeat.
Polly Russell, OSFC Trustee and British Library Curator introduces a series of events at the British Library April – May 2018
Late last year a colleague from the Events team at the British Library where I work as a Curator asked me if I’d be interested in curating a food-focussed season of talks and tastings. He had hardly finished asking the question when I answered with a resounding ‘yes’. As a Curator with a focus on food and a Trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (OSFC), the opportunity to facilitate a series of conversations about food at the British Library was too good to be true. At the risk of irking my non-food focussed curator colleagues, I would hazard that food is the topic most represented throughout the library’s millions of items. Whether it is handwritten manuscripts or printed cookery books, letters and diaries revealing the intimate details of eating habits, historical patents of cooking technology or in-depth oral histories of food producers, food is present in the British Library’s collections. The Food Season, therefore, offers a wonderful opportunity to introduce these collections to new audiences and to instigate a series of lively conversations about food in the past, present and future.
The 2017 Young Chefs: Deborah Ryan and Girish Nayak.
Deborah Ryan, one of the 2017 Young Chefs, reflects on her experience at the Symposium
I first heard about the Oxford Symposium through my university lecturer, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, a trustee of the symposium. I had been looking to broaden my knowledge of gastronomy outside university and to push myself into new fields.
I began cooking at age 16 in the restaurant kitchen of Ballymaloe House in Cork, Ireland. I would cook here in the summers and holidays when I wasn’t at school. I started to connect to the ethos of using local ingredients and suppliers. I took a year off before starting university and travelled to work in San Francisco then Rome. I worked as an intern in the Rome Sustainable Food Project, started by Alice Waters. This completely changed my cooking style and introduced me to the importance of sustainability in food. I returned to Ireland to study a degree in Culinary Arts in Dublin. Last summer I did an internship working in River Cottage, UK. When I learned that the 2017 theme of the symposium was “Food and Landscape”, I knew I would find it fascinating.