Discover another side to food: we'll be talking experiential food, home restaurants, food as art, and more, with some of the UK's most innovative food geeks. Learn about supper clubs and food history, experience edible stories, create your perfect liqueur blend, and look out for our feast of cheese (the edible kind) coupled with cheese (the writing kind.) We'll also be talking about the roles of food in building fictional worlds, trying out edible knitting, and putting together a collaborative cookbook!

Contribute to the Nine Worlds Cookbook
All Weekend
Room 32
The food track will be collecting fantasy recipes all weekend for the Nine Worlds 2014 Cookbook. Your fantasy recipes could be recreations of food from fiction like butterbeer, lembas bread, blue string pudding or soylent green (with faux people, please); or they can be your wildest food fantasies: giant jaffa cakes, cream eggs Benedict, exploding puddings, six legged roast goose.

Come post your recipes on the giant pinboard in the food track room and discover what others have posted. At the end of the weekend, the best recipes will be collated into a free digital cookbook which will be sent to every contributor (whether they made the final cut or not). If you're feeling unsure of your recipe writing skills, drop by the bar on Sunday for our Peer Recipe Writing session for some help and support getting that contribution in!

Thursday

Cheese & Cheese! Eating, talking, and getting to know each other
8-10
Room 38
Ease yourself into the weekend, and get to know some new people, over two kinds of cheese: we'll be providing some finest cheese (the food kind) for you to nibble on, while you regale your fellow attendees with cheese (the writing kind). If you can, we'd like you to bring a little extract from one of your most guilty pleasures to read out. At Nine Worlds, we don't think that you should ever have to be embarrassed about what you like, but we all still have a book we wouldn't openly read on the bus. Come and celebrate the cheap erotica, pulp scifi, TV spinoffs and unlikely crime stories which we still love: no matter what anyone else thinks. The food track head will be presenting extracts from the collection of Stephanie Plum novels that she keeps on the bottom-most shelf in her library, in the hope that no-one notices them. We promise not to judge you, whatever you bring.

Friday

Tales from The Underground Restaurant: how to run a supperclub, with Kerstin Rogers
3.15-4.30
Room 32
Kerstin Rodgers (aka, MsMarmitelover) launched the underground restaurant movement in the UK with her eponymous supper club, The Underground Restaurant. Since then, she's been at the heart of the supper club movement: providing advice, publishing a book on how to start your own, and even running an underground farmers' market in her own house and garden. Kerstin will be giving an introduction to supperclubs and talking about her themed evenings: including an all-black banquet, a hobbit feast, and a Doctor Who evening.

Food As Art: Caroline Hobkinson talks about and demonstrates her work
6.45-8.00
Room 32
Caroline Hobkinson curates dining experiences that force diners to reassess the way they eat. Her work looks at the world through food: its history, the rituals of how we eat, and the traditions involved in preparing it. She is fascinated by the spectacle of eating, and, more recently, by how we can modulate flavour by using different sound frequencies. Caroline’s work ranges from installations that use food as performance and social commentary, to scientific research on flavour enhancement with Oxford University. She'll be giving a talk on some of her latest work, explaining the processes behind the performance and demonstrating a sound which actually makes things taste sweeter.

Anatomy of a Blend: A talk and tasting with Alchemist Dreams handmade liqueurs
8.30-9.45
Room 32
Alchemist Dreams produce custom handmade liqueurs from a kitchen in East London. Order from them, and you are invited to design your own unique flavour by combining the fruits, herbs and spices of your choice. But how to know what to choose? Head Alchemist (and Food Geekery track head) Ruth Ball will be giving a guided tasting, talking you through the process of creation and how to design your own perfect blend.

Saturday

Food In Fantasy: A panel discussion with Esther Saxey, Ed Cox, Mark Newton and Gail Carriger
1:30-2.45
Room 32
So: you've made a world. You've designed people (or other beings) to inhabit it and you've given them art, culture and history, maybe even a language. But what about the food? Food is an central part of most cultures: societies are structured by the need to grow and distribute it, and families are structured by cooking and eating it. The rich feast on the extravagant and exotic, while the poor struggle to find enough of it. How will your food reflect the cultures which you have created? Our panel discuss the role of food in fantasy writing: both their own, and their favourites.

What Is Experiential Food?: Talk, demonstration and theatrics with the Robin Collective
3.15-4.30
Room 32
The Robin Collective are Elspeth Rae, Robin Fegen and Brandy Wright. Working at the cutting edge of experiential food, their projects have names like Extreme Garnishing, Marshmallow Apothecary, Creating Senses Orchard, and Cryptology Tours. They've created entire edible orchards, and bitters made with moisture from the walls of Churchill's bunker. They'll be telling you what experiential food is and why it's important, as well as giving some live demonstrations which will go off with a (literal) bang.

Edible Knitting: knitting cord bracelets from strawberry laces
6.45-8.00
Room 32
Come and make your own edible bracelets! We will be teaching you to make an icord bracelet from delicious strawberry laces. The icord is a simple technique which you should be able to master very quickly. And while bracelets will probably be gone soon (om nom nom) but the skill will stay with you forever. Kid-friendly (recommended 8+) but also very suitable for adults.

Anatomy of a Blend: talk and tasting with Alchemist Dreams handmade liqueurs
8.30-9.45
Alchemist Dreams produce custom handmade liqueurs from a kitchen in East London. Order from them, and you are invited to design your own unique flavour by combining the fruits, herbs and spices of your choice. But how to know what to choose? Head Alchemist (and Food Geekery track head) Ruth Ball will be giving a guided tasting, talking you through the process of creation and how to design your own perfect blend.

Sunday

Talking With Food, Not Words: Telling an edible story with Chloe Morris
11.45-1.00
Chloe Morris will be talking about her project, Edible Stories. This carefully curated and themed dining experience takes some of your favourite written stories and brings them to life: exclusively through the use of food. Coming into the experience, you are informed of the time and given directions to a secret location, but the title of the story is not revealed. Chloe will be taking us behind the curtain of this creative process.

Food in Science Fiction
1.30-2.45
How do aliens eat? What do they eat? Do they eat at all? Will they want to eat us? Food is essential to human survival and to the survival of most everything we normally think of as living, so in any journey to an alien world it can never be forgotten. Our panel discuss the different ways in which we might grow or construct food in the future, as well as the role food plays in science fiction of all kinds
Panel: Sarah McIntyre, Gareth L. Powell and Aliette de Bodard

Peer Recipe Writing: Get help writing your Nine Worlds Cookbook entry
3.15-4.30
Bijou Bar
Want to contribute to the Nine Worlds Cookbook but feeling a little unsure of how to write your recipe up? Food track head Ruth Ball and professional food writer and blogger Kerstin Rogers will be relaxing in the bar. Drop in and bring your recipe ideas along. We'll work with you, and encourage you to work with each other, to put them down in writing. Maybe we'll have a new idea or two over a drink as well!