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Check before you choose on Mother’s Day

Mothers Day

If you are treating your mum to a meal out this Mother’s Day, Sunday March 10, check the food hygiene rating as well as the menu.

Brighton & Hove City Council has a well-established food hygiene rating scheme, which enables people to look up the food hygiene ratings for local restaurants, pubs, cafes and other premises serving food.

To check ratings, click here: or through a mobile app, or look at the stickers on the premises themselves.

You can’t judge hygiene by appearance alone, but the Food Hygiene Ratings Scheme enables customers to obtain that information.

Restaurants, pubs, hotels, cafés, takeaways and other places that sell or serve food are given a food hygiene rating from 0 to 5 when they are inspected by a food safety officer from Brighton & Hove City Council. The top rating of 5 means a business has ‘very good’ hygiene standards and every outlet should be able to reach this.

Cllr Pete West
Cllr Pete West

Councillor Pete West, chair of the city’s environment & sustainability committee, said:

“Brighton & Hove has had a very successful food hygiene ratings scheme for a number of years. It is a useful guide for residents, visitors and food businesses, which are an important part of our local economy.

“With the recent concerns nationally about food, it is good to know that our officers are out there checking that food on sale is safe for consumption. The food hygiene ratings are about putting the consumer first and rewarding food businesses that provide good standards of cleanliness as well as good food.”

The Food Safety Team acts to ensure that all food sold in Brighton & Hove is clean and safe for the consumer. Officers also work closely with the Food Standards Agency where there are national food issues.

Each year the council undertakes premises inspections, food sampling, food poisoning investigations and food safety promotions.

There are estimated to be around a million cases of food poisoning every year in the UK, with about 20,000 people ending up in hospital.

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Local food and produce at the heart of Brighton & Hove

Farmers Market

After two years of negotiations, food shoppers from across Sussex will soon have another major farmers market to buy from. A new site for a market is to be piloted in Brighton & Hove city centre close to the War Memorial on the Old Steine every 3rd Saturday for 12 months. The market will be sited; just moments walk from the busy retail areas of North Street and St James Street.

Managed by the Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival team, it will complement the weekly Churchill Square Farmers Market, and will feature around 35 stalls selling affordable fresh local Sussex produce. It will also be a chance for shoppers to speak to farmers and local food producers and find out more about how their products are made.

GeoffreyBowden
Geoffrey Bowden

 Chair of the Economic, Development and Culture Committee, Geoffrey Bowden said;“The council has worked hard with partners in the city to get this pilot scheme off the ground. It is a terrific site for a new farmers market; it will add to the already very popular markets on different days through the month elsewhere in Sussex and the city and will ensure that food enthusiasts can get their fill of beautiful locally sourced produce. It’s also another great way for the farmers and food producers to get their product to market and will help those small businesses and food enterprises to thrive.”

Nick Mosley
Nick Mosley

Nick Mosley, managing director of the Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival, said:

“The new Brighton Farmers Market is a major step forward for locally sourced, sustainable food and drink in the city, to complement the offering of our excellent hospitality industry. The food festival has championed Sussex produce for over a decade, and this market is a further way to make local food accessible to the residents and will contribute towards reinvigorating the high street experience”

Sussex-based farmers and producers are invited to register their interest for a regular pitch at the market via the food festival website at www.brightonfoodfestival.com

Farmer Market Brighton & Hove

Blackpool Pride changes date

Blackpool Pride

Blackpool Pride 2013 is being re-launched on Saturday, June 8 & Sunday, June 9 in an effort to attract more families to the event.

Since 2006, the event has been held as a street party, but in this year it will move to the Winter Gardens as a free, two-day indoor event, with party venues, information services, an LGBT market place and restaurants and cafes.

There will be a variety of entertainment in the Theatre Bar of the Winter Gardens on the Saturday, and an afternoon tea with show tunes at The Pavilion Theatre on the Sunday.

Plans are also underway to host a parade along the Promenade to the Winter Gardens via North Pier.

Blackpool Pride

Kath Smith, Chairman of Blackpool Pride Festival, said:

“Blackpool Pride Festival will promote inclusion, equality and diversity, enhance education and eliminate discrimination in relation to LGBT people across Blackpool and the surrounding areas.

