The importance of knowing where our food comes from and whether it is grown, reared and caught sustainably and organically is to take a new turn as the Italian SlowFood movement hits Essex this month.

While London foodies may have known about SlowFood for a number of years, it has not yet penetrated the psyche of many – food lovers or not – outside the capital.

But this weekend Essex will be hosting the region’s first Slow Food Festival, something organisers hope will generate interest from across the region and spread the SlowFood ethos.

It takes places in Colchester and people are expected from all over Essex, as well as Suffolk and Norfolk.

“The SlowFood movement has been going for about 30 years now and is all about sustainable ways of growing your own and buying from farmers’ markets,”

says Dermott Sales, leader of SlowFood Anglia.

“SlowFood is something everyone can get involved in – food lovers, retailers, chefs, even schools can get involved by getting children to growing veg. The SlowFood movement is very active educationally.”

The Anglian branch was only established at the end of 2014 and the Colchester festival, organised by Colchester Food and Drink Festival organiser Don Quinn, is SlowFood Anglia’s very first festival in the region.

When the Italians heard about the festival – which will focus on seafood – they decided to send some of their own chefs over for the two-day event at Castle Park.

Dermott, who volunteers for the SlowFood movement, explains: “We now have several chefs from Sicily and also from the Le Marche region of Italy taking part on our special cookery demonstration area, and we are very pleased to have the Sicilian chef Carmelo Carnevale, who is the president of the UK Italian Chefs Association, taking part by holding cookery demonstrations and workshops with the public.

“SlowFood Italy want to work more closely with us and set up educational visits both ways, and encourage their chefs to visit East Anglian producers.

“We want to publicise the Slow Food movement here in Essex and encourage some involvement in the various projects being run by the group.

We want to put the East Anglian SlowFood movement on the map. It’s easy in London – there are nine million people there. It’s a vibrant and growing membership. If we can get people interested in what SlowFood is all about, we can start organising educational visits and promote the ethos a bit more.”

Plans are to create a standalone Colchester group, like there is in Norwich and Cambridge, allowing the individual groups to organise their own events to promote the produce from that area.

Since being established in the Eighties, the SlowFood movement has reached as far as India and America, with festivals including SlowCheese, Slow Meat and SlowFish.

Dermott adds: “We want to promote local producers in East Anglia and work with schools to raise awareness of the SlowFood ethos.

“We also want to make Colchester oysters a Presida food, helping to protect and promote foods that are under threat to the wider public.

Recently this has been helped by the EU and now the Government in this country is very keen to promote local products, cheeses and such. Colchester oyster falls into this category.”

Don Quinn, one of the directors of the Colchester Food and Drink Festival, adds: “Slow food is a global organisation and one which supports Colchester’s native oysters. We are hugely privileged they are coming to Colchester.”

The SlowFood Festival will be held on September 5 and 6 at Colchester’s Lower Castle Park between 10.30am and 5pm.

Tickets cost £2 and are available on the gate. Children under 14 go free.

TOM Haward’s family have been cultivating oysters in the shallow creeks leading from the river Blackwater to the west of Mersea Island as far back as 1792.

The family now specialises in cultivating the Native and Gigas oysters. Tom Haward, son of current owner Richard Haward, will be running a pop-up seafood restaurant at this weekend’s festival, to raise awareness of what they offer and just how long it takes to go from cultivation to plate.

Tom, 34, who has worked at the family’s restaurants the Company Shed and Mehalah’s and also run a restaurant in Auckland, NewZealand, has just launched his own catering business, Ostreus Catering. 

Tom says: “My dad has been involved in the SlowFood movement for some time now, and as we sell our oysters at Borough Market in London, people know that there. London foodies have known about SlowFood for quite some time.

“With our oysters we are trying to raise awareness of the SlowFood ethos, but it’s been under the radar here at home. Oysters are a brilliant example of slow food, because it takes time, passion and patience to get them to the stage where you sell and eat them.”

It takes Haward oysters anything from six months to four years to prepare. First, they are dredged from the sea bed, then they are laid on the Hawards’ own oyster beds, seven acres of them just off Mersea Island.

“It’s the tide that brings in all the nutrients to help the oysters grow and give them their flavour and that all takes time. The method hasn’t changed since my family first started cultivating oysters in the 1700s,” explains Tom.

“SlowFood is all about working with nature, not exploiting it but working in partnership, never doing anything to ruin the eco system around us.

“In a world of instant food and mass production we are actually abusing the environment.”