You can be part of the cheering throngs at the Oxford Offal Conference, which will befall 8-10 July at the University of Oxford.
The Offal Conference is this year’s incarnation of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery. On the menu, both intellectually and sur table: offal, offal, and more offal. What is offal, you may slightly wonder? Here’s the official Offal Conference take on offal:
Offal can mean many things. It does not just refer to organ meats but to the manifold ways in which certain foods may be rejected and despised (‘awful offal’!); or reclaimed and loved. There can be vegetable offal, in the form of the ‘ugly’ vegetables deemed too imperfect for supermarkets to sell. We invite papers that embrace the subject of offal from a wide and imaginative perspective.
Conference attendees will be ingest offal. The conference web site touts, in advance, some of those rendered remains:
- Friday Night Feast: Fergus Henderson, the King of Nose-to-Tail Cookery [will prepare] A Bold Offal Feast ( and Bold Vegetables).
- Saturday Lunch will be all vegetable, titled Leftover, Rejected, Orphaned, and Reclaimed.
- Saturday Dinner: Jacob Kenedy of Bocca di Lupo restaurant in London… will be cooking A Roman Offal Feast including vegetable and fish offal.
At least two of our colleagues will contribute to the offalness:
- Saturday morning panel discussion: What is offal? What does it mean in different cultures? Why is it sometimes a delicacy and sometimes a source of horror? What are some of the common features of offal cookery? … Joining the panel: Merry White, anthropologist of Japanese food and author of the legendary Cooking for Crowds as well as, more recently, Coffee Life in Japan (UC Press).
- On Sunday, our plenary speaker is Ben Wurgaft, addressing the subject of In Vitro Meat: the science and philosophy of ‘lab meat’.