Food Festival
The Yorkshire and Humber Faiths Forum invite people of different faiths and beliefs to participate in a Food Festival planned for Sunday 8th June 2008. Sharing food with each other is a way of celebrating diversity and promoting community cohesion.
This initiative, first launched in 2006, comes at a challenging time for community relations and is part of the Forum’s Commitment to advance the contributions of faith in the region, encouraging people to work together, and challenging discrimination and injustice.
The diversity of the Yorkshire and Humber region and its cultures is reflected in our foods.
Food is celebrated in many ways by Faith Communities. All faith communities keep an open table at meal times. Food and hospitality stories from all faiths abound. The Food Festival, now an annual event provides an opportunity for us to share these stories and our distinctive cuisines with each other with pride, and learn from each other.
How to get involved
The Yorkshire and Humber Faiths Forum is inviting people of different faiths and beliefs to participate in a Food Festival by organising an event in your community. Sharing food with each other is a way of celebrating diversity and promoting community cohesion. Sunday June 10th is the main date for this year’s festival, but you can organise something at a time to suit you. This year, the festival coincides with the international Bollywood Awards festival in the region, so organising something that incorporates film would also be appropriate.
"Entertainment has great universal value. It reaches out to many people. When we sit in a cinema, we never ask ‘Who is next to me?’ ‘What is their faith or colour?’ Yet we laugh and cry together. In a world full of hatred, how wonderful to have a medium to bring people together to make a better world." Amitabh Bachchan
Why Food?
“First we eat, then we meet” Guru Amardas Sahib
We all enjoy good food.
The diversity of the Yorkshire and Humber region and its cultures is reflected in our foods. It is not unusual to be served a Yorkshire pudding filled with Chicken Tikka Masala. Yorkshire pudding, Wensleydale Cheeses, Grimsby Fish, Rothwell Rhubarb, Chicken Tikka Masala, Rice and Peas and more is our fan fare.
Food is celebrated in many ways by Faith Communities. All faith communities keep an open table at meal times. Food and hospitality stories from all faiths abound. Let us share these stories and our distinctive cuisines with each other with pride, and learn from each other.
What can you do?
You can arrange a meal in your local Community to bring people of different faiths and beliefs together. It could be a bring and share meal, a picnic in a Park, a Bar-B-Q in your garden, Sunday lunch in your home, or a meal in your local Worship Centre or Community Centre. Invite neighbours, friends old and new. Eat with each other as a way of meeting with each other to form friendships and foster relationships of respect and trust.
We can all get involved, faith groups and those who profess no particular faith. We can show togetherness and present a strong challenge to those who seek to divide us.
Things to think about
Ensure that your meal is accessible to all the invited guests, and meets health and safety requirements.
Numerous issues and topics of conversation are raised by food:
- Food Sourcing - Where does our food come from?
- Where there is overseas produce, use it and trace its origins.
– Where there is local produce, use it, it will have spent less time on a boat, plane or lorry, and will have retained more nutrients. Cut down food miles.
When cooking use local as well as imported foods. - Food and land
The character and quality of the environment is directly linked to the way land is used to produce food and other goods.
Environmentally damaging food production fails to respect the earth. - Economy, Food and Fairness
Conventional trade discriminates against the poorest producers. Fair Trade is about local sustainability and fair terms of trade for farmers in developing countries. Free Trade is unjust without Fair Trade. - Food, Famine and Health
While many people in the Western world are damaging their health through over eating or bad diet, hunger and malnutrition forms one of the biggest killers around the world. Food also represents the greatest divide in the global community as is seen in unjust trade rules that bring suffering and hunger to millions who do not have their daily bread
Challenge the injustice represented by hunger.
Good food contributes to good public health. - Food, Faith and Fasting
The Open Table, Holy Communion, and the Langar (the communal kitchen) are examples of the ways that food plays an important part in faith communities and worship. Fasting is observed in different ways by different faith communities.
Food rules in faith communities mean that: Buddhists are vegetarian; Hindus are vegetarian or eat no beef; Jews and Muslims eat no pork and observe Halal (Muslim) and Kosher (Jewish) regulations; Many Sikhs are vegetarian and if they eat meat it is Jatka. - Food and Community Cohesion
Eating with each other this is integral to the strategy for achieving Community Cohesion. Food brings people together, and can help to create life long friendships. - Food and Education
Preparing food for each other, and eating with each other provides opportunities to educate each other about ourselves, our foods and our cooking styles.
A Food Festival provides opportunities to eat and meet with each other, to engage in conversation around issues listed above, and also to conduct analysis of Community needs. Conversations can trigger many fruitful actions for the welfare of all.
Eating at an Open Table where all are welcome and catered for anticipates a world where all are included in the feast of life and none are hungry.
“There is enough food in the world for human need but not for human greed.”
M. K. Gandhi
Download this page as a Word document here: 
Food Festival Guidelines 2007.doc