To celebrate the second annual Food Day, the Downtown Dutchtown Business Association (DT2) is throwing its second Dutchtown Harvest Festival October 14, from 11 a.m.– 5p.m. in Marquette Park.
Highlights of the free festival will include a farmers’ market, cooking demos, a pie baking contest and live music.
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Food Day, officially celebrated on October 24, is an international event created by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) to praise healthy, sustainable food while addressing problems with food production and distribution across the globe.
Caya Aufiero, the president of DT2, said she is bringing Food Day to Dutchtown to educate people on healthy food choices right in their neighborhood.
“We are really focused on bringing good food, and making it accessible to people in inner-city neighborhoods as a social mission,” Aufiero says. “A valuable thing to do in inner-city neighborhoods is to get more people connected in terms of food, and reality in terms of what they can do making a little go a long way.”
Aufiero plans on making fresh food accessible by having a small farmers market at the festival. She and Mayor Francis Slay will host a cooking demo, instructing festival-goers on how to make a fall soup. Last year, Mayor Slay served cooked and served a pumpkin soup to those wanting to try a taste.
“He had the chance to truly serve the people … samples of the soup he made,” Aufiero says with a laugh.
A Yam Jam pie-baking contest will be hosted at the festival. After judging, the pies will be sliced and served as free samples. Registration for the contest is still open, and judges are still accepting entries of any pie baked with an autumnal vegetable in it, such as a sweet potato pie or a pumpkin pie.
Live entertainment at the festival will include performances by musical groups Miss Jubilee and the Humdingers and Jennifer Roques. The STL Hoop Club will also give a hoop dance demonstration.
Many organizations and businesses local to Dutchtown will have booths at the festival.
“We want people to know where they can get things locally and access local foods,” Aufiero says. “To show there’s a better way of living, even if you can’t buy your food organically, even if you can’t buy something that’s locally sourced, you can still use fresh pumpkin to make pumpkin soup, for example. We find ways of not making it too exclusive, as accessible as possible.”
Arts and crafts booths will feature work by local artists, and there will be activities for adults and children alike, such as $2 face painting, pumpkin painting, a potato sack race and bobbing for apples.
The DT2 is giving a locally produced apple and a locally grown, organic bag of salad mix to each attendee of the festival.
Aufiero encourages people to be aware of where their food comes from, and to support local food producers as much as possible. She hopes the festival will educate not just Dutchtown residents, but all of St. Louis.
“The real message is eat real food, try to get connected again to all those little realities of life; where your food comes from, where your clothes come from, all those things that are basic to living on this earth,” Aufiero says. “We hope that folks will get that message and get it in an enjoyable way.”
More information on the Dutchtown Harvest Festival and Food Day can be found at foodday.org.
