Events

September 26, 2011

Advance Notice

Yam Festival offers a taste of traditions


The festival kicks off Tuesday, Oct. 4, with a lecture from Carlos curator of African Art Jessica Stephenson.

Yams and sweet potatoes — they're not even distant cousins — will be celebrated with a series of programs from Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory Dining and Sustainability Initiatives Oct. 4-9.

Celebrity chefs, home cooks and dancers and drummers will participate in the Yam Festival to highlight the importance of the yam in the ritual and daily life of people in West Africa and its celebration in art and dance and to note the annual Georgia sweet potato harvest.

The festival kicks off Tuesday, Oct. 4, with a lecture from Carlos curator of African Art Jessica Stephenson. Following her talk, dancers and drummers from Giwayen Mata will perform and lead a yam festival procession to the Emory Farmers Market on the Cox Hall bridge where farmers will offer locally grown yams and sweet potatoes.

A highlight will be the Oct. 6 conversation at the Carlos Museum with Southern chef and author Scott Peacock. He will share taste memories of sweet potatoes from growing up in Alabama and also actual tastes of sweet potatoes that he has prepared. 

Other cooking events will feature Griselda Lartey, Lynn Sawicki, Steven Satterfield of Miller Union and Billy Allin of Cakes and Ale, both Atlanta restaurants.

Jessica B. Harris, author of "Africa Cooks" and "High on the Hog," will give a talk entitled "Those Aren't Yams, Those Are Sweet Potatoes: Culinary Confusion in the African-Atlantic World" on Friday, Oct. 7.

The festival is part of the special exhibition programming for "Divine Intervention: African Art and Religion."

Currently, 94 percent of the world's yams are grown in the African "yam belt" encompassing Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Cameroon and Togo. The annual harvest is celebrated throughout this region with "new yam festivals," in which the first new yams are offered to the villages' important deities and ancestral spirits.

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