ABERGAVENNY FOOD FESTIVAL 2007

Around Britain with a fork
Matthew Fort, The Guardian, Saturday November 18 2006

The air in the market hall is rich with the smells of cooking. There are beef burgers made with Welsh Black beef and lamb kebabs made with Welsh Mountain lamb and venison burgers made with, well, venison. There are sausages grilling and chunks of roasted Gloucester Old Spot being shoved into soft baps at the stand run by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage lot. They seem to be doing a roaring trade; in fact, everybody seems to be doing a roaring trade - Patchworks' pâtés, the Black Mountain Smokery and Welsh Brew Tea. They're doing a roaring trade, too, in Lower Brewery Yard and Cross Street, and in the Priory Centre, Chadwick's Yard, St John's Square, Red Square, up at the castle and down in Nevill Street. The whole of Abergavenny - Roman town, cattle town, old-fashioned market town - is a milling, cheerily chattering mass of kids and parents and grandparents, smart and tattooed, long-haired and bald, suited and T-shirted, 15,000 of them today, another 15,000 tomorrow, all shapes and sizes welcome. It is the spirit of this year's Abergavenny Food Festival - as it was last year, and every year since it started in 1999 - that strikes you. It is the most democratic of festivals, the most easygoing, the most celebratory.

And that, according to Martin Orbach, sheep farmer, ice-cream maker, founder and presiding spirit, is what it was always intended to be - by the people, for the people, bringing together not just the usual foodistas and the more commercially minded producers, but every kind and all kinds, in the wake of the BSE crisis that decimated our farming communities.

But it's not all about stuffing your face. There's a serious side, too. Aside from tutored tea tastings, a mushroom foray, a seafood spectacular with Mitchell Tonks of Fishworks, Amy Willcock, Queen of the Aga, Thomasina Miers, Masterchef winner, and Giorgio Locatelli, who needs no introduction. There are debates (A School Food Revolution? with the country's premier dinner lady, Jeanette Orrey) and the Adventa Food Academy devoted to getting kids involved in cooking and eating proper food. And Sober As A Judge, which, believe it or not, examines "judicial pronouncements on food and drink".

Mixing the serious with the downright pleasurable was always part of the point of the food festival, Orbach says. All right, they were never going to fill the Borough Theatre as an audience with H F-W does, but a very respectable, lively and independent-minded 150- to 200-strong crowd turns up to see Joanna Blythman and Rufus Carter, driving force behind Patchwork pâtés, having a go at Bad Food Britain. These festival-goers take their food seriously. But that is not the same as saying they don't also take it with a sense of fun. There's a balance, though the sense of fun seems to have it over the serious bit today, even as somewhere between £400,000 and £600,000 is pouring into the town's businesses. "It's better than Christmas," says the man who runs the bookshop.

Some sections of the town council and the shopkeepers weren't all that keen on the festival when it started, although the county council saw it rather differently and gave £5,000 to get it off the ground. Now it's something to be proud of, a template for what food festivals can do for a community and for how to do it. There are dozens of such festivals all over the country now. They are a phenomenon - 20 years ago, who'd have thought we would be honouring and celebrating our food and producers the way they do in France, Italy and Spain?

Everyone agrees that this year's festival was bigger and better than last year's. And next year's festival will be, well, whatever Orbach, his team and the people of Abergavenny make it. It will be better still, I'll bet. Put it in your diaries now.

Originally published online by Guardian Unlimited (www.guardian.co.uk)

You can still visit last year's Festival website by clicking here