“We also want to push the festival further into the public domain, generating tourism, increasing Blackpool ’s local economy as well as encouraging local businesses to work with us to see how we can complement and support each other.

“Pride events primarily target an LGBT audience but we also want to engage with their families and people of all ages, giving us a wide spread appeal. Our aim is to target this audience locally, regionally and nationally, ideally attracting people from major cities as well as neighbouring towns, encouraging them to stay over in Blackpool.”
 
“We want Blackpool Pride 2013 to be the biggest and best Pride festival Blackpool has seen and therefore we would like to see as many people as possible involved. Our success relies on the wider community engaging with us so we can all work together to deliver a fantastic and enjoyable Pride Festival 2013.”

To get involved in Blackpool Pride 2013, email: 

For more information, click here:     www.blackpoolpridefest.com

For Facebook click here:  www.facebook.com/blackpoolpridefest

Or Twitter: @bpoolpridefest

THT Charity auction

Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), the HIV and sexual health charity, has unveiled the catalogue of its 30th Anniversary Auction, which takes place at Christies in London on Thursday. March 21 from 7pm.

THT

A rare print of Louise Bourgeois’ painting I Do, which was designed for the Freedom to Marry campaign in support of gay marriage, will form part of the lot, which also includes pieces by artists Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry, Julian Opie and Ricardo Cinalli. Get-aways ranging from a serene break in a Cornish cottage to a luxury getaway in Bhutan will also be up for grabs.

THTThe event will be a re-invention of the charity’s long-running Lighthouse Gala Auction, which has been a highlight in London’s social calendar for the last 16 years. It will mark 30 years since Terrence Higgins Trust was founded by a small group of friends in the early days of the HIV epidemic.

Genevieve Edwards, Director of Fundraising for Terrence Higgins Trust, said:

“We are thrilled to launch this auction in celebration of our 30th anniversary. Thanks to the kindness of our supporters, there will be some spectacular lots up for grabs. Thirty years since Terry Higgins’ friends set up the charity in his name, this year’s auction is a chance to celebrate the awe-inspiring level of support that still exists today. We hope our guests will dig deep and help us raise a record breaking total in our 30th year.”

For more information, or to purchase tickets, click here:

Equality charity says Catholic Church risks “missing the point”

Equality NetworkThe Equality Network, Scotland’s LGBT equality charity, is warning that the Catholic Church risks missing the key lesson of the events of the past two weeks after Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s resignation following allegations of sexual abuse of trust.

The charity says that the fundamental problem facing the Church is its public message on issues of sexual morality, not simply the hypocrisy of any one individual.

The Equality Network points out that the Catholic Church has vigorously campaigned against every major step towards LGBT equality in the UK over the past two decades, including the introduction of an equal age of consent, the repeal of Section 28, Civil Partnerships, same-sex adoption, and now same-sex marriage.

Last year a source in the Catholic Church told the Sunday Times that it was declaring a “war on gay marriage” and intended to spend over £100,000 more on its campaign to fight equal marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Tim Hopkins, Director of the Equality Network, said:

“Many people cannot understand why the Church seems to think that the worst thing for a relationship is for it to be same-sex. People know that what really matters is whether a relationship is respectful and consensual, or abusive. Abuse of young and vulnerable people destroys lives. Abuse of positions of trust and power, for example over students in a college, damages lives too. And there are more than 50,000 cases of domestic abuse reported to police each year in Scotland.

“Concerns have rightly been raised about the priority the Church places on sexual morality in particular, and the tone with which it speaks, but the focus needs to be right too. Why does the Church put so much time and money into opposing loving same-sex couples getting a marriage certificate, instead of campaigning on issues of abuse? Until the Church shows that it understands that consent versus abuse are what matters most in relationships, not sexual orientation, it will struggle to regain its credibility and moral authority.

“We have heard regret from the Cardinal about sexual conduct, and concern from the Church about well-deserved charges of hypocrisy. But we have not yet heard clearly enough that the Church understands that the real problem here was not breaching vows of celibacy, or that the sexual acts were same-sex, but that they were an abuse of a position of power.”

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Cardinal Keith O’Brien

 

 

 

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