Do we need food critics to tell us what is good food? Is the food that we eat more than just nourishment? Do our food choices define who we are? We’ll discuss these questions with our invited experts in various lectures and seminars.

February 10 (Thursday)

Why Food Criticism should be taken with a Grain of Salt
Frank Armstrong, Oxford, UK (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 11:00
Often the food critic has the power to make or break a restaurant. Yet taste is famously subjective. This lecture will explore the various sub-genres of food criticism relied on in the English-speaking world and assess their reliability.

Being a Food Critic
Paolo Tullio, Dublin (Dock 11 EDEN)
11:15 – 12:15
Being a food critic can be a tricky business. Questions for the conscience can be whether a good or bad restaurant review can make or break a restaurant. Many questions come to mind such as does the well-known face of a restaurant critic ensure better service and food; can one person’s tastes and preferences be of any use to someone else; and should a restaurant review tend to informative or entertaining? Broader questions shall be asked such as whether gastronomy is for the few or the many. Does better cuisine in restaurants help people eat better at home? Why has food become the zeitgeist of the last 20 years? Where will restaurant cooking go in the next decade? And, finally, why should we care?

The Nation-Plate: How Nationalities are defined by their Cuisines
Frank Armstrong, Oxford, UK (P24.Conference Room)
16:30 – 18:00
Why is French food esteemed around the globe and English disparaged? This seminar will explore the relationship between food culture and the ‘imagined community’ of nations. A national cuisine draws together disparate dishes and identifies them with that community. Once formulated this becomes a source of identity which binds people together.

Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste
Jim Cohn, Quest University, Canada (P98a. Lecture Hall)
19:30 – 21:00
In any discussion of food, it behooves us not to lose sight of one of its most basic human features: good food tastes good. To stimulate our own discussion of taste, we will look at excerpts from Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (1825)—an effervescent classic that is partly a gastronomic cookbook, partly a scientific treatise, and partly a personal memoir. His book is still in print, and it is still a favourite for its charming style and its diverting anecdotes about the many pleasures of the table. Despite its surface claim to be merely the personal reflections of a bon vivant, this book raises consequential questions about our relationship to food, which of course we know primarily through our palate: Is good taste natural? Or is appreciation of the finer things learned? Does it depend on our culture of food? What is the importance of the small pleasures and the outsized passions that characterize our sense of taste?

Foodways as Cultural Theory and Practice
Ryan Plumley (P24. Conference Room)
19:30 – 21:00
Through the mutual interaction of theory and practice, foodways enact processes of socialization that define who is a child or an adult, a man or a woman, one of “us” or one of “them”. Partly unconscious, partly learned, partly improvised, partly planned, partly theory, partly practice, foodways can tell us a lot about a culture. In this seminar, drawing on an engaging reading about French women’s culinary practices by Luce Girard and Michel de Certeau, we will discuss how foodways define culture and identity.

Comments are closed.