Dear Slow Food Oxon members:

Let me update you on our local events – recent and upcoming.

I hope you’ve had a chance to read the article in the Guardian this week. The project is gaining momentum fast, with Edward Maxwell leading. SF UK have already invited us to a high profile press reception on 30 November and The Vaults & Garden now plan to run a students Local Food Festival next summer, with our help and participation of course.

Our Bread event on Andrew Whitley’s book “Bread Matters” was another success and fun too. We had 4 loaves of home made bread and 3-4 artisan breads and it went very well with a glass of wine, home made chutneys, cheese and even oysters! We also decided to launch the “Bread Manifesto” with the aim to bring the bread back to the royal place it deserves on people’s table. We will start something on our website and will invite everybody to pitch in, so that we can at some point propose it to Slow Food, and to the public indeed.

The next book for discussion is “Salt: A World History” by Mark Kurlansky. We’ll hold it the Summertown Wine café on 24 January. Everybody is welcome. Bring your favourite salt (I hear you can even have smoked salt…) and let us taste it. Sign up with Liz Wilding.

Our Christmas event this year will have an Italian touch and we’ll ask all those who went to Terra Madre this year to bring and share some photos and stories. Any books, leaflets, handouts you picked up there will be very welcome, too. Bring an Italian dish and wine and let’s celebrate a year of outstanding activity and achievements in Slow Food Oxon. The event will be held on 13 December at Oxford Brookes University, same room as last year, in the new Buckley building room BG11, from 6:30. Plentiful parking at Brookes Gipsy Lane car park after 5pm.

Our second Annual General Meeting will be organised some time in January, hopefully at the Three Tuns pub in Henley again.

Thank you all who have sent their cheques for the Christmas Guide, and thank you for your supportive and warm complements as well. I am very happy that many of you ordered more copies “to share with friends this precious information” as Muryel kindly wrote. I am still missing quite a few cheques so please support the Convivium, or send the Guide back if you don’t need it.

Last but not least, please double check whether your Slow Food membership is still active. I never remove any lapsed members from my mailing list, simply because I, like all you, am a volunteer in Slow Food and have only so much time for it. But I understand that because you keep getting my emails, you may not realise that you are not an active member anymore. If you are not sure, send me an email and I can check my latest database which I receive every month from Slow Food.

Thank you,

Tamara