Food, Creativity and Courage: The 2013 International Food and Culture Festival at Denison University

This year's IFCF logo was created by Freda Okundaye '14 and digitised by Bryan LeBlanc '15. Bryan also compiled images of international sites, as well as food and items from our Center, to create this year's IFCF banner. The quotation (by Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger) written on the orange peel of our above logo reads "The mind without culture can never produce good fruit."

Yesterday, more than 525 students, faculty, staff and community members from and outside of Granville found their way into Curtis Dining Hall, bringing with them not only a satiable appetite for food (and I hope a bit of culture), but also metaphorical suitcases of history, heritages, family recipes and memories that filled the space which for me yielded an emotional state of success and a validation of the hard work put into our second annual International Food and Culture Festival. Feeding off this year's campus wide theme of Creativity and Courage, creativity was key in executing the global, gastronomic representation of this year's menu: a purposefully diverse collection of ingredients and techniques in the form of 26 dishes (arguably, 29) spanning six continents, the menu of which was developed over the past three months and refined over the past few weeks. But perhaps even more importantly, everyone brought with them their own amounts of courage-- the courage not only to cook dishes that ranged from recognisable and extremely familiar and personal to completely "foreign" and arguably unpronounceable, but to in some (if not many) cases step outside of one's comfort zone and eat whatever happened to be presented on the plate. [Note on the aforementioned link: instead of individual country dish videos, this year I asked faculty, staff and students to do their best in trying to pronounce this year's menu offerings. Throughout this post, I have linked each pronunciation along with the suggested recipe (if available) for each dish.] On one hand, this second IFCF was a matter of relative redemption and a challenge to one up last year; on another, it's truly an opportunity to bring people together. But aside from meeting folks I would otherwise never have the opportunity to meet, and introducing folks to new dishes and techniques, engaging in conversations about how folks had grown up eating one of many variations of the same dish, receiving the outright approval of properly executed dishes and hearing comments such as "wow, this brought me back to my childhood and being in my grandmother's kitchen" make the work put into the festival that much more meaningful.

A Truly Epic Post: 25 Foods Just in Time for Post #150!

Plates galore!

Shortly following the success of our fall "Migrations"-themed event à la a domestic focus on farm to table cuisine, planning for an international focus went underway. Resulting in a celebration of 25 countries (or in some cases, inspirations or regions), 25 different foods made it onto a truly eclectic and highly ambitious menu. And operating within the framework of food fusion and in search for authenticity, I cannot be anything but enthusiastically grateful for the commitment of the Sodexo staff and Denison's Dining Services, as well as all of our sponsors, students and multi-cultural student group advisors who helped make Denison's first international food and culture festival the success that it was. I admit there were a few of the misfires, but would like to emphasise before continuing with this post just how monumental of a task I laid before the staff. Certainly we could have gone with fewer dishes (which arguably, though not guaranteed, could have turned out better), but the desire to celebrate many and test the limits resulted in humble lessons learned and the motivation to better everything that was accomplished. For this, my 150th blog post, I invite you to continue to read on for my takes on each dish that I tried, as well as the cultural connections behind each one.