Slow Food Anglia news

Slow Food Anglia together with the FirePitCamp held the second Slow Food Festival at their venue in the village of Wendling in north Norfolk which attracted a large number of visitors to the event and was held in glorious summer sunshine.
The venue at the FirePitCamp is ideally suited for such spring and summer outdoor events and is also a well known and busy camp site which is also in the Guardian newspapers top 15 camp sites to visit in the UK.
On the day over five hundred visitors were present and they were entertained by local musicians and with a full range of street foods and a selection of tasty foods cooked by the owners. There was also a Slow Food stand present to promote both Slow Food Anglia and also to tell those present about the Slow Food ethos and as part of this process Dermott from Slow Food gave a talk about the history and current projects being undertaken by the local groups.
Vanessa Scott of Strattons Hotel in Swaffham also gave an inspiring talk about the new book she had co written which supports one of the well known national charities in the UK.

On Sunday July 5th Slow Food Anglia will be joining Slow Food Norwich group members at the annual Norwich Lanes Fair being held throughout the city of Norwich, we will be having a stand manned by Slow Food members in one of the historic lanes in the centre of the city.

We will also be having some short presentations by members of Slow food Norwich to highlight the current projects that the Slow Food group plan to carry out in that city in the next year.

The highly popular Norwich Lanes summer fair has been running for several years and has become increasingly popular now attracting several thousand visitors on the day, with stands and attractions dotted throughout the small lanes and alley ways found in the centre of the city. The Norwich Lanes association is a voluntary and community organisation dedicated to the preservation of the area for both local residents and also visitors to Norwich.

We took the opportunity to visit a member of the Cambridge Sustainable Food group in that city last week and heard about their projects and recent and planned events, and from this meeting came the idea for Slow food Anglia to work with Slow Food Norwich members to make Norwich one of the Sustainable Fish Cities in the UK and once we have achieved this we will concentrate our efforts on making other cities in East Anglia Sustainable Fish Cities as our region has a long coastline, a long history of fishing in the North Sea and there are still a large number of local fishing communities.

August is a quiet month for most of us at Slow Food Anglia so we have taken advantage of the holidays and will be holding one of our popular members social evenings on Friday August 21st at the popular Louis' Deli in Upper St Giles in Norwich. We will be featuring wine and food made by Slow Food memebrs and producers from the Le Marche region of Italy, this will include organic red and white wines, organic olive oils, salami, cheeses and honey all from this beautiful region in eastern Italy.

Slow Food members from the Marche region now work closely with the Slow food Anglia group and we will be arranging joint visits between these groups in late 2015 and throughout 2016. Slow Food Marche are very keen to build strong links between themselves and our groups in East Anglia and as part of this some Slow food Anglia members will be attending a Festival in Portonovo,Italy on the 19th and 20th June to sign agreements to strengthen our ties and start work on joint projects.

Our next large event that we will hold as Slow Food Anglia will be at the beginning of September in Colchester, Essex and we now have recently started work with Don Quinn from Food and Drink Festivals UK on the planning of this first Slow Food Seafood and Oyster Festival. This event is expected to be extremely popular as the Festival company has long history of holding similar events and we hope for several thousand people to come to the venue over the course of the two days that it is being held in Colchester.

Already we have had confirmation from several well known chefs in Italy who wish to take part at the Festival and to have cookery demonstrations and workshops each day of this two day outdoor event in the centre of Colchester. As plans progress we will update the latest news both on our website and also on this blog.