Two things I hate about Flavour Fest

There are two things I hate about Flavour Fest. One is that I've just come away from it with my wallet £75 lighter. The other is that it isn't held every month.
As a Plymouth exile (I live in the wild yonders of Torbay) I braved the rains, the 45 minute trek along the A38 and the stench of the Theatre Royal carpark to make my way to Plymouth's fourth annual festival of local produce.
And I wasn't disappointed, I was stunned to find a dozen local growers and producers of organic produce I'd never even heard of among the hundreds of stalls tempting me and thousands of others with their wares. I filled my shopping bags, and my belly, just for research purposes of course. Balancing a tagine in one arm and six bags of organic plants in the other I scoffed my way through a Thai curry and a banana crepe, along with more produce than I can mention here without alerting the Health Police.
You will often hear and read people running Plymouth down, or dismissing us as a crumbling industrial oasis in the heart of a rural paradise, but Flavour Fest shows us for what we really are - diverse, vibrant, innovative, passionate, adventurous and thriving.
What really warms my heart when I wander through the stalls at Flavour Fest isn't the vast, diverse array of extremely high quality local produce across hundreds of tables, it is the thousands of people who turn out to enjoy them.
Even in the grey drizzle the event was packed. People love Flavour Fest and they turn out to support it, to enjoy it, and to relearn what the Spirit of Discovery really means.