“There’s carrot blood everywhere!” exclaims a small round bespectacled scientist, chuckling to himself. His audience laughs, but nervously. The scientist is Dr Len Fisher and he is attempting to fashion a musical instrument out of a carrot – using nothing but an electric power drill, a bradawl, a plastic funnel, a mouthpiece and his wits. Fisher holds the carrot lengthwise in his bare hand and blithely starts drilling into it. “Jesus, take care!” a man mutters.

Anxiety turns to admiration when Fisher – unharmed – holds up his finished product: a perfect six-hole carrot “recorder”. He hands it to a jazz saxophonist who proceeds to play a mellow rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel”.

At the Oxford Food Symposium such sights are not merely possible, but normal. The symposium, an annual event for the best part of three decades, is like no other conference. Here, in an Oxford college, you will find seminars on the properties of sheep fat, chemists making mayonnaise out of egg whites instead of yolks, and middle-aged men wearing edible hats – all in the name of food scholarship.

“Pleasantly mad” is how the historian Theodore Zeldin has described the symposium – and he was one of the people who started it all, back in 1979. Every year there is a different theme – food and morality, wild food, eggs, the cooking medium, milk, the meal. This year’s symposium, from September 11-13, will be called “Food and Language”. (In 2008, to the chagrin of some hardcore carnivores, the theme was vegetables, hence the carrot recorder).

The benign mood of enthusiastic amateurism owes a great deal to the late Alan Davidson, author of the Oxford Companion to Food, diplomat, publisher, and world expert on fish. In collaboration with Zeldin, Davidson convened the very first symposium – just 18 people sitting round a table talking about cookbooks – at St Antony’s college in 1979 when he was a visiting fellow researching science in the kitchen. Until his death in 2003, he and his wife Jane presided over the symposium, shaping its charming atmosphere. Davidson had precise passions which he shared freely: for marmalade, preferably made with kaffir limes; for outlandish silk Laotian shirts (he had been ambassador to Laos before becoming a food writer in retirement); for trifle (about which he co-authored a delightful short book); for all things fishy; and for screwball comedies of the 1930s, which would have been his next great project.

THE OTHER CIA

A culinary conference

I first visited the Culinary Institute of America, or the other CIA as I like to call it, almost 10 years ago, writes Anissa Helou. The institute featured, glowingly, in a Financial Times piece about cooking schools. I had been looking for a professional cookery course. So I immediately called to ask for a brochure and soon afterwards I found myself settled at the CIA’s gorgeous Greystone campus, in the heart of Napa Valley, having signed up for several weekly courses.

A few years later I revisited the CIA as a presenter at their annual “Worlds of Flavor” conference, whose theme that year was “Mediterranean Flavors, American Menus”. Since then, I have been back several times. Greg Drescher of the Culinary Institute of America is the creator of WOF and considers the Mediterranean culinary heritage a rich source of inspiration for American menus. “In 25 short years, the US has gone from a country that regarded olive oil, garlic, and pasta as ethnic and exotic, to a nation that today embraces the Mediterranean traditions of small plates – from tapas and antipasti to meze – as an American dining mega-trend, in sync with both declining budgets and big appetites for culinary adventure in the most casual of settings,” he says.

The conference takes place over two-and-a-half intensely packed days during which top chefs, bakers and pastry chefs, cookbook authors, artisanal food producers and growers, and other authorities lead general seminars, and hands-on kitchen sessions.

The World Marketplace alone is worth the trip. In the Barrel Room stands are organised by country or by sponsor, and each chef prepares two or three signature dishes offering an array of flavours from his or her own country. Over two evenings, you can discover and taste dozens of authentic dishes, some little-known, some classics, and others modern creations.

The WOF may not be one of the world’s largest food conferences, but it certainly is one of the most influential. It sells out soon after it is announced, each year attracting about 700 attendees, all looking for knowledge and inspiration.

