Artichoke Festival kicks off at Monterey County Fairgrounds

Castroville is celebrating its 59th annual Artichoke Food and Wine Festival this weekend.

The festival aims to raise money partly for the town’s disenfranchised youth as well as to educate people about the unique vegetable.

Among the different ways of cooking artichoke, this year festival volunteer Art Carbonel decided to cook artichoke-filled lumpia, which is the Filipino version of the egg roll.

Castroville calls itself the Artichoke Capitol of the World, producing an average 33,000 cases a week sent all over North America. The cool and foggy Monterey Bay makes the town a perfect place to grow the versatile vegetable, which takes between 100 to 200 days to grow.

“Showing people how to eat the artichoke, showing them why it’s important to our community, and the more people we can get to put an artichoke in their pot to boil and insta-pot to steam, the better for us as far as a community and an industry,” said Diana McClean, the festival board vice president.

McClean says she expects about 7,000 people to show up, some making the long drive.

“It’s about a five hour drive. So I said that would be a good day trip, so here we are. Left at 5am to be here at 10 when this opened,” said Nadine Winning, who drove from Southern California. “Well worth the drive.”

California produces about 95 percent of the country’s supply.