What's a Heritage Food Festival
We're planning a Fall Festival! A Heritage Food Fall Festival.... But what is that?
The first key to our 'Heritage Food Festival' is that you can get there Thursday night or Friday morning and stay until you are feeling all the way connected to the people and the place, tired and full, Sunday afternoon. Now, we are selling day passes for Saturday, and dinner-music night passes too. So-- if you can't make the whole weekend-- its possible to come out for the day, take a gander, get some good food, and hear some absolutely stellar folks teach on whatever they know better than anyone. If you can come for three days, I recommend that you do! And this is what you can expect.
Friday is a day to set the scene and get to know the people who will be building the weekend experience with you. You will make yourself at home. Tickets include camping at Terrapin Hill Farm, and most of our teachers will be present and getting settled just as you are. There are a few small cabins (elders and teachers have priority on these) and places to hook up electric for campers. In addition, we are securing blocks of rooms at Shakertown and at the Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg where you can sleep in hotel comfort (it's true, there's no telling what the weather will do) and still be co-housing with other festival-goers and close to the action.
Friday, like all three festival days, we will serve lunch and dinner, prepared by Kaleb Wallace, co-founder of the Firefly Gathering in North Carolina and professional festival cook. Meals will use regionally sourced ingredients as much as possible including a hog which will be donated by Mt. Folly, brought in cut to primals to be smoked and utilized in meals throughout. Meals are a chance to gather together in the big pavilion and get to know your table-neighbors and perhaps some folks who you didn't know were your neighbors in everyday life. Work-trading is a chance to cut vegetables for Kaleb and get a sense of how he pulls off cooking for hundreds of people at a time in places which are not designed for that work (hint #1, propane).
On Friday, Andrew Bentley will set up the covered wagon herbal first aid station. Bentley hangs a shingle as a professional herbalist in Lexington--gathering wild plants in his home lands around Bear Track, KY, consulting and also writing widely sought professional opinions including on COVID. He will also teach on Saturday.
Leila Garrett will open the weekend with a Fire Ceremony like she did in Heritage's first year. As more participants begin to arrive, we will all have opportunities to get to know each other with fire, food, drink, music and conversation, knowing that we are all going to be staying around for a few days and that there is time to pull the threads we take an interest in farther than in everyday life.
Saturday we aim to invite the broadest possible community of interest to attend workshops. Do you want to learn sourdough bread baking from someone who teaches that skill professionally as part of her business, with a dash of Weston A Price's dietary wisdom thrown in? Do you want to learn how to improve your woodlot to make it more productive of food, medicine and habitat from Andrew Ozinskas, who has been improving the once clearcut woods on his family's land for something like twenty years and gathers a living's worth of medicinal plants there today? Do you want to make a deeply health-promoting cabbage and fall herbs ferment with the Embry brothers whose knowledge and talk veers into the history of modern pharma medicine and the way back to healing from nature?
From wellness coach and family farmer Krista Raymond to capacity builder Dan Kittredge working to identify the compounds that make food from healthy soil healthier to eat; from respected permaculture teacher and student of Guatemalan home-scale production Susana Lein, to biologist turned food policy wonk turned deep thinker and teacher on resilience Mark Cohen; all these folks are looking for ways to cushion the rough transition from the current civilizational age to the next one, in ways that improve life for all the participants in the productive ecosystems of plants and animals which sustain life on Earth. Saturday includes a keynote from Dan from Bionutrient Food Association and a panel discussion with multiple workshop leaders talking through these bigger themes and sharing differing perspectives on how the next decades are likely to play out.
Sunday we will close the festival with time for reflection on the festival itself and what to keep/what to change, reflection on the wider food production and logistics systems in our regions, and reflection on each of our personal next steps to engage with the communities building something better where we each live.
