Foodfest Fever

I’m currently fighting a valiant but doomed battle against becoming a grumpy middle-aged git. So nowadays, whenever I happen upon something that strikes me as irritatingly pointless and find myself about to go off on one, I simply internalise the soothing mantra, ‘It’s just not aimed at me.’  

 While this technique has in the past tamed my vitriolic ranting on everything from the Women’s Rugby World Cup to Holby City, it still often fails me when it comes to understanding the increasingly packed calendar of food festivals. 

The thing is, while it’s completely understandable that I would find, for example, an afternoon at a cage fighting tournament or a Morris Dancing convention a tedious waste of my time, the same shouldn’t be true of the majority food festivals. 

They are, after all, aimed at the restaurant, food and drink-fixated likes of myself. It is, after all, my job to write about restaurants, food and drink and much of my disposable income is spent on eating out, ‘assessing’ alcohol and cooking at home.  

 It could be argued that I’m just another jaded hack and that as I regularly get handed free passes to such events I’m simply spoilt. True, true and true.  

But despite the supposedly charmed life I lead in this respect, each time someone kindly invites me along to another food, drink and restaurant related festival, the pertinent question that I always need to address is  ‘Would I be here if it wasn’t my job and someone hadn’t bunged me a free ticket?’

Call me an ingrate and a curmudgeon but in most cases the answer is a resounding no.

My main problem is one of format. Most of these things revolve around onstage food demos by well-known chefs that are familiar faces from the pages of food porn publications or TV cookery shows.

It’s not really the chefs’ fault but with very few exceptions their shtick doesn’t really translate to the live stage. Shorn of television’s slick editing and without the soft focus food shots from their cookbooks, you’re just left with someone in a white jacket wittering their way through a dish that you’ll never get to try.

Unless you’re a celebrity chef groupie – and God knows there’s a whole separate diatribe to be written about the species – why would you want to spend your money to sit through that when you could be out eating at a nice restaurant? Or at home working your way through a recipe from your favourite cookbook before sitting down to see how you’ve done with a nice glass of wine? Or even at a cookery class where for your money you might actually learn something? Why would you instead want to be part an large audience, significant sections of which probably finds Gary Rhodes sexually appealing, that only gets to look but not taste?  

 The latest food festival to be launched, Love Cooking (nothing to do with us by the way) which will tour four UK cities this winter, is an attempt to address this sense of disconnect. This isn’t just about any old audience staring at a chef doing a demo, they seem to be saying, this is about an audience of people that actually like cooking staring at a chef doing demo.

It’s built around a series of hour-long onstage chef demos from the usual suspects, that, in what seems from the blurb to be the one and only truly innovative part of the whole shebang, you can pay per presentation if that’s all you have time for. Or you’re only there to see James Martin because seeing him every week on Saturday Kitchen just isn’t enough. 

‘Love Cooking’ promises to be ‘the ultimate culinary concert’ with ‘a number of educational and interactive features’ the nature of which don’t seem to be immediately obvious from the website but I’m guessing won’t include the demonstrating chef in question actually cooking you something to eat. I’m wishing the organisers and all those that attend and appear onstage the very best of luck but - not that they’ll care as it will no doubt be widely attended by the usual cast of aspiring foodies - I’m already guessing it’s just not aimed at me.