Gastronomy Summit 2022

About Joxe Mari Aizega

Joxe Mari Aizega is General Manager of the Basque Culinary Center, a pioneering educational institute in the world of gastronomy, which incorporates a Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences and a Technological Center in Gastronomy. The Center was formed by eight of the Basque region’s top chefs, along with eleven leading chefs from elsewhere worldwide. It aims to provide a benchmark for gastronomic education, research and innovation and places particular emphasis on gastronomy as a lever got social and economic development. Aizega has shaped the Basque Culinary Center, providing it with strategic leadership since its foundation in 2009.

Aizega is a graduate in Law and Business Studies and he holds a Doctorate in Law from the University of the Basque Country. He began his professional career as a teacher at the University of the Basque Country. He has held different management positions, both in the business and academic sector, including as Vice Chancellor of Mondragon University.

His books include Basque: Creative Territory and Culinary Action.

About Andrea Pieroni

Andrea Pieroni is Rector of the University of the Gastronomic Sciences, located in Pollenzo, Italy.

Trained in medical botany at the University of Pisa, Pieroni earned his doctorate from the University of Bonn in Germany. He has worked as a Research Assistant at the University of London (2000-2003) and as a tenured Lecturer and, later, Senior Lecturer at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford in northern England (2003-2009). From January 2009 he was Associate Professor in the subject area Environmental and Applied Botany in Pollenzo and from 2016 he is Full Professor in the same subject.

Professor Pieroni has served as the Vice-President and President of the International Society of Ethnobiology (2008-2010), he is the founder and Chief Editor of the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine and sits on the boards of diverse international ethnoscientific associations and peer-reviewed publications.

The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004 by the international non-profit association Slow Food in cooperation with the Italian regions of Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna, is a ministerially recognized, private non-profit institution.

Its goal is to be an international research and education center for those working on renewing farming methods, protecting biodiversity and building an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science.

The university forms gastronomes, new professional figures with multi-disciplinary skills and knowledge in the fields of science, culture, politics, economics and ecology of food, working to apply them to production, distribution and sustainable consumption.

UNISG students, hailing from around the world, gain dynamic experiences in artisanal and industrial food production, thanks to complementary education in both sciences and humanities, sensory training and hands-on learning during study trips across five continents.

About Dr Jessica B. Harris

According to The Heritage Radio Network, “Doctor Jessica B. Harris damn near knows it all when it comes to African and Caribbean cuisines and culinary history. She’s a living legend“.

She is the author of twelve critically acclaimed cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora and her latest, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, was the International Association for Culinary Professionals 2012 prize winner for culinary history. She has since published her memoir, My Soul Looks Back, and Vintage Postcards from the African World.

In her more than four decades as a journalist Dr. Harris has written book reviews, theatre reviews, travel, feature, and beauty articles too numerous to note. She has lectured on African-American food and culture at institutions throughout the United States and abroad and has written extensively about the culture of Africa in the Americas, particularly the foodways.

Dr. Harris has been honoured with many awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Southern Foodways Alliance (of which she is a founding member) and the Lafcadio Hearn award as a Louisiana culinary icon from The John Folse Culinary Academy at Louisiana’s Nicholls State University. In 2010, she was inducted into the James Beard Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in the United States. In 2015, she received a lifetime achievement award at the Soul Summit, the first national gathering of African Americans in Food. The same year, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Johnson & Wales University. In 2016, she received the de Masters Award from the American Association of Food Journalists.  In 2020 she received the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. Widely regarded as America’s highest honour in the food world, it is bestowed upon ‘a person in the industry whose body of work has had a positive and long-lasting impact on the way we eat, cook, and think about food in America.’

Dr. Harris was the inaugural recipient of the Ray Charles Chair in African-American Material Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans where she established an Institute for the Study of Culinary Cultures. Dr. Harris was a professor of English in the SEEK Program at Queens College/C.U.N.Y. for more almost five decades.  She is a regular presenter at the annual FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, England.

In 2012, Dr. Harris was asked by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture to conceptualize and curate the restaurant of the new museum on the Mall in Washington DC and is a member of the Kitchen Cabinet at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Most recently she was the Lead Curator of African American: Making the Nation’s Table, a major exhibition hosted by the Museum of Food and Drink and New York City.

