Ox Tales

Retired LA Times food writer and food historian Charles Perry explains how the 19th century Los Angeles practice of earth-pit barbecuing whole bulls became a culinary craze for settlers who saw the eating of the bull’s head as a wild west delicacy, and how the rise of Hollywood changed the practice into what we know today as the backyard barbecue. “People had this obscure sense that they had been having too much fun in the 20s and they now were being punished and so everything became suave and elegant and the idea of being able to invite people as if on the spur of the moment for a steak was very appealing.” --- Ox Tales is produced by Anna Sigrithur and edited by Naomi Duguid and Fiona Sinclair with production help by Thomas Krause.  Music by Thomas Krause and Ava Glendinning.  Find out more by visiting our website at https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/

English performance artist and food scholar Amanda Couch reprises the ancient Mesopotamian art of liver divination, and tries to answer questions from mortality to Brexit by reading the lines and lobes on a sheep's liver.   “Chance, when you use it to make a composition or to make a decision to do something, it’s taking away from those enlightenment ideas of hierarchies of what art is and returning them back to where they were in prehistoric times when art objects were connected to ritualistic acts.” --- Ox Tales is produced by Anna Sigrithur and edited by Naomi Duguid and Fiona Sinclair with production help by Thomas Krause.  Music by Thomas Krause and Ava Glendinning.  Find out more by visiting our website at https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/

In Japan, 'slurp' is more than just eating-related onomatopoeia. Japanese cultural and food historian Voltaire Cang researches and explores the significance of this important sound in the complex role it plays when people eat noodle dishes (ramen, in particular) and during the refined tea ceremony, Chado. “it's not because people here aren’t taught about manners. It's because it IS manners to slurp your noodles.” --- Ox Tales is produced by Anna Sigrithur and edited by Fiona Sinclair and Naomi Duguid with production help by Thomas Krause.  Music by Thomas Krause and Ava Glendinning.  Find out more by visiting our website at https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/

Fozia Ismail, a British-Somali social anthropologist and food activist, challenges the easy consumption of foods with roots in colonialism by exploring the ways different people in Brexit-era Britain see the culinary landscape around them. “As the place became more hostile, I was craving home comfort food, and my comfort food is Somali food. You know?....  I really wanted my mum's food.” --- Ox Tales is produced by Anna Sigrithur and edited by Fiona Sinclair and Naomi Duguid with production help by Thomas Krause.  Music by Thomas Krause and Ava Glendinning.  Find out more by visiting our website at https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/

Third generation French foie gras producer Guillemette Barthouil takes you on a history lesson that spans thousands of years and an ocean as she makes the case that foie gras is the quantum offal- a food that is both loved and reviled. “I think foie gras is really an interesting topic because it is an offal and is not an offal at the same time. That is why I call it the quantum offal.” --- Ox Tales is produced by Anna Sigrithur and edited by Fiona Sinclair and Naomi Duguid with production help by Thomas Krause.  Music by Thomas Krause and Ava Glendinning.  Find out more by visiting our website at https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/

What do the Pillsbury Bake Off and molecular gastronomy have in common? Culinary historian and food writer Laura Shapiro unwraps the significance of gender to the prestige afforded to different arenas of innovation-driven cuisine by examining the history of the USA’s oldest cooking competition. “Home cooking has always been the kind of cooking that is supposed to kind of go without notice, except in the world of the family, where you're supposed to be rewarded by the happy faces around the table. You’re certainly not supposed to be rewarded in cash.”   --- Ox Tales is produced by Anna Sigrithur and edited by Naomi Duguid and Fiona Sinclair with production help by Thomas Krause.  Music by Thomas Krause and Ava Glendinning.  Find out more by visiting our website at https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/  

Hello dear listeners, We are delighted to announce the official launch of Season One of Ox Tales, beginning on April 18. Please enjoy this trailer of highlights of what's to come! Ox Tales is the podcast that serves up rich and surprising stories about food and how it makes us who we are- from the Oxford Food Symposium.   Every year since 1981, hundreds of scholars, writers, chefs and enthusiastic amateurs from all around the world gather at the Oxford Food Symposium to share their ideas in the form of published papers and lectures. Now, Ox Tales brings those stories to you.  ... ... ...  Season One launches April 18 with an episode every week for six weeks, and we are hard at work on Season Two, which will launch this fall.