A food festival with a difference including feasts and farm visits will come to Newport next week.
The eight-day event, which will illustrate how we can feed ourselves sustainably and deliciously, starts on October 29 with a food fair in Newport memorial hall. It will be followed by a week of farm tours, talks and meals in the pubs, shops and restaurants.
The festival aims to explore a future of eating local without depending on supermarkets, fossil fuels or imports. It will end with a wine, salmon and cheese tasting and dinner party.
“Our area produces all the basics, even the beer. Let’s celebrate that,” said Vicky Moller who is organising the event with Grwp Resilience.
“If you go up the local mountain, Carningli, you can see the land and sea and the farms producing the ingredients for our festival. They could sustain us indefinitely without harm to nature or other countries.”
Vicky says that such a festival could not have happened until now.
“This year has seen a small explosion of new businesses around Newport, including two new organic market gardens, three food outlets and a shop.”
The area also boasts a relatively new farm to doorstep milk delivery.
Not all the food in the festival is from the square mile around Newport, specialities like nut cheese, sea plants, and the rum, wine and cider are from the wider area.
The food fair at the beginning of the week will feature produce from land and sea.
There will be food demos and tasters ranging from seaweed to gin, apple-cake to nut cheeses, as well as food art for children and talks offered through the day.
Two sit down cafés will be provided by local teenagers and a Syrian family In the week that follows will farm visits take people up the mountain and into the valleys to learn about ancient breeds, high tech farming and feeding the population from a few acres of vegetables.
They tours will cover green building and self-build using grown materials such as hemp and wood.
Throughout the week amazing meals of mainly hyper local ingredients will be on offer at different restaurants and pubs.
The festival will end with dinner and party into the night, starting with tasters of wine, cheese and sustainable salmon.
To book into tours and talks email info@grwp.wales. You can book evening meals directly: Tides Kitchen, Llys Meddyg, The Royal Oak, Newport Boat Club, Cat Rock Cafe. Wholefoods of Newport.
For daytime cafes: Pwnc, Temple Bar, Tides, Pasta a Manu, just turn up.
The festival is delivered through Growing Greener spaces, a project funded by the UK Government through the UK Community Renewal Fund. A full programme of events is available on eventbrite or www.grwp.wales/events.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here