The 2009 Worlds of Flavor conference runs November 12-14; details on www.ciachef.edu. Anissa Helou is the author of ‘Modern Meze’

Davidson disliked the narrowness of academe, seeking out food scholars from all walks of life. Those who make the annual pilgrimage to Oxford – about 200 a year – have included food writers, chefs, bankers, vintners, students, civil servants, housewives and publishers as well as academics. Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson were early “symposiasts”.

Far greater numbers travel from the US, Australia, Europe and Asia than from the nearby Oxford colleges. A regular attendee is Alicia Rios, a flamboyant Spanish olive oil expert famous for her performance art (she once oversaw a project recreating the Houses of Parliament using cucumber sandwiches). The main panel last year included Paul Levy and Claudia Roden (co-chairs of the symposium), Elizabeth Luard, and Fuchsia Dunlop.

Anyone is welcome. The common thread is a genuine interest in some aspect of food not adequately covered by the mainstream culture. What were the origins of summer pudding? Does the oxalic acid in spinach soften fish bones? Why do plums taste sweet to Italians, but sour to the Japanese? Someone at the symposium will have devoted hours searching for the answer.

I’ve been attending for nine years, first as a PhD student, then as a food writer, first motivated by admiration for Alan Davidson, but drawn back by the peculiar sense of community and the fact that you always learn something new.

You hear occasional mutterings that the symposium is not what it was; that some of the amateur charm has seeped away since Davidson’s death. One casualty was the notorious bring-your-own lunch, which until 2004 always took place on the Saturday of the weekend. It would include dishes you would otherwise have to travel far and wide to taste (and in some cases to avoid) such as hundred-year eggs or pies made to authentic Renaissance recipes. The 1981 lunch is preserved for posterity in a tiny book published by Davidson. It included eggs scrambled Parsee style; Anglo-Sephardic fried fish; ancient boiled wheat; Indonesian salad; Medieval chicken liver with optional gizzards. One recipe opens, encouragingly: “This dish looks appalling. But persevere.”

In 2008, by contrast, the lunch was a perfectly composed selection of vegetable meze. Dinner was even better, a magnificent Indian thali made by Camellia Panjabi and the chefs of London’s Masala Zone. Diners swooned over the individual metal dishes of tindli masala and moong dal, white pumpkin raita, butter chicken, elegant towers of cashew rice and fenugreek-flavoured flatbreads. Paul Levy, a stalwart since 1979, was jubilant. “I think,” he remarked the next morning, “we may safely say it was the best meal ever served in an Oxbridge college.”

The preference for non-disgusting food is part of a gradual professionalisation of the symposium, spearheaded by Carolin Young, a young art historian and the symposium’s indefatigable organiser. Proceedings have moved from St Antony’s on Woodstock Road to the clean modernist buildings of St Catherine’s. New participants are now likely to be graduates of gastronomy programmes rather than pure enthusiasts.

Last year, speakers gave learned papers on the spread of sugar beets in 19th-century America and the Roman vegetable garden. There were disquisitions on a late Alexandrian vegetable zodiac and consumption of vegetables in space. We learned about the Japanese art of “modoki”, or making fake meat and fish dishes, mostly from tofu.

Such was the seriousness of many of papers, and the general self-assurance of proceedings, you might almost imagine you were at any academic conference. Almost. After dinner, people retired to the bar to construct vegetable faces in the manner of Arcimboldo; the best had cabbage cheeks and an aubergine nose.

And then there was Len Fisher’s musical veg. Fisher, a physicist, was making the solemn point that vegetable acoustics can be a good determinant of freshness and quality. Tapping a melon to see if it is ripe is a logical idea. Not that logic was foremost in our minds by the time he was up on stage carving his carrot recorder.

“Actually,” he confided to me later, “you get a much better sound from a cucumber – more sonorous. But I didn’t dare do it because of the sheer carnage. Carrots are one thing, but you wouldn’t want a roomful of cucumber blood.”

The 2009 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery runs from September 11-13; details onwww.oxfordsymposium.org.uk