03/08/2011

Pauliina Munukka, Finland: Local delicacies come to Helsinki

Summer is the time for all sorts of events. In Finland, there are numerous amounts of cultural events, and especially music festivals have always been at the core of the Finnish summer. However, I feel like there is one part of culture that has always been underrepresented when it comes to the summer events at least here in Helsinki, and that is food.

This summer this will change though, as on the 26 and 27 August an event called Finland of Delicacies (or Herkkujen Suomi) will take over the railway square right in the centre of the capital. The event is organised by the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners MTK as well as its Swedish counterpart SLC, FoodFinland theme group and the Microbrewery Union.

The event aims to motivate consumers to be interested in how and where the food they eat is produced. And what better way to do this than to give people a chance to taste and buy delicacies from all over the country? Almost all of the counties of Finland are represented, so visitors will get a comprehensive view of what Finnish food and local food cultures are like. The event is held during the night of the arts, so Finland of Delicacies is an attempt of making food a larger and more integral part of other cultural events as well.

It will be interesting to see, how the event will be received by people and how this large collaboration between the various local food producers and other food sector professionals will work. The aim is that the event becomes a yearly tradition, and maybe even becomes larger in scale in the future. Especially next year when Helsinki is the design capital of the world and food is one of the main themes of the year, it is important that we have events such as this that give people perspective into what Finnish (and Nordic) food culture and products are like. Hopefully during the design capital year Nordic food culture will be a part of all the events organised.

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