Ugly Tomatoes Taste Better: A Conversation about OUR Food!

Name: Ugly Tomatoes Taste Better: A Conversation about OUR Food!
Start: 2024-10-26T13:00:00-05:00
Location: LSU Shreveport

Schedule

Sat Oct 26 2024 at 01:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

LSU Shreveport | Shreveport, LA

This is a food forum where we will talk about OUR food in the context of how our community's food superheroes are adding diversity to what we are being offered to eat here in North Louisiana.
Kicking off this local food forum will be guest speaker David Shields, the keeper of the Slow Food Ark of Taste in the US and known as “the flavor saver”. He tracks down lost food crops and assists in restoring them to fields and tables. Among his 14 published books, he has written award winning agricultural and culinary histories—Southern Provisions (2015), The Culinarians (2017), Taste the State South Carolina (2021)—and most recently The Ark of Taste (2023). His research links horticulture to the table, agriculture to home and professional cookery. He chairs the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, Heads the Ark of Taste Committee for the South, and became the Carolina Distinguished Professorship Emeritus at the University of South Carolina in 2024. He is the Southern Foodways Alliance’s “Keeper of the Flame,” twice a James Beard finalist in food history, and Slow Food’s Snailblazer for Biodiversity. He and long-time collaborator Kevin Mitchel will be hosting and writing a PBS television show, The Savers of Flavor in 2024-25. It is about the people who have preserved the most endangered traditional southern fruits, grains, and vegetables.
Following David Shields will be a series of panel discussions with some of our local food heroes led by Shreveport Green executive director Lauren Jones so our food consuming community can better understand what they do and why they do it and how they are bringing us more and better choices. There will be break-out sessions on hot peppers and African diaspora foods in our North Louisiana cuisine. And amidst it all will be tasting opportunities!
Tickets are $10, 15% discount for current Slow Food members.
Big thanks to the LSU Shreveport College of Education and Human Development for being our venue sponsor!