On Saturday, I had the chance to check out Conscious Food Festival  at historic Fort York in downtown Toronto. Thanks to Jonathan from Savouries.ca for hooking me up with a free ticket to the event. Overall I found it to be a well-organized event with lots of interesting vendors and a great theme to draw people together who are interested in local, sustainable food to the event.

Pretty much all of the vendors had samples – some were for a small fee ($1-2 typically), while others were giving away samples for free. Two of my favourite samples were the cheese plate from Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Co which featured 3 different cheeses from 3 different animals (goat, sheep, and cow), and in 3 different styles and the poutine from another vendor (can’t remember off hand which one).

Other vendors and interesting things included local wineries/breweries, a gourmet tofu company, an iced kefir dessert (just like how you’d think it tastes), cooking demonstrations, a chip company from the West coast, live bluegrass music, and a taste test between “conscious” ice cream (with organic cream, real sugar) versus “modified milk ingredient” ice cream (with modified milk ingredients, artificial sweeteners).

-mmmm, conscious poutine

A Hidden Gem
My thoughts on the hidden gem of the event was visiting the community garden on site. Tucked in behind one of the stages and away from the main festival area, the garden featured a number of raised beds (at least a dozen and of various shapes and sizes) that are assigned to various community members. Tomatoes seemed to always be the popular thing to grow in almost all of the boxes and some of the surprising things were corn and winter squash being grown. Unfortunately, pretty much all of zucchinis and some of the cucumbers had powdery mildew (seems to be a common theme across the city this year) and it was interesting to see how other people set up their garden and the various stages of organization within the garden.