The 2014 Real Food Festival

Over the weekend I attended the Real Food Festival held at Maleny in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland.  The festival is about connecting local food producers directly to customers.
In addition to the fantastic array of local foods to sample and purchase there is a wide rage of talks and presentations that you can attend.

I attended:

I attended a talk about gut health from a man who is a raw food vegan and advocates for an increase in raw food in our diets.  He shared his personal story of having trouble digesting proteins and suffering from a range of health including being 25kg heavier.  I was interesting but it is not the type of diet I would choose.

Scott Mathias talking about he raw vegan lifestyle.

I also attended a very entertaining cheese making presentation from Carole Willman who used to own 'Cheeselinks'.  She shared some really interesting information including the fact that in Australia because of our labelling laws camembert and Brie are technically the same cheese and by law a producer could make one big batch of cheese and label half as camembert and half as brie and this would be totally legal.  Are you surprised?
In reality Cmambert should be in small rounds (and if you are in France only made form 3 breeds of cows that come from only a couple of specific regions) but brie should be made in a bigger wheel (like a dinner plate) and this means that the brie says moister and the drier camembert takes on a slightly different flavour because the ration of air to total mass is smaller.

Carole from Cheeselinks

I also had the oppertunity to sit down for an hour and have a 1 on 1 chat with a Farmer who runs an organic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).  It was really interesting to talk to him about it as it is something Hubby and I have talked about for doing when we move to NZ.

I also made a whole lot of purchases some for us and some for gifts and overall had a lovely day out meeting up with other like minded people.

What did you get up to on the weekend?