Last year, Dutch eating designer Marije Vogelzang was the headline speaker at the annual Spier Secret Food Festival, and she had the audience eating out of her pretty hand.
The speakers at this year's festival share her passion and philosophy about food. Local and international experts on food will present a day of talks at the Spier wine farm next Friday, with a focus on ethical and sustainable food production.
Hannes Bernard from the Netherlands and Guido Giglio from Brazil are the duo behind SulSolSal (South Sun Salt), a consultancy founded in 2012 to investigate - by using food, research and performance - the relationship between design and economy. Their talk at the Secret Food festival will focus on the urgent need to increase food production in the next few decades.
They say food production will need to nearly double in developing countries to feed the estimated 9.1 billion people that will live on earth by 2050. The pair look at efficient methods of preserving food to combat the population increase.
Another speaker to look out for is Heather Thomas, a self-taught dessert designer, conceptual confectioner and chocolate haberdasher. She was at the Johannesburg launch of the festival, where she taught the art of chocolate making by pairing the taste of favourite wines with complementary flavours of home-made chocolate, to which we added our personal selections of ingredients from rose petals to coconut, or both.
Wongama Baleni has brought the first artisanal coffee shop, Department of Coffee, to Khayelitsha, and opened in 2012 with the slogan "We Bring Coffee to the People". He will be talking about entrepreneurship in food at the festival.
From Norway comes one of that country's premier salmon smokers, Ole Hansen, whose family's business was founded in 1923 and now runs from a smokehouse in Stoke Newington, London.
He has experimented with interesting techniques. One of them is tinkling on a piano as the fish enters the smoking chamber.
Along with these five, there will be five other speakers at the conference talking about street food, alternative meat cuts, the story of grain and more. The festival will also include a Saturday food market at Spier and a Brazilian biltong braai and preserved dinner hosted by SulSolSal on Saturday night. For more info and to book, see spiersecret.co.za
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