Visitor’s experience

At first when we finally got to Fiskars Village after four hours in a bus, it felt we had arrived almost into a different country. There was much more summery and warmer weather than in Jyväskylä where we left and most of the people that we heard speaking, spoke mostly Swedish. There were many animals everywhere like rabbits, sheep and even horses and ponies you could ride with, so not only for food. At first we got a very interesting lecture about modern food systems by Johan K. Dal. When we got deeper in the village where all the food was, we found us surrounded by a lot of people of a wide age range and so many food stands. Seeing and smelling awesome locally made food everywhere.

After walking a little while outside we met a nice group of five women from Helsinki and Espoo, who told us they were almost 30 to plus 70 years old. They had just made some sour bread art from a ready dough in one of the workshops. They thought it was a very nice and instructive experience and the breads became very gorgeous! One of these lovely ladies told that they hope that people would appreciate and prefer local food even more. Other one said it was great to see when people sell their own grown food, and that it was cool to see there wasn’t only companies but individual people selling their food. They had bought a few pumpkins and some moose chorizo. One of them had been there before a few years ago, but for others it was the first time and over all they had enjoyed their visit in Fiskars Slow Food Festival a lot.

30 years old Erik with his wife and two daughters from Espoo had bought a pumpkin, some cranberries and bread. It is their every year tradition to visit there and it had been quite nice this time too. Tiina and Kennet who are 50 and 60 years old, visit there also every year. They live in Karjaa 10 kilometers away, their daughter works in Fiskars and they go often to a theatre nearby so it’s a very familiar place for them. They found everything they were looking for, which was some cabbage, meat and juice.

Fiskars village itself is a very beautiful place and has a nice kind of old atmosphere. It is surrounded by beautiful fields and woods and the Fiskars river goes through it. The festival area was so big we didn’t even have time to see everything there in four hours. It was a bit crowded at least at first, but of course it just gives you the festival feeling!

The best part of Fiskars Slow Food Festival was that we could appreciate the producers, the local food, and stuff. When we looked around, the producers told us about the interesting stories of food, like how they were made or their passion to the products. This precious experience will cause people’s behavior changes, for example when they buy food, they might consider protecting their traditional food culture, purchasing the local food and how their choices effect the environment of the whole world. Overall the Fiskars Slow Food Festival was a very good experience and we can recommend it warmly to everyone!

Text and pictures: Joonas Hiltunen, Oriol Rey, Jere Ollinen, Nanako Kanahara