6 Food Panels Not to Miss at SXSW 2012

The following are our SXSW food picks for those attending or following SXSWi on Twitter this week. I will be organizing some impromptu Food+Tech happy hours. Follow the hashtag #SXfoodtech for more details!

My Robotic Kitchen Planned This Dinner Party
Hilton Austin Downtown
3/9 | 3:30PM – 4:30PM
#SXcooking

Dinner parties are the ultimate social experience that no digital technology will ever replicate. You sit face-to-face with others, sharing an experience that uses all five of your senses. It’s the original social network.

For many though, hosting your own dinner party — or even cooking dinner for yourself — feels like too much work. There’s too much planning, too many options, too many picky eaters.

In this session, we’ll demonstrate some emerging technologies that make cooking easy and more accessible for both novice and expert home cooks. Things like smart recipes that adjust to your guests’ preferences, multiple recipes that combine themselves into one step-by-step process, dinner party planning tools connected to social networks, cooking classes done via chat rooms, appliances that can’t overcook food, kitchen scales that measure ingredients for you and a few tips and techniques to let you do more in the kitchen.

Seafood Watch vs. Yelp: Future of Social Food
3/9 | 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Hilton Austin Downtown
Room 616AB
#socialfood

World food systems hang in a balance–the latest tech only hints at what’s coming. Consider the future of social tools with us, using a seafood lens. DNA testing, barcode scanning, big data and ubiquitous computing mean we can hack the food system like never before. Corporations have yet to provide consumers with tools to understand the impacts of our food choices. This is a change that we will have to lead. Let’s build it today. The open food system will be social. Disruption from a social food system may be as powerful as social media has been in the media world. We can demassify food like social tools have demassified media. Just as we have increasingly turned to the web to learn about—and influence—world and local events, so too we will turn to an open and social food system, managed online, to learn about and acquire food.

The Rise of Brooklyn Food Scene
3/11 | 11:00AM -12:00PM
Driskill Hotel
Citadel
#bklynfood

Could Brooklyn be to food what Seattle was to music — a hotbed of creative people doing new things? There are tons of artisans finding new businesses and launching new products in the biggest NYC borough whether it be from the Brooklyn Flea or the local store front. Clarkson Potter publishes cookbooks from several Brooklyn food entrepreneurs: One Girl Cookies (Dawn Casale & David Crofton), Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book (Erica Shea & Stephen Valand), The Butcher’s Guide to Well Raised Meat (Joshua and Jessica Applestone), Momofuku Milk Bar (Christina Tosi) and more!

Better Food Through Open Data Standards
3/11 | 12:30PM – 1:30PM
Driskill Hotel
Citadel
#openfood

There is an explosion in the number of services created to help people make better choices about how we produce, consume, and interact with food. Challenges related to the accuracy and completeness of data hamper the rate of innovation.

A panel of leading food, data and technology doers shares their initial framework for an open standard for reporting, recording and sharing food information. Hear how recipe sites, restaurant menu wranglers, open government developers, urban agronomists, provenance geeks and food policy activists are collaborating on an interoperable standard. Panelists will share their unique perspectives and invite new collaborators to expand, refine, and put into practice an open standard. The open food data standard describes all aspects of food, in a way that allows technologists to support and enhance the success of the local food economy. Come find out how you can take part in the generation of an open data standard for food that reflects the values we place in food.

SXSW Create
3/11 | 11:00AM – 6:00PM
Palm Park

Come join creators, hackers, makers, artists, and diy’ers for the first annual Create on March 13th in Palm Park from 11am-6pm. This community event, in conjunction with Dorkbot Austin and the Austin Hackerspace, will be featuring talented artists from the Austin and SXSW communities showing off their creations and discussing what inspires them. From the latest in robotics, funding methods, and even hacking food science come see what it means to create. Featured speakers include Jeff Potter and Justin Jenson. Follow this site for an updated schedule as well as twitter.com/CreateATX for up to date information. If you would like more information please contact createatx@gmail.com

Digital Debauchery with Anthony Bourdain
9/13 | 3:30PM – 4:30PM
Austin Convention Center
Ballroom D
#bourdain

Meet chef, author & television personality Anthony Bourdain and the crew behind the award-winning series Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, who help Tony oversee the show’s social media presence.

Tony and his trusted sidekicks will discuss how he utilizes social media —Twitter, Facebook, blogs, et al. — to directly communicate his unique and unfiltered P.O.V. to fans of the show, and to the world at large.

We’ll also look at how social media and the digital audience is changing the overall game for TV, and how it directly impacts both the show and how Tony converses with his audience.

From ‘LiveTwatting’ wrap parties on the road (read: shots of toilets abroad) to propagating food porn online to live-streaming a pub crawl — all is fair game as we present an unprecedented & uncensored behind-the-scenes access to No Reservations.

This panel also includes a Q&A with Tony and crew — and as always with Tony, nothing is off-limits.