Ancient Food
I gave my presentation at Convergence (the National SF Convention for Oz) on Saturday, but have only just woken up enough to report on it now. It was a wonderful, wonderful SF convention. It was, however, peculiarly Australian. There were two craft circles, for example. One was led by a knitting reviewer (a reviewer who knits?) and the other by a knitting and origami-ing writer. I found it curious that there were more knitters than folks in costume.
My talk went well. Conference room 2 started off half full and ended with people standing up the back. About a dozen people tried grains of paradise (which I touted as ‘Medieval viagra’) and about the same number stopped me in the corridor later to aks more questions.
The biggest issue was convincing people that food isn’t one-size-fits-all. Many people have preconceptions of what Medieval food is like and it takes me answering the same question from four different angles to convince people that maybe some of those preconceptions might possibly not quite reflect the reality.
What did I talk about? Basically, I took the description of the presentation that I’d given to the programmers and I riffed. I talked about how food bonds people and holds societies together, and how it can tear society apart. I discussed how historical cuisines can be used by writers to show vast amounts about the underlying society without the need to infodump and I gave examples. I talked about Apicius and the Middle Ages and I told my kosher butcher story. Everyone dutifully laughed in all the right places. I even heard someone describing my talk as ‘fun’ to someone else. It’s good when the scholarly can be fun - it’s even better when it can help fiction entertain: if someone asked me to do another talk of the same kind, I would be very happy :). In fact, I am very happy now.
food history, Convergence, SF convention
June 13th, 2007 at 8:27 am
It sounds great!
June 13th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I wish I could have been there for your talk, Gillian. It sounds like you drew quite a crowd!
June 14th, 2007 at 6:54 am
It was amazing fun :). The chocolates I threw into the audience have apparently caused me to become a trifle notorious though.