TALKS
Saturday 20 September
The Forager - Yun Hider
Tickets: £5.00
Yun Hider is a professional forager working in the woods, estuaries and mountainsides of Carmarthenshire. He runs the Mountain Food Company, supplying wild vegetables to top restaurants like Richard Corrigan’s Lindsay House, The Dorchester, and Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. Here he talks about his life as a forager and the culinary and medicinal uses of wild plants.
Sponsored by: The Crown at Whitebrook, www.crownatwhitebrook.co.uk
12.30pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
Eat Your Greens – Charlotte Hume
and Freddie
Tickets: £5.00
When Charlotte couldn’t get her son Freddie to eat his greens, she harnessed the power of the internet, inviting people to post recipes and tips while documenting her own blow-by-blow account of her mission to get Freddie to try vegetables from A-Z. Her blog, www.greatbigvegchallenge.blogspot.com, has attracted thousands of posts while Charlotte and Freddie have become experts on the treatment of veggiephobia in children.
2.00pm – Borough Theatre
Culinary Travels in China - Fuchsia Dunlop with Tom Parker Bowles
Tickets: £5.00
Fuchsia Dunlop was the first westerner to enrol in China’s leading cooking school, the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in 1994. She talks to the TV presenter and columnist Tom Parker Bowles about her latest book Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, an evocative account of her immersion in a cuisine and culture that is a world away from most Westerners’ experience. Fuchsia writes and broadcasts extensively on food and current affairs in China and has written two highly acclaimed books on regional Chinese cooking.
Sponsored by:
The Culinary Cottage, www.theculinarycottage.co.uk
2.00pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
The Happy (and Unhappy) Chicken and
the Good Egg –
Hattie Ellis
Tickets: £5.00
This illustrated talk considers the history and nature of the chicken, how the chicken industry emerged, the future of chicken farming and the role of consumer power. Hattie Ellis is one of Britain’s best writers on food culture. Her latest book Planet Chicken was given the Derek Cooper Award by The Guild of Food Writers.
Sponsored by: Blue Egg Productions, www.blueeggproductions.co.uk
3.30pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
The Allotment Doctor –
Terry Walton & Hywel James
Tickets: £5.00
Kitchen gardening is enjoying a renaissance and demand for allotments way outstrips supply. Whether you are a beginner or an expert don’t miss this chance to put your questions to The Allotment Doctor. Terry Walton has kept an allotment for over 50 years in the Rhondda Valley and his regular allotment reports have become a highlight of the BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Show. He is joined by Hywel James, presenter of Down to Earth and The Food Show on ITV Wales.
Sponsored by: Heronhurst, www.heronhurst.co.uk
5.00pm – Borough Theatre
THE END OF THE ROAD FOR CHEAP FOOD?
The Observer Food Monthly Debate in association
with Organic Centre Wales
Tickets: £5.00
For decades British consumers have enjoyed uninterrupted access to cheap food. Now that looks set to change. Our panel discuss how climate change, rising energy costs and global demand are shaping a new agenda, and give their prescriptions for what we need to do to ensure a sustainable food supply for the future.
The panel: Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, City University and lead spokesperson on Natural Resource and Land Use for the Sustainable Development Commission; Joanna Blythman, award-winning food-writer, OFM contributor and broadaster; Kevin Morgan, Professor of European Regional Development and Director Regeneration Institute, Cardiff University; Nic Lampkin, Director Organic Centre Wales, Aberystwyth University.
Chaired by Henry Dimbleby, co founder and partner of 'Leon', the healthy fast-food restaurant chain (Best New Restaurant, OFM awards 2005).
5.00pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
Food in Pictures – Gillian Riley
Tickets: £5.00
Paintings tell us many things about gastronomic history that are not to be found in recipe books. This illustrated talk explores the ingredients, kitchen utensils, cooking methods and table manners of Renaissance Italy through the medium of paintings by Crivelli, Veronese, Caravaggio and others. Gillian Riley has written extensively on food in art. Her latest book, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food is one of Time Out’s ‘best new food books’.
Sponsored by: Abergavenny Music, www.abergavennymusic.com
SUNDAY 21 SEPTEMBER
11.00.am – Borough Theatre
Good Grannies – Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall
Tickets: £5.00
The success of Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Good Granny Guide took everyone by surprise. Now that it has spawned a newspaper column, The Good Granny Cookbook, and the interactive website www.goodgranny.com, there can be little doubt that her combination of good sense, good judgement and good humour has helped to give voice to a new generation of thoroughly modern grandparents.
