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August 2006: the FIRST Edinburgh Food Festival

I've been coming to Edinburgh during August since 1985, first as a teenage member of the Durham County Youth Orchestra, then from 1991 as saxophonist with The Honkin' Hep Cats and recently the Big Buzzard Boogie Band. This year I was looking forward to doing something else with my summer months, but a conversation at the bar of the Pleasance in London with Anthony Alderson changed all that. I had just been to the Soil Association's annual conference and was fired up about great food. Anthony seemed to share this enthusiasm and our conversation turned to the lamentable state of the culinary offerings at most of the Fringe venues in Edinburgh. It was a typical conversation over a beer - something like "Why don't we start a food festival in Edinburgh..." - the kind of thing that rarely turns into anything real. However, I said that I would call Momma Cherri, who I thought would be the perfect person to do something sun with food during the Edinburgh Festival, so a few days later, I thought I better at least keep my word, and speak to her. So I did, and she immediately said "Yes!" and it looked like we might have our star attraction!

Then fate stepped in and I developed 'end stage renal failure' (the consequences of PKD, an inherited medical condition). This meant spending a couple months sorting out the necessary dialysis treatment, and not getting much time to think about Scottish food. However, I hadn't completely given up on the idea. In April, as a bit of a last ditch attempt to do something, I came up to Edinburgh for a few days to visit the Fine Food Fair. I mentioned the ideas of starting a new food festival during the summer, and was overwhelmed by the amount of support from the people I met, which included some of the finest chefs and food producers in Scotland. So even though by then there was not a lot of time left, we decided to go for it, and here are the results.

As I write, we're still pulling together a lot of the details, but our two central 'events' (Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack, and the Fresh Food Market) are definitely happening, with the promise of all kinds of other things developing around them over the next few weeks.

As a jazz musician in my 'real' life, I've always been aware of the close links between food and music, particularly as oilers of the social wheels, within culture with a strong community ethos. So I'm delighted that we have 'Soul Food' as our central attraction this year. Soul Food is well known as coming from the slave communities of the southern states of America. Less well known is that those areas contained a large immigrant population from the British Isles, and in particular, there's a strong 'Scots-Irish' element in the origins of Soul Food. We look forward to exploring these connections while preparing Soul Food in Edinburgh this summer.

My original plan was to invite other venues, restaurants and food shops all over Edinburgh to be part of this first food festival. But events got in the way of all the talking and persuasion that was necessary for this to happen this year. In future years, I would love to involve as many other people as possible from all over the city of Edinburgh. If you'd like to be part of that, either this year or in future, then please do get in touch. At the moment, all we ask is that you sign up to our essential manifesto, which is that we believe in:

Andy Williamson
Director - The Edinburgh Food Festival