Kew - A Taste of Adventure

If you're lucky enough to live near the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, I recommend you visit their Spicy Flavour weekends - which are on until 11 October 2015.

There's a wonderful exhibit called the Spice of Life:

which tells us how spices can help keep us healthy, as well as making tastier meals. The display above show us which spices may help with cancer, diabetes, digestion, heart disease, mental health, pain and general health. I'll certainly be eating even more ginger and chillies in future!

In some like it hot:

I learnt more about how gingerol (in ginger) , piperine (the pungent ingredient in black peppers) and capsaicin (in chillies) help protect plants, but also affect humans.

We had an opportunity to find out if we are supertasters:

25% of the population are supertasters a person who experiences the sense of taste with far greater intensity than average, 50% are tasters and 25% are non tasters.  We learnt about the Spice Invaders:

 which told us how spices have been traded through history. 

By the old ice house:

we learnt about the cinnamon wars, and how a tax on aniseed (in the 13th century) helped fund repairs to London Bridge!

In the Princess of Wales Conservatory:

we could see all sorts of foods growing (bananas, bromeliads, chillies, cocoa, prickly pears):

We were told how pineapples became a symbol of wealth, and how shrimp farming was ruining mangroves, and why this is important. 

I enjoyed looking around the Kew on a Plate Kitchen Garden:

There was tea and some very nice spicy choclate to buy from the East India Company:

and I also got some interesting food from Keik baked goods:

Royal Botanic Gardens

Kew

Richmond

Surrey

TW9 3AB

Tel: 020 8332 5655

Web: www.kew.org/visit-kew-gardens/whats-on/festivals/flavour-autumn-2015