Table of Contents

Reader for Open Sauces

see: open_sauces_reader

Page in progress until the 22nd of November 2008

This menu includes the speakers & their 'toast' topics, as well as the matched foods that they can use instead of a slide presentation…

The timing of the dinner is from app. 6:30PM - midnight.

Diagram explanation

By Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney

To celebrate the diversity and openness of food culture, FoAM organised Open Sauces – a tasting dinner as an experiment in restoring the original meaning of the word “symposium” – a place for meaningful, inspiring conversations, digression and celebration centred around food and drink. The evening unfolded in a sequence of evocative dishes, matched with drinks, improvised music and speakers. Each course was put together to reflect diverse associations between food, contemporary culture and our turbulent environment. They were created in collaboration with the speakers who used the taste, texture, scent, temperature or sound of a dish to illustrate their “toast.” Each toast was a minute long speech, question, story, or provoking statement which aimed to encourage conversation around a specific theme. As palate‑cleansers between courses, short musical pieces for the violin and hurdy-gurdy were played, creating rhythms and textures of sound to match the tastes and textures of the food and conversation.

This recipe is presented as a diagram describing the flow of Open Sauces, outlining the relationships between the food, topics and speakers that composed the event. The central thread of the diagram - comprised of arrows, circles, text and scribbles – shows the flow of the menu, whether a course had many elements or a single focus, whether the taste intensifies from one course to the next, or the particular subtleties explored in a course. This layer is the essence of the menu - it shows its rhythms and harmonies, combining the multi-course, multi-topic dinner into a continuous whole. Beneath the central thread are the names of dishes, notes about the primary ingredients and the concepts inspiring the theme in each course (e.g. beetroot or DIY Biotech), some of which were repeated, or reintroduced to help create a sense of consistency, as well as punctuation in the rhythm of the meal. The top of the diagram show pairs of speakers (e.g. WM → Wietske Maas) and the topics that unite them (e.g. scent and taste). The pairings of speakers and topics were determined to encourage particular discussions between the speakers and the guests that shared their tables. Alongside this high level recipe, many of the details were filled in with additional scores, maps, lists, notes and diagrams to help guide the cooks, performers, sommelier and maitre d'.

Amidst sharing and eating, the speakers toasted to food from different perspectives – artistic, cultural, technological, or scientific. From molecular gastronomy to fair trade, Ayurveda to permaculture, Open Sauces blended seemingly unrelated elements of our food-chain, bringing them together in the flow of the menu – each course building thematically and sensually on those before. The evening began in the wild, with discussions about urban foraging, then continued via cultivation through agriculture and biotechnology, paused to dwell on the nature of taste and scent, only to be grounded back in the practices of shopping and cooking, diets and health, and finally to be lifted up and twisted sideways in discussions of re‑appropriating urban waste in mobile kitchens, reminding adults that they can still play with their food.

More about Open Sauces can be found at http://opensauces.cc

Awakening

Cocktail Upper

Tempting

Beetroot air, jelly, crisps & mayo

Hunting & Gathering

Farming & Growing

Tasting & Smelling

Cooking & Shopping

Serving & Sharing

“To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party.” - Adelle Davis

Nourishing & Sweetening

Digesting

/Downer cocktail/ /Chinese High-mountain tea/ /Bangladeshi Black Tea / Croatian Bush Infusion/


for the previous version see open_sauces_menu_2007