When you take food to the edge, what gets stirred up is raw emotion.
It’s those emotions that remain embedded in the memory, the reactions stirred by a decade of Food on the Edge, Jp McMahon’s annual congregation of the great and the good in food.
Bringing international and national chefs to Ireland to stand on a stage and talk about food issues and food politics sounds like cerebral work, a menu of intellectual heavy lifting. Uplifting, for sure, but hardly visceral.
In fact, FOTE is a visceral experience, as speaker after speaker reiterates and underlines the fact that food is emotional.
Political, and emotional. Social, and emotional. Financial, and emotional. Creative, and emotional.
Food on the Edge tilted so many of us over the precipice and into emotional freefall on so many occasions that it was often like a mass therapy session.
The sessions amplified, time and time again, a simple truth about people whose job is to cook for a living: it is a moral pursuit, more akin to a vocation than a profession.
People who cook want to be their best in order to achieve their best, and achieving that best is then a gift for everyone, because generosity is at the heart of hospitality.
The fact that McMahon could persuade the superstars of the food world – Massimo Bottura; Diana Henry; Alice Waters, Ana Ros; Fadi Kattan – to come to Ireland to speak, and then to mingle them with homegrown culinary talent, has meant that FOTE is always surprising.
One minute its agrigastronomy, the next minute its organoleptics, the next minute Fadi Kattan is explaining that Palestinian food can be dated back some 9,500 years. And then Ashley Palmer-Watts, chef at London’s red-hot Devonshire Arms, is explaining how they cooked 45 different iterations of chocolate mousse until they got one they were happy with. And that’s just one session.
Everyone who has been to FOTE will have their fave moment, their fave advocate for good food. Daniel Patterson moved everyone to tears back in the opening year when he spoke about the desolation of cultural and culinary existence in America, whilst in 2024 Pam Brunton’s analysis of Scottish food and politics, in which she ranged from the Highland Clearances of 1750 to 1850 and on to her own acclaimed cooking at Inver Restaurant, on Lough Fyne, was eye-opening in every way. Or Albanian chef Bledar Kola describing his initial migration to London as a fifteen-year-old hidden in the underside of a lorry.
Massimo Bottura’s Call to Action silenced the assembled crowd in his description of RefettoRio Gastromotiva, where he made banana skin into bacon, and used food waste from the 2016 Rio Olympics to feed the city’s disadvantaged, as part of his Food for Soul non-profit. The talk will live in the memory of anyone who was stirred into action from hearing it. The gasp when he pulled up his sleeve to reveal the tattoo “No More Excuses” matched the frequent standing ovations that followed over the years. Last year it was for food activist Ebru Baybara Demir who described her project to feed millions – literally millions – of meals to victims of the Turkish earthquake in 2023.
The list goes on, and everyone who ever went to FOTE will remember a favourite (do add them below in the comments if you have one). Many of the speakers come back, creating a kind of FOTE family, including Mark Best, Sasu Laukkonen, Matt Orlando, Joshna Maharaj, Fadi Kattan, Andrea Petrini, many of whom are coming back this year to celebrate the tenth anniversary of this seminal session.
These are the speakers for 2025
FOTE should have more sponsorship, and the partners they do have, who are so essential to this programme, are listed here. Show them your support.
The 2025 FOTE will take place in Galway at ATU, Galway City Campus, Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th October.
Finally, here is a short video we made for the first ever Food on the Edge, featuring most of the wonderful speakers who had just arrived in Galway, ready and primed to stir up those emotions.