Can festivals change food culture?

Why you’d be hard pushed to find a soggy fry at Shambala
Foodie festival: Shambala
David Taylor12 September 2017

Food at festivals has always been something of a, ahem, hot potato. Thirty years ago festival fodder was limited to questionable burgers and soggy fries, or a palate-cloying veggie alternative - served with the same soggy fries.

Thankfully, as our tastes have matured so has the festival menu. Today you can joyfully tuck in to a global smorgasbord of Peruvian arepas and Goan fish curry, Nepalese momo or Japanese sushi. You’d be hard pushed to find a soggy fry on site.

But while we can rejoice at this choice, questions remain over food miles, sustainability and animal welfare. Which is where Shambala steps in.

In 2016 the Northamptonshire-based festival took the (some might say brave) decision to go meat-free. And it was a resounding success - 52% of festivalgoers, who usually ate meat and fish, surveyed after the event said they’d changed their diet as a result of the experience.

The organisers insist they aren’t forcing people to go veggie but instead are stimulating debate. Indeed, despite being meat-free, they did host an insect bar last year. Which, even if you couldn’t face tucking in to the mealworms on the menu, still highlighted how the protein-rich critters could play a crucial role in easing global famine.

Crayfish Bob

Shambala went meat-free again this year. And the debate continued apace in the Garden o’ Feeden tent, with a weekend of inspired talks and discussion chaired by the inspirational political ecologist Nessie Reid.

Among the highlights was the charismatic Crayfish Bob whose campaign to rid our waterways of invasive American and Turkish crayfish should be widely applauded. Despite it being a meat-free festival, Bob demonstrated how to cook his Swedish recipe with live crustaceans. In his defence, that is both the best way to cook and the quickest way to dispatch them. And what other solution is there to this invasive problem which threatens our own indigenous species to the point of extinction? To cull and just throw way this excellent source of free protein would be shameful. Especially when it tastes this good.

Bob also revealed that one of the most effective baits for trapping crayfish was black pudding - which brings us neatly to another Garden o’ Feeden: What A Bloody Offal Waste!

If you’d suggested I’d be spending 45 minutes in a field listening to a cookery demonstration on the joys of corpuscles and clotting, I’d have questioned what was in your festival cigarette. But Sadhbh Moore’s talk and cooking demonstration was at turns funny, informative, uncomfortable… but overall inspiring.

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Sadhbh, who works as a chef at the Skip Garden Kitchen in Kings Cross, eulogised the virtues of cooking with blood – the majority of which is wasted in the abbatoir. After all, if we are going to slaughter an animal for its meat it makes sense to use everything from nose to tail. A great source of iron, blood’s binding properties also means it can be an ideal egg substitute which she deliciously demonstrated with meringues (bizarrely they tasted as if they contained dark chocolate), blood bread and some of the best black pudding I have ever tasted.

Sadhbh used dried blood in the Gill Meller – of River Cottage fame - black pudding recipe she adapted. In fact she revealed that the majority of black pudding is made using dried rather than fresh blood. London’s more adventurous foodies could therefore be just a click away from making their own signature boudin.

An overarching theme of the Garden o’ Feeden talks was Can Festivals Change Food Culture? On this evidence, at Shambala they already have. Food for thought indeed.

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