Food for Real

Today I spent a very happy morning in Toxteth. It was the first event of this year's Food for Real Film Festival which is organised by the wonderful Squash Nutrition organisation - which is a collective of food-loving creative professionals in Liverpool, who want to share the good food message far and wide.

Lisa Agatha showed us how to make delicious sugar-free cakes - like Carrot and Banana Muffins 

and their famous Sweet Seed Bites:

We were a wonderful happy mixture of people, and I'd forgotten how much fun it can be cooking communally:

Some of us cooked a lot, and others hardly ever cooked - but that didn't matter as Lisa kept circulating:

and enthusiastically gave us all help and advice. 

We also had a discussion, and shared tips, about how we could improve our diets and cut out sugar whilst still making great tasting food.

After that I dashed over to the Odeon to see Fed Up Movie. This film, which was by the team behind ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explore the global problem of surging human obesity rates and related diseases. 

After the screening there was a discussion led by Robin Ireland of the Health Equalities Group, Professor Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool, Cheryl Kokolay, a local foster carer and mum, and a nutritionist from London-based Action on Sugar. We all agreed that this film deserves a much bigger audience.

I was delighted to see a FAT Taste the Weight Poster:

as we went into the cinema. It told us that drinking just one can of sugary pop a day could lead us to gain over a stone (6 kgs) of weight gain per year! As we left we were given a GULP water bottle:

which stand for Give Up Loving Pop from Food Active - an excellent collaborative programme launched by the North West Directors of Public Health in November 2013 to tackle increasing levels of obesity.  

I hope someone from the Odeon was present, as it's about time most cinemas changed their offerings of unhealthy food and drinks.

It was a fantastic start to this years Food For Real Film Festival, which continues in Liverpool until Sunday, 22nd March 2015. 

There's still spaces on some events - my advice is to get there if you can.

Web: www.foodforreal.co.uk