Oxford Food Symposium

The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery is an annual weekend conference at which academics, food writers, cooks, and others with an interest in food and culture meet to discuss current issues in food studies and food history.

The Symposium has taken place every year since 1983, with the proceedings published in an annual volume about a year later. Since 2006 the annual venue has been St Catherine's College, Oxford. The Oxford Symposium has been a Charitable Trust since January 2003. Influential in its field, the Oxford Symposium is the oldest such annual meeting in the world, though a series of scientific conferences on the anthropology and ethnology of food began in the 1970s.

The 2015 meeting is to be held at St Catherine's College on 3–5 July. The topic is "Food and Communication". The Oxford Symposium is a registered charity in Britain, with a group of distinguished Trustees, and there is a support group called Friends of the Oxford Symposium.

The origin of the Symposium is traced to a series of three historical seminars on science and cookery arranged in 1979 by the scholar and former diplomat Alan Davidson (who was Alistair Horne Research Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford for 1978/79) and sponsored by Theodore Zeldin, historian of France and a fellow of St Antony's. Zeldin had asked Davidson: "Tell me ... how do you propose to make manifest to the other members of the college your presence here?" The seminars were the answer. About twenty people attended on each occasion. The title of the first seminar, on 4 May 1979, was that of Davidson's fellowship, "Food and Cookery: the Impact of Science in the Kitchen". Academic disciplines represented ranged from the history of medicine to mathematics and French literature; Nicholas Kurti, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Oxford, was among them, and some of the 21 participants were not academics at all. Elizabeth David was among them, though she was reported to be "ambivalent at best" about the value of this academic approach to food. Also present were David's publisher Jill Norman, Anne Willan, Paul Levy and Richard Olney.

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