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Chicago’s Good Food Festival: FamilyFarmed = Family-Friendly #GFFChi

by Bob Benenson *Photo Credit: Barry Brecheisen*

There are many reasons to attend the 11th annual Good Food Festival on Saturday, March 21 at Chicago’s UIC Forum. There is an Exhibit Hall where you can meet about 150 great food and farm businesses and buy their wares.  There are great demonstrations by top chefs and bakers, informative and inspiring discussions, and of course great food and drink to enjoy.

There is an additional reason to join this celebration of the fast-growing Good Food movement if you have children. The Good Food Festival, presented by the nonprofit group FamilyFarmed, is one of the city’s family-friendliest events.

The Festival provides great, fun, and age-appropriate events, in recognition of the importance of encouraging healthy and environmentally conscious eating habits from the earliest ages.

The Kids’ Corner will entertain and amuse young attendees. Sponsored by Purple Asparagus —  a nonprofit organization that promotes early education about food — The Kids’ Corner will includes face painting, seed planting, a scavenger hunt, reading corner, and arts and crafts. Great Scott will keep everyone entertained with live sing-along and balloon-twisting fun.

A demonstration of the innovative Pilot Light food education project, an initiative in Chicago Public Schools, will be engrossing for children while providing grown-ups with an opportunity to engage with two top Chicago chefs who are founders of the program: Matthias Merges (Yusho, Billy Sunday, A10) and Jason Hammel (Lula Café, Nightwood). The chefs participating in Pilot Light create lessons that integrate education about food and its role in society into the schools’ overall curriculum.

And if your children are interested in food in a hands-on way, then the DIY workshops at the Festival’s Good Food Commons provide dozens of choice learning opportunities.

The Good Food Festival is the big public event of the three-day Good Food Festival & Conference, March 19-21, at the UIC Forum on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. For more information and to purchase tickets for the Festival and other sessions, please visit the event website.

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