Cooking up food heaven! Visitors enjoy first Field to Fork Festival - PICTURES

Thousands of people attended the event on Saturday held at Harper Adams University, organised by Shropshire Festivals.

It explored the different stages that food takes before it reaches our plates.

They were able to visit the university's labs to try out their taste buds, see how good they were at washing their hands and taste the huge variety of products made from milk.

The university's working farm was also open and there was milking, in the new robotic milking parlour, calf and lamb feeding and the chance to see how the diary cows are bedded down.

Alongside all this were craft stalls along with 80 food and drink producers selling everything from nut butters to luxury handmade cakes and muffins, home reared pork and beef and a pint or two of beer.

Beth Heath, festival organiser and a former student at Harper Adams was delighted with the turnout for the free event.

"As of Friday night we had nearly 10,000 people register on the site to say they were coming - which is absolutely fantastic," she said.

"I have been wanting to do something like this for some time so to be able to do it at my former college is brilliant.

"There are so many wonderful producers in the county, many of whom also came to Harper Adams, and it is great to be able to bring them under one roof and show people exactly how the food gets from the field to the table.

"My children are very lucky as we live on a small holding and they understand where the food comes from but for some children they do not even realise an egg comes from a chicken or how bread is made.

"This is the ideal opportunity to show how the process works.

"I also wanted to hold the festival here as Harper Adams is such an amazing place.

"It seemed a great way to show the place off to children who may be unsure about going to university to come along here and see what is on offer."

Enjoying the event and answering a myriad of questions was Scott Adams, managing director of Telford's Exotic Zoo and his two nine-week-old meerkat babies.

Along with three others, they were attracting a great deal of attention.

Scott said: "We work closely with Harper Adams engaging school children and helping them to go on to further education. It is great to be able to come along and show the meekat mob off to people who are always so interested."

Stallholder Zoe Harrison is another former student of the university. She launched Butterbelle while studying for her Food, Nutrition in Wellbeing degree and it has gone from strength to strength.

Using only natural ingredients she creates a range of nut butters and recognised a gap in the market with the rise of veganism.

Zoe said: "My butters only contain clean ingredients and there is no added sugar or palm oil. They have proved to be very popular. I realised when I was on my gap year in 2015 that there was space for this type of product. It is wonderful to come back here to the festival and it is nice to see something like this going on at the university. I am really pleased to be back here."