Features / Bristol Food Connections
A day at Bristol Food Connections festival 2018
This year’s Bristol Food Connections festival was packed full of events taking place across the city. I set off on my bicycle to find out how many events it was possible to fit into just one day.
The day started soon after 7am at Bristol Fruit Market in St Philip’s where pupils from three Bristol schools – Bedminster Down, Cotham and Henbury – were undertaking an Apprentice-style challenge, buying produce from the traders which they were going to make into delicious dishes to sell at the following day’s Harbourside Market.
“What’s your best price?” asked Holly from Henbury School, eventually getting one pound off two creates of English tomatoes.
is needed now More than ever
Pupils from Henbury School driving down the prices at Bristol Fruit Market
“It’s great that we can showcase the place that Bristol Fruit Market plays in food in Bristol and the South West,” Nick Matthews of Total Produce told me. “And to get young people enthused about fresh produce.”
Before heading back home to take my eldest daughter to school, I popped into Better Food in Wapping Wharf who were serving free coffee to anyone with a reusable cup.
A coffee is handed to a customer at Better Food who has also brought a reusable cup
Over at Ashton Court, a small group of people were able to join a keeper in feeding the resident deer, with the eldest stags seven or eight years of age.
Did you know that stags’ antlers become fully grown around August and can make up a third of their skeletal weight?
The hungry herd of deer are fed through the fence
A swift cycle ride back to Wapping Wharf and it was then time give a talk to the British Guild of Beer Writers about Bristol’s food and drink scene:
Next stop of the day was the Food Connections hub to listen into a talk about fermentation:
The Food Connections hub was within Bristol Energy’s base up from the Watershed
And then it was outside where my three-year-old daughter Lois joined other children in pressing apples to turn into apple juice:
Lois enjoying the apple juice she has just helped to make
After the kids had had their fill, it was the turn of the grown-ups.
Tom Oliver of the multi-award-winning Oliver’s Cider talked us through how his ciders are best paired with cheese, and boy do they go together well.
Tom Oliver – cider maker extraordinaire
Cheese and cider was just the prelude to a most unusual afternoon tree held in a carriage of a GWR train making its way from Temple Meads to Severn Beach and back again.
The team from Food Connections and Severnside Community Rail Partnership had decorated the carriage with bunting, there were tablecloths on the tables, and sandwiches and cakes served on three-tiered stands.
The only thing missing was china teacups, but there was tea for this most convivial of occasions, passengers who were strangers when we boarded at Temple Meads firm friends by the time we returned.
Afternoon tea is served
For the evening, it was time to spruce up for the BBC Food & Farming Awards held at City Hall.
There was no Bristol nominee in the main categories, but there was a very special posthumous award to Bristol’s very own Charlie Hicks, who sadly died at the beginning of this year.
Total Charlie Hicks was a legend of the food and drink industry, most recently working for Total Produce
And that’s a wrap. See you next year!
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