About Michael Caines MBE

Michael Caines MBE is one of the UK’s most celebrated and acclaimed chefs, a successful and imaginative hotelier, a respected spokesperson for the hospitality industry, and a patron and fundraiser for a number of national and local charities and community organisations.

In 2017, Michael opened Lympstone Manor, a luxury country house hotel that sets a new benchmark for hospitality in the 21st century. Lympstone Manor is the culmination of a longstanding dream that Michael realised after three years of hard work and planning to transform an historic Grade II Georgian mansion into his wholly personal and exciting vision of contemporary country house hospitality for the 21st century. With 21 stunning guestrooms and suites named after the birds of the estuary, three beautiful and individual dining rooms in which to savour Michael’s acclaimed Michelin starred cuisine matched with a world-class wine cellar, 28 acres of gardens, grounds and parkland including its very own vineyard all set in the beauty and tranquility of East Devon and the Jurassic Coast, a stay here is a totally exceptional experience.

With a life-long career, Michael has built his reputation on a highly personal and distinctive modern cuisine that celebrates the finest local and seasonal produce and ingredients from Devon and the South West and draws on influences from his travels around the world.

Michael appears regularly on Saturday Kitchen, and has made numerous appearances on MasterChef, The Great British Menu, Sunday Brunch and other broadcasts. He has numerous business interests and is extensively involved in community and charity work.

Michael held two Michelin stars for 18 consecutive years before he took the leap of faith to create his own country house hotel. Just six months from opening Lympstone Manor, Michael and the team were awarded their first Michelin star.  Amongst his many accolades, Michael cooked in 10 Downing Street for the Prime Minister, was awarded AA Chef’s Chef of the Year in 2007, and received an MBE in 2006 for services to the hospitality industry. In 2015 he was made freeman of the City of Exeter “in recognition of his outstanding services to the field of cookery which has led to Exeter’s name being known around the world as one which supports cookery”.

About Carolyn Steel

Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities. An award-winning writer, architect and academic, she is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia, or food-place, has gained international recognition across a broad range of fields in design, ecology, academia and the arts.

A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, Carolyn studied architecture at Cambridge University and has subsequently taught at Cambridge, London Metropolitan and Wageningen Universities and the London School of Economics.

Carolyn is in international demand as a speaker and her 2009 TED talk has received more than one million views. In 2020-21, she is a Research Fellow with Aeres University in the Netherlands and in August 2020 she was featured in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

About Anna Pollock

Anna Pollock has 40 years’ experience as a consultant, strategist, speaker, and change agent.  
Described as an irrepressibly curious “renaissance woman”, her strength derives from an ability to dig beneath surface trends to find and make sense of the real drivers of change combined with a creative capacity to develop innovative responses.

She enjoys dual Canadian and British citizenship having worked in each country for over 15 years and is now a much sought after speaker internationally, focusing on the deep changes affecting tourism and community development.

While resident in Canada she undertook seminal work in human resource development, sustainable tourism, health tourism and adventure travel and received The Visionary of the Year Award from the tourism industry in western Canada in recognition of her contribution to thought leadership.

In the late 1990s, she conceived and developed the first destination IT strategy based on the Internet and later acted as CEO of a UK-based software company that developed a Destination Management System and became recognised by the UK government as “best of breed”.  
For over a decade – and long before it became a fashionable to call oneself a “new media guru”, Anna was recognised as a thought leader who understood the deeper impacts associated with connectivity and interactivity.

In 2007 Anna turned her attention towards climate change and, in anticipation of the need by the tourism industry to reduce its carbon footprint, created The Icarus Foundation a not-for-profit agency formed to assist the Canadian tourism industry constructively address climate change.

Saddened by the hesitancy with which mainstream tourism approached the need to reduce its environmental impact and heartened by research that shows customers might be changing faster than suppliers, Anna is developed the concept of Conscious Travel to that faces the oxymoron of tourism growth and sustainability head on. Believing that tourism cannot continue to grow indefinitely on a finite planet without destroying the beauty and cultural integrity of the places and people it depends on, Anna believes that we have to find a better way – one that replaces the concept of more with better and focuses on delivering better for more.

Conscious Travel offers a new model or approach to destination and business development; is developing a community-based, collaborative action learning program that turns hosts into change agents; and will become a global network of self-organising communities creating a better tourism in their own unique way.

