When the Northmoor Trust staged the first Children’s Food Festival in 2007, it took the world by storm.

Everyone declared it was a great success, and happy children left the festival field clutching recipe books and little bags of gingerbread men they had made themselves. It was quite clear that many of the youngsters attending had been inspired to see the food they ate in a different light. As organisers said, it was a festival that made everyone a winner, but most particularly the children, who were able to smell, touch and taste ingredients that some had never tried before.

Thanks to Eka Morgan, the festival director and the patrons, celebrity chefs Raymond Blanc and Sophie Grigson who injected so much of their own enthusiasm into the helping with the food-related activities, it proved an outstanding event.

Now preparations are under way for The Children’s Food Festival 2009, which will take place on Saturday and Sunday, June 27 and 28. The venue will be the Northmoor Trust’s Hill Farm, ten miles south of Oxford.

Once again Raymond and Sophie will front the festival and give hands-on demonstrations, inviting children to chop, stir, smell and taste. The celebrity line-up will also include best-selling author Annabel Karmel, who writes on baby and children’s food and nutrition, Jane Fearnley Whittingstall, who wrote The Good Granny Cookbook, Sam Stern who wrote Teenage Chef and Nora Sands who is Jamie Oliver’s School Dinner Lady.

Eka Morgan, who put so much into getting the first festival organised, is thrilled that there is to be another. She is passionate about cooking seasonal local food and connecting children with real food.

“We want children to discover that cooking is fun and creative. As eating habits are learnt when we are young – the sooner they can get their hands in the dough the better.”

Eka recalls with joy the hundreds of children who did just that in 2007. She particularly remembers the excitement on their faces as they waited patiently for their biscuits to come out of the oven so that they could decorate them with the many tubes of coloured icing sugar and edible decorations at their disposal.

She said: “Watching them enthuse about their efforts, made it all worthwhile.”

She went on to explain that the yardstick for the success of the first festival was the feedback they got from parents.

“If the children were clamouring to help in the kitchen when they got home, we would know we had got it right. Happily, the reports we got showed that this did happen in many cases, which has given us the confidence to do it all again.”

As a child Eka was fed an appalling diet. She admits that the poor relationship she had with food during her youth has dogged her adult life. She is convinced that if she had attended a Children’s Food Festival when she was young, it would have made such a difference, as she would have discovered what fun food can be.

The idea for the festival came to Eka in 2005.

“Parents say that one of the best ways to encourage children to eat good food is to get them to cook it themselves. I thought that a festival which conveyed positive messages about food, with plenty of colour, humour and hands-on cooking, could go someway to transform young people’s approach to eating.

As it is to take place on the Northmoor Trust’s conservation farm, which stands in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Eka believes the festival will also link young children with food’s natural source.

The Northmoor Trust manages an estate of 300 hectares, a conservation farm, a woodland dedicated to forestry research and the Project Timescape Visitor Centre. The trust was set up in 1967 by its patrons Sir Martin and Audrey Wood, who started Oxford Instruments, a company manufacturing specialist equipment needed for scientific research.

In 1982, the couple began looking for a wood to buy, which they found thanks to an advertisement in The Oxford Times for Little Wittenham Wood. As the wood was steeped in history, it proved the perfect place to create a wildlife sanctuary.

Two years later, the famous Wittenham Clumps came up for sale and were added to the reserve. In 2006, the trust moved into a new sustainable timber-framed offices at Hill Farm, which is now home to a complex of beautifully restored 19th-century barns and Project Timescape, which are part of a £3m Heritage Lottery Funded project.

The trust’s vision is to bring people closer to their local environment, which they do by running education programmes on farming, wildlife, waste and energy. The trust’s food-related activities include the Kids on Farms initiative, which links local schools with local farms. Naturally, the Children’s Food Festival is now the highlight of its food programme. During the festival, children will be able to visit the farm and view an observation beehive, which enables them to see just what goes on inside.

They can also can see the Grow Your Own area, take a farm walk, watch a sheep dog demonstration and meet loads of farm animals, including a baby water buffalo.

More than 20,000 children are expected to attend this year’s festival, which opens on both days at 10am, closing at 6pm on Saturday and 5pm on Sunday.

Because the roads leading to the Festival site are narrow, the entrance will not be via Northmoor Trust offices.

A map and directions can be viewed by going to the children’s food festival’s website www.childrensfoodfestival.co.uk, which also gives details of all festival activities. A charge of £10 a car will be made to those parking in the field opposite the site.