Foodies set to flock to fair

Anyone visiting Covent Garden this weekend can taste the countryside. For three days the piazza will host more than 100 British speciality food producers, selected by food writer and broadcaster Henrietta Green, along with foodie events and demonstrations.

Ms Green has long been an advocate of Britain's small speciality producers and farmers, seeing the issue leap from a question of taste and quality onto the political and economic agenda.

"The topic has become highly politicised," she said today. "Everyone is now more aware of rural issues and the plight of the rural economy. Unless people wake up and understand the power of their own purse these small producers aren't going to survive."

Marguerite Patten, doyenne of the cookery world, will open the Food Lovers' Fair at 11am on Friday - her 85th birthday.

Other cookery luminaries at the Fair's Waitrose Cookery Theatre include Antony Worrall Thompson, Clarissa Dickson Wright, and the River Cafe's Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray. The Countryside Agency's Eat the View foodcraft theatre will host demonstrations of traditional skills and production methods.

The fair runs from 11am to 7pm on Friday 3 November, and from 10am to 5.30pm on 4-5 November. Admission is free. Ten per cent discount at selected stands with a copy of the Evening Standard. For information, call 01189 714162 or go to www.foodloversfairs.com .