About Duncan Morrow

Duncan Morrow is Professor in Politics and Director of Community Engagement at Ulster University in Belfast, where he is currently supporting the regeneration of Inner City and North Belfast, with partners across the community and public sectors.  He has worked widely in the fields of conflict resolution, cultural diversity, Northern Irish politics and the relationship between religion and politics, including a strong interest policing, criminal justice and alternatives to violence.

Between 2002 and 2012, Duncan was Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, which focused on building an outward-looking and socially progressive region.  In 1998 he was appointed as a Sentence Review Commissioner responsible for implementing the prisoner early release provisions of the Good Friday Agreement and since 2002 he has been a Northern Ireland Parole Commissioner. In 2015-16 he chaired the Scottish Government’s Independent Advisory Group on Hate Crime, Prejudice and Community Cohesion.  Since 2018 he has been actively engaged in political and community efforts to move Northern Ireland away from sectarian division and paramilitarism.

About Marc Millon

Marc Millon has been travelling, eating, drinking, learning and writing about food, wine and travel for nearly 40 years.

Born in Mexico, with a mother from Hawaii via Korea and an anthropologist father from New York via Paris, he was weaned on exotic and delicious foods. Marc and his photographer wife Kim are the authors of 14 books and are regular contributors to publications on both sides of the Atlantic. They pioneered a series of illustrated wine-food-travel books including The Wine Roads of Europe, The Wine Roads of France, The Wine Roads of Italy, and The Wine Roads of Spain. Other titles include The Wine and Food of Europe, The Food Lovers’ Companion Italy, and The Food Lovers’ Companion France.

Marc regularly lectures and hosts gastronomic cultural tours to Italy and France with Martin Randall Travel, the UK’s leading cultural travel specialist. He and Kim also have their own wine company, importing Italian wines from small family estates. Marc has lived in Devon for nearly four decades and is recognised as one of the most effective ambassadors for local food culture. Each year he hosts a gastronomy field trip to his adopted county for Oxford School of Hospitality Management students to learn about food and food culture directly at the source, meeting outstanding producers, chefs, winemakers and more.

About Akwasi Brenya-Mensa

Akwasi is due to open his debut restaurant and bar, Tatale, in London’s Africa Centre, in Spring 2022.  It will showcase contemporary Pan-African cuisine and will be a venue for events and storytelling through food, art and culture.

Tatale began life as a series of supper clubs which captured the distinctive spirit of Chop Bars – a defining element of Ghanaian cultural and culinary life. He is opening his new permanent site at a time when African cuisine is beginning to attract the recognition and appreciation it deserves. Serving dishes which marry his Ghanian heritage with innovative technique and presentation, Tatale will be a high-profile platform from which Akwasi can further enhance the appeal of African cuisines.

Taking its name from the plantain pancake, tatale – a quintessential Ghanian dish – it reflects Akwasi’s belief that wherever you are in the world, plantain is synonymous with the Black Experience. This concept of universality, reflected in his desire to form connections through food, art and music, has become the backbone of Akwasi’s approach.

About Melissa Thompson

Melissa Thompson is an award-winning food writer and cook whose powerful articles on the British food industry have become focal points for important discussions on identity, diversity and inclusivity.

In 2021, she won the Food Writing Award from the Guild of Food Writers. Her debut cookbook, Motherland, is due out in September 2022, published by Bloomsbury. It explores the evolution of Jamaican food, from the island’s indigenous population to the present day.

Melissa has appeared on Saturday Kitchen and Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and is co-director of the British Library’s Food Season.  She is a columnist for BBC Good Food magazine and has written articles and recipes for a range of publications including The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveller, Stylist, Vittles, Waitrose Weekend, and Waitrose Magazine.

About Dan Saladino

Dan Saladino, food journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, recently published his first book, Eating to Extinction, to great acclaim.

Dan honed his journalistic skills on Radio 4’s investigative series Face the Facts before specialising in food and farming stories more than a decade ago. Dan is listed in the Progress 1000: The Evening Standard’s Most Influential People in Food and Drink, The Telegraph’s Food Power List and he is the recipient of a James Beard Awards (America’s most high-profile award for food journalism). He has won multiple awards for his radio work, including for his efforts to document the loss of biodiversity around the world.

In this regard, his extensive travels through Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, recording the world’s most endangered foods and the disappearance of traditional and indigenous food cultures, formed the basis for his recent book. In 2019 Dan won the Jane Grigson Trust Award for New Food Writers, prior to the publication of Eating to Extinction.