Starting Friday August 27th through the 29th, the EAT REAL FESTIVAL is taking over Oakland’s Jack London Square for three days of all things food—with a focus on food crafts, street food, urban homesteading, and fresh, local, sustainable ingredients. The festival aims to bring farmers, food producers, and eaters together to celebrate real food and the artisan “food crafters” who make it.
With four stages’ worth of events, this year’s schedule is jam-packed with demonstrations, performances, and contests all weekend long. You’ll be eating (with 80 street food vendors on-site), drinking (handcrafted beer, wine, kombucha), and learning how to grow, raise or craft your own food (think canning, preserving, cheesemaking, animal husbandry, vertical gardening). Here are some event highlights from the schedule to pique your interest:
- Home-Roasted Coffee with James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee
- Backyard Chickens 101 + Eggy Cooking with Heidi Kooy
- Grow Your Own Mushrooms with Far West Fungi
- Chinese Noodle Pulling with Chef Gordon of Ark Restaurant
- Make Your Own Kombucha with Jessica Prentice of Three Stone Hearth
- Homemade Bitters with Greg Lindgren of Rye
- And plenty of butchery events (including steer, goat, and pig)
The entertainment stage will feature music, DJs, dancing, contests, and even a literary festival and food poetry slam. The Eat Real Fest is sure to inspire you to go home and do some food crafting, so an indoor farmers’ market will be held on Saturday and Sunday so you can get fresh, local ingredients for your own DIY food projects.
And here’s our PSA: don’t forget comfortable shoes, your hat, and some sunblock!
The Eat Real Festival was founded by a group of people who believe that delicious, convenient, affordable, and sustainable food should be celebrated through an annual food festival. A small percentage of proceeds from the event will be donated to La Cocina, Community Alliance for Family Farms, and People’s Grocery.
Flickr photo by Kostas Pagiamtzis.
Event Info
Friday Aug 27, 2010 – Sunday Aug 29, 2010 Website
