I'm back in my role as a longtime attendee and current Trustee of the Oxford Food Symposium: I'd like to reintroduce the Symposium and its unusual grant program for professional cooks early in their careers.
What an excellent time it is to be a young and hungry chef! Despite many serious challenges, the culinary profession has never been livelier, never more open to fresh ideas and the world's many traditions. Nor has it been more engaged with its broad social and environmental roles. Cooks at all levels are helping to develop ethical and sustainable systems of food production and distribution. Some have become prominent tastemakers and thought leaders beyond the profession. Cooking on the line has its rewards; today more than ever it can be just the start of a richly fulfilling career.
Any young chef keen to explore the larger world of food should know about an unmatched resource for doing just that. The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery offers the opportunity to connect with food experts and enthusiasts from across the planet, to learn from them and be inspired by them.
The Oxford Symposium is the original international food conference, now in its fourth decade, and by far the most inclusive. Each year two hundred people from two dozen countries gather at the University of Oxford to discuss such broad themes as Food & Communication, Food & Markets, Rejected & Reclaimed Foods, Food & Celebration. The perspectives are diverse: participants include chefs and artists, historians and anthropologists, farmers and biologists. Conversations continue over communal meals prepared by leading chefs, and long afterwards.
In order to make the Symposium experience more accessible to food professionals early in their careers, the Friends of the Oxford Symposium sponsor a program of Young Chef Grants. Awardees receive a free place to attend the Symposium, assistance with travel expenses, and a chance to work in the kitchen alongside such luminaries as Fergus Henderson and Olia Hercules. Past awardees have come from the UK, India, Germany, Kenya, Ukraine, and the US.
In 2019, the subject of the Symposium is Food & Power. Discussions will consider the influence of governments and corporations, the realities of wealth, subsistence, and poverty, hierarchies in the kitchen and on the table, the power of cooking to forge emotion and human connection, and much more.
If you're a chef with fewer than ten years on the job and a hunger to understand your profession more deeply: apply for a grant! And if you know someone else who should, please pass the word. The deadline for this year's Symposium is 1 March.
