Kitchen Table

It’s Symposium time and we hope to see as many as possible of you during the Weekend at St Catherine’s College and the Online Conference, before the new season starts in September.

We are delighted to invite, or invite back, the OFS community to participate in the Symposium’s monthly Wiki Club. Together, we are improving the content and raising the profile of food-related articles on Wikipedia. In the inaugural 2021/22 season, we learned about the mechanics of editing, from resources to images, from the lead to the end matter. This season we touched on these aspects again, but with more of an emphasis on collaborating on-wiki.

Please join us at The Ask, our new monthly training and strategy sessions designed to familiarize the OFS community with The Sifter. The brainchild of longtime symposiast Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, The Sifter is a database dedicated to food history research and allows the researcher to identify, and organize information in ways not possible by conventional research methods. The goals of The Ask are to demystify The Sifter, make it more accessible to users, and expand the information that can be located through this unique tool.

The idea for monthly gatherings on a regular basis orginated at the 2020 VSymp, when a necessity became a vision and then a virtual reality, allowing us to come together, discuss and share, learn and laugh – almost like in Oxford, at St Catz. That exceptional experience made us understand how important it is to create and safeguard an accessible online space where our community can meet and grow, independent from any commercial or political interests, travel restraints or health scares.

For everyone with a deep interest in food who feels the need to change the conversation, the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table presents single subject, hosted discussions, with all voices respected. Unlike the distance that comes with a keynote delivered from a lectern, these are informal, personal encounters around a table, to share ideas and spark constructive debate on issues that profoundly affect us all. So pull up a virtual chair and join us!