The Children’s Food Festival – A New generation of Healthy Eating

Children can learn to cook on an open fire, create a smoothie using pedal power, have a go at making everything from pizza to pesto and sushi to sausages. They can even watch a farmyard drama inside a 40ft giant inflatable pink pig at the Northmoor Trust Farm, 10 miles south of Oxford, during the last weekend in June.

 

“It will be fun but we will also be passing on very important messages about nutrition and seasonality too,” says Blanc who is patron of the festival alongside food writer Sophie Grigson. Back in 2007 over 16,000 people attended the first ever Children’s Food

Festival at Abingdon Airfield and this year, with a new location at a

conservation farm in the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, organisers hope to attract even more.

 

“It was so wonderful to watch children and their families exploring new tastes and see them discover how joyful and creative cookery can be,” reveals the self- taught French chef who received an OBE two years ago for services to the British food industry and for raising awareness of the importance of healthy food as a central element of family life.

 

 

Blanc has always believed in the importance of families eating together, something that stems from his own upbringing in Besancon in Eastern France. “As a child, we ate with the adults and we had to behave like them. It was tough sometimes to be at the table for hours but I learnt how to enjoy food. It was also about getting to know one another, debating and arguing and meeting friends.”

 

The Raymond Blanc Cookery School has been offering children’s cookery lessons at Le Manoir for over 15 years and father-of-two Blanc clearly loves working with young people. “Children are amazing, they have so much energy and have hundreds of questions, which can be exhausting, but they are so receptive. I remember making a simple pate once with butter and chicken livers and this boy of about five said that it tasted ‘like silk’. I loved the way he responded to it¹s smoothness.”

 

At Le Manoir they have a two acre kitchen garden which provides 90 types of vegetables and over 70 types of herbs for the restaurant kitchen and Blanc wants to encourage festival goers to grow their own food too. “You don¹t even have to have a garden,” he declares. “On a window sill children can grow herbs in just two weeks”.

 

The festival will include a Grow Your Own area with seed and saplings to plant and take home. New editions for 2009 include an Early Years Area for 0-5 year olds which will include a baby café in a double decker bus and a Chocolate Tent with Green and Black’s chocolate tastings, demos from Le Manoir’s Chef Patissier and Willy Wonka recipe making with staff from the Roald Dahl Museum. The Farm area will include Gloucestershire Old Spot Pigs, cattle, sheep and

baby water buffalo as well as farm walks and lots of tractors.

Visitors can sample food from different cultures in the Taste The World area and there’s plenty of opportunity for foodie retail therapy at the Farmer’s Market, where they will sell local produce from within a 30 mile radius, and The Bazaar, where they will sell things from further afield as well as cookware and books.

 

Back by popular demand is theatre company Whalley Range Allstar’s surreal show Pig, where children can watch a farmyard drama played out inside a giant inflatable sow.

 

The line-up in the Celebrity Chef Cookery Theatre will include Sophie

Grigson and baby recipe expert Annabel Karmel, Jane Fearnley- Whittingstall, author of the Good Granny Cookbook, ‘Teenage Chef’, Sam Stern, and Jamie’s School Dinner Lady, Nora Sands, plus there will be a Kid’s Kitchen run by children’s cookery writer, Amanda Grant.