Photo: shimelle/Flickr

Besides the star line-up of chefs, delicious food offerings and the chance to talk with professionals really dedicated to their work with food, one of the most exciting things planned for the Let’s Talk About Food Festival this Saturday is the Kitchen Conversations installation.

Think of it as a mobile recording studio. Think of it as a foodie ‘take’ on Story Corps (but substitute a recipe box for the silver trailor). Or think of it as your favorite aunt’s comfy breakfast nook. It’s a bit of all of these, in fact.

And now think: what is your favorite food memory? We each have one. A meal, a flavor, a moment in time over food, perhaps in a certain setting or on a particular occasion, that encapsulates something critically important and ultra-personal to each of us.

This weekend, you’ll get the chance to record that memory. Festival goers will be invited to enter a custom-built set called “Kitchen Conversations” and sit down with an interviewer to share a funny, moving or meaningful story related to food. The recordings made on site will be edited down to broadcast-quality narratives with audience appeal.

A photo of the set, when it was still under construction, gives a sense of the space where participants will sit to have their memory recorded.

Photo: project manager Linda Ziemba (l), documentary producer Katie Ellis (r) and a colleague discuss the Kitchen Conversations installation

The principal organizers behind the Kitchen Conversations project — Let’s Talk About Food founder Louisa Kasdon and Kathleen Frith of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School — recognize the cultural and historical value of the audio archive that will result from the installation. They shared with PRK their collective thinking on the purpose behind this audio project.

Why is it important to you to record people’s food memories? Why food memories versus any other sort of memories?
The topic of food lies at the center of so much of our human experience. Who among us does not remember their most romantic meal, a triumph (or utter failure) in the kitchen, their grandmother’s recipe, or their child’s first harvest in the backyard garden? Through experiences with food we shape relationships, connections with the natural world, and our own identity, both personally and culturally.

Kitchen Conversations aims to capture those personal stories that can be shared with a large audience and emotionally articulate how food shapes ourselves and our lives. Creating an oral history of food will, we believe, raise awareness and understanding about the importance food plays in our culture, health and relationship with the natural world and help define a bedrock of what is America. A team of storytellers, food experts and radio journalists have joined forces to create this public participatory project that will entertain, move and inspire both contributors and listeners alike.

How is it going to work? What will it look like?
We have [constructed] a three-sided booth designed to look like a recipe box on the outside and a cozy 1950’s style kitchen on the inside. Festival goers will be invited to come share their memories about food and escorted to a kitchen table in the booth. An interviewer sitting with them at the table will record their conversation with broadcast quality audio equipment. We’ll have three interviewers on site for the day, all with strong backgrounds in public radio production. They will take one-hour turns conducting the interviews while the other two are outside the booth corralling festival-goers and, of course, sampling festival fare.

Where will the memories live? Does kitchen conversations have a life bend Boston?
We envision Kitchen Conversations to grow into a major national effort with the potential to capture stories at a variety of venues around the country. We are exploring partnerships with museums, event-hosting organizations and broadcast partners. We can foresee a traveling set that visits festivals, museums and venues around the country collecting food stories from a wide variety of backgrounds, creating a novel archive of our American food culture unlike any preceding effort.

Look for the Kitchen Conversations installation with recipe box signage (below) on Saturday, and become a part of this oral history project about our food culture! PRK will see you there.

Signage for the Kitchen Conversations installation