Sponsored by: Llansantffraed Court, www.llch.co.uk
11.00am – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
The Riverford Story – Guy Watson
Tickets: £5.00
The Riverford story is a remarkable one. Starting with a three acre patch on the family farm in 1986, Guy Watson was a veg box pioneer. He now heads up Riverside Organic Vegetables, cultivating and packing over 1000 acres in South Devon and, together with sister farms in other parts of the country, supplying fresh seasonal organic veg, fruit, meat and dairy to over 50,000 households a week. Meanwhile brother Ben runs Riverford Farm Shops, voted ‘Best Independent Retailer’ in the Observer Food Awards 2007, and the Riverford Field Kitchen, led by chef Jane Baxter, has won rave reviews. Guy and Jane have now branched out into print, co-authoring The Riverford Cookbook.
Sponsored by: Cooks Galley, Abergavenny
12.30pm – Borough Theatre
From Spaghetti Trees to Slow Food: How the British fell in love with the Italian Dream –
John Dickie, Alasdair Scott-Sutherland and Henry Dimbleby
Tickets: £5.00
The popular image of cheery Mammas doling out pasta to their rustic families owes more to post-war advertising than to the realities of Italian food. So says John Dickie, the award-winning author of Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and their Food. While Alasdair Scott Sutherland, in his forthcoming book The Spaghetti Tree, Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution tells the story of how two former waiters and their Soho trattoria transformed Britain’s restaurant culture in the 1960’s. In conversation with Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of good fast-food restaurant chain, Leon.
Sponsored by: King’s Head Hotel, www.kingsheadhotelabergavenny.co.uk
12.30pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
The Ever-Green Revolution? Can we feed the world in the 21st century? – Noel Kingsbury and Denis Murphy
Tickets: £5.00
The threat of famine in the 1960s was averted by the scientific advances of the Green Revolution. Now that we are again facing food shortages, it's time to take a hard look at whatscience, politics and lifestyle choices canand cannot do. Denis Murphy,formerly Head of Brassica and Oilseeds Research at the John Innes Institute, is now 
Professor of Biotechnology atGlamorgan University. Noel Kingsbury is internationally known as a writer on plants, gardens and the environment and is currently working on a history of plant breeding.
Sponsored by: Welsh Venison Centre,
www.welshvenisoncentre.co.uk
2.00pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
The Road to Vindaloo – David Burnett
and Tom Jaine
Tickets: £5.00
Author/publishers David Burnett and Tom Jaine take a trip around some of the further-flung reaches of British cookery writing. David Burnett had the surprise hit of 2007 when he re-published Bill Fowler’s Countryman’s Cooking, a book he had found in a local charity-shop. With its recipe for cormorant and unreconstructed comments on women in kitchens, it went on to be serialised on Radio 4, read by Leslie Phillips. His own book The Road to Vindaloo, co-authored with Helen Sabieri, traces the development of Anglo-Indian cookery (curry) in English and Scottish cookery books and is published by Tom Jaine.
3.30pm – Angel Hotel Wedgewood Room
Tackling the Food Crisis in Africa –
Chris Wardle
Tickets: £5.00
Chris Wardle has worked on development programmes with farmers in Africa for over 30 years with a wide range of organisations, from large UN Agencies to small local NGOs. For this illustrated talk he draws on the results of a series of large community-based programmes that are transforming food-insecure regions of Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda, and sets out his vision for a sustainable agriculture which puts the peasant farmer at the centre. Chris runs an organic farm on the Welsh Borders and is co-founder and Chair of the Abergavenny Food Festival.
Sponsored by: Farm First Veterinary Services, Abergavenny
3.30pm – Borough Theatre
Don’t Teach Granny to Suck Eggs –
How to make sure older people keep eating good food
FREE BUT TICKETED
Sponsored by Health Challenge Monmouthshire and Monmouthshire’s Older People’s Strategy – helping people to age well.
They have spent a life-time rearing, growing and cooking fresh, seasonal, local food, so why is it that so many older people are malnourished and live in ‘food poverty’? Join us for a panel discussion.
Chaired by Jeanette Longfield MBE - Coordinator of Sustain. With Jane Fearnley-Wittingstall author of ‘The Good Granny Cook Book’, which celebrates the food heritage and knowledge of older people; Lindsey Kearton, Senior Policy Officer, Welsh Consumer Council and author of ‘Food Poverty and Older People’; Rosalyn Williams, Health Initiatives Coordinator, Age Concern Cymru; Pauline Batty, Community Meals Service Manager, Monmouthshire County Council and former Chair of the National Association of Care Catering.
Sponsored by: Friends of the Abergavenny Food Festival, www.abergavennyfoodfestival.com/friends