British Food Fortnight – What happens during it

British Food Fortnight – the national celebration of the diverse and delicious food that Britain produces

A fun and delicious national celebration that everyone is invited to take part in!

The focal point of Love British Food’s activities is British Food Fortnight, the national celebration of our food that takes place every Autumn in the last week of September and the first week of October, at the same time as Harvest Festival, the traditional time for celebrating our food.

It is all tremendous fun and people, from the very young to the elderly, love taking part.

There is a serious objective of course…British Food Fortnight is a proven influencer in engaging the retail, catering, education and volunteer sectors and in establishing a more robust market for Britain’s food. Establishments taking part, whether they are large retailers or small independents, pubs or major food service outlets, all report sales increases as a result of their British Food Fortnight promotions.

What happens during it

Every year communities across the country take part with foodie festivities in villages, towns and cities; fun activities for children in schools; menu promotions in pubs and restaurants; and British food on the plate in hospitals and care homes. 

You can literally eat your way around Britain during the Fortnight as nearly every county holds a food festival during it: Horsham, York, Cardiff, Devon, Nantwich, Isle of Man, Abergavenny, Cornwall, Manchester, Hastings, Alnwick, Luton, Glasgow, Kent, Norfolk, Newbury, Penrith, Brighton, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire to name a few.

The Fortnight culminates in a competition to find the best British community event, from small gatherings to entire towns. Previous winners have included the village of Haslington in Cheshire that organised a whole day of festivities on the green for everyone in the community; the City of Peterborough that held a two day food celebration culminating in a tremendous harvest lunch for 500 people in the Cathedral square; the coastal town of Emsworth that organised the best food festival we have ever seen with activities for every part of their community; a group of 450 schools in Hampshire that organised foodie activities, farm visits for children and themed British food Fortnight menus throughout the two weeks; and a collection of villages in Somerset that organised and ran a Great British Harvest Trail with our Harvest Torch travelling from parish to parish. 

So many fun things have taken place during British Food Fortnight…here is a flavour, with no apologies for the pun!

Foraging walks, food trails and fungi forays; a Harvest Swap Shop in St Paul’s Cathedral; fruit and vegetable shows; ‘Bring back Granny’s Recipes’ and ‘Design a Sausage’ competitions; Mad Hatter’s tea parties, Teddy Bear picnics and People’s Picnics; Plot to Plate cooking demonstrations and a drop-in cooking theatre; Meet the Farmer events and school trips to farms; a ‘Dancing with Dabs’ musical fish procession; Wembley Stadium’s ‘Mash of the Day’; grow-your-own competitions and a quest to find the quintessential British Banger; art exhibitions on ‘The Story of Our Daily Bread’ and ‘From Rabbits to Rams, Longhorns to Leicester Longwools’; a giant picnic at Whipsnade and Apple Days at National Trust properties; a Quorn Bacon Roll Day in Leicestershire; wild night feasts; a Giant Beanstalk competition for children; Battle of the Bangers competition between butchers; a Moveable Feast with courses at different restaurants; a Union Jack coloured meal promotion; a challenge to cook 5,000 British breakfasts in 96 care homes for the elderly; Plot to Plate cooking demonstrations; Meet the Farmer events, school trips to farms and even a British menu for animals in a zoo! 

Communities across the country, from tiny villages to inner city schools have taken part in hugely imaginative and fun ways: harvest suppers; harvest services on the farm; home-brew-offs; tractor rides through cider orchards; foodie film festivals; scarecrow displays throughout towns; slow food breakfasts; corn dolly workshops; apple pressing; pumpkin championships; historical harvest re-enactments; farm discovery trails, inner city interfaith celebrations and the town of Emsworth even built a farmer’s field in the town square! 

Farm animals in the centre of Birmingham; hundreds of children bringing harvest boxes to the first harvest festival in Westminster Abbey in half a century; new foodie family discovery trails; educational days on the journey of seafood from ocean to table; Family feasts in Sure Start Children’s Centres; and activities during University Freshers Week.

British Food Fortnight has a long tradition of working with care homes for the elderly. Hundreds of care homes have taken part with British chip shop days, welsh cheese and wine tasting, British pie and pastry making and creating their own care home recipe book with recipes from the residents. One of our favourite activities was when the residents at the Abbeyfield Society’s Grace Muriel House in St Albans had help from nearby Marlborough Science Academy to clear scrubland to create a vegetable patch in which residents grew and harvested seasonal vegetables. Young and old helping each other.

There have been some great fun competitions over the years: the search for the Face of British Food Fortnight (judged by Jilly Cooper and won by a Lincolnshire farmer); Cake for The Queen competition for schools (a lot of cakes in the shape of crowns or corgis!); Favourite Food Spot competition (won by Lincolnshire); competition for schools to design a dish for an Olympic Athlete; Queen of the Harvest competition; and Search for a Harvest Tune modern day harvest anthem to give ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ the X Factor treatment. 

Many of British Food Fortnight’s activities have had Royal patronage. School children cooking a tea for HRH The Duchess of Cornwall in The Dorchester Hotel in London; children working with the Hairy Biker celebrity chefs in the kitchens of Clarence House to prepare and serve a VIP lunch; Scottish children cooking in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh; harvest festivals for children in Westminster Abbey and Birmingham Cathedral; and, most famously, Cook for The Queen in the year of the Diamond Jubilee when schools competed to take over the Buckingham Palace kitchens for the day and make tea for Her Majesty.

Establishments Taking Part

More than 100 organisations have taken part in British Food Fortnight; and over a thousand independent shops, many of the major supermarkets, nine of the largest food service organisations and eight major pub groups have run promotions. St Pancras train station, Harrods, Wembley Stadium, Grey Gables Hotel in Radio 4’s The Archers, the Cabinet Office, the BBC staff canteen, St Paul’s Cathedral, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, Holyrood Palace, The Dorchester Hotel, the British Army, the Test Match Special commentary box, the National Trust and Buckingham Palace are just a few of the famous establishments that have joined the celebrations. Even Dudley Zoo has taken part! 

This is what makes British Food Fortnight GREAT!