EVENTS LISTING RELEASE

Stefan Gates, author of In the Danger Zone and presenter of BBC TWO’s Cooking in the Danger Zone, will be appearing at Valvona and Crolla for a Literary Lunch.

When: Tuesday 1st April, 11.45am for 12pm

Where: V&C Caffè Bar, Valvona and Crolla, 19 Elm Row
Edinburgh EH7 4AA

Tickets: £25  The lunch will include a three course lunch with a glass of V&C wine and a 10% discount on Stefan Gates’ books.

Contact: 0131 556 6066 or buy online at www.valvonacrolla.co.uk

‘Deceptively sharp, very funny and inquisitive’ – The Guardian on Cooking in the Danger Zone

IN THE DANGER ZONE

Stefan Gates

Published by BBC Books, 7th February 2008, £15.99

The companion book to Stefan Gates’ critically acclaimed

Cooking in the Danger Zone, which returns to BBC TWO for a third series on March 16th at 7pm

Award-winning writer Stefan Gates has travelled to some of the world’s most dangerous places investigating food and crisis for three series of BBC TV’s Cooking in the Danger Zone. He avoids the well-trodden journalistic routes to live with ordinary people and find out how they cook, eat and survive in extraordinary situations. Now the accompanying book In the Danger Zone presents Stefan’s dispatches from Afghanistan, the Arctic Circle, China, Haiti and more. Combining travelogue with a food writer’s eye for wild culinary experiences, it is an exciting, occasionally reckless and often very funny chronicle of one man’s hunger for travel and adventure.

In Chernobyl, Stefan samples potentially radioactive food, forages for mushrooms which he discovers are eight times too radioactive to eat, and investigates the Ukranian belief that vodka can flush radiation from the body. In Uganda, Cameroon and Ethiopia, he lives and eats in refugee camps, investigates the illegal trade in bushmeat and uncovers the continuing food aid catastrophe.

Further east, Stefan visits the dog farms of South Korea to explore a culinary culture that is often reduced to a stereotype in the West. He battles with paranoid authorities to get a glimpse of real rural life in China and understand the fragile relationship between a Communist government and a consumer driven food culture. In Beijing he tries out weird and wonderful traditional foods – shark’s lungs, water buffalo penis, braised camel hump and scorpion kebabs. In Israel and Palestine, amidst the conflict and confusion, Stefan lives with people from both sides and discovers the conflicting claims to land, food and the origins of hummus. He tastes tear gas at a riot, farms with ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers, milks camels with the Bedouin and bakes bread with Arabs in Nablus.

In this book Stefan shows that when you scratch the surface of the world’s great crises, food lurks just beneath. In the Danger Zone is a white-knuckle ride into some of the most dangerous, controversial and poverty stricken places on Earth with an intrepid - and very hungry – author at the helm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stefan Gates is a writer and broadcaster who first introduced the nation to the wilder side of gastronomy in BBC2’s Full on Food. His book Gastronaut won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award and was shortlisted for a Guild of Food Writers’ Award. He spent two years travelling the world writing and filming Cooking in the Danger Zone.

Stefan has worked as a journalist, scriptwriter and TV producer. He lives in London with his wife, two daughters and a fridge full of weird food.

Stefan Gates is available for interview

For further information, please contact Ed Griffiths at Ebury on