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OUR STORY

Baltimore's best and only celebration of the delicious world of petite edibles, the annual Small Foods party and contest, returns for its 15th year on Saturday, February 8th, 2020.

The party-cum-competition began in 2006 as a casual hors d’oeuvres gathering of a few friends, including Baltimore artists Melissa Webb, Kelley Bell, Kristin Anchor, and Edward Knapp, near the Christmas holidays. Over time, the food, once bite-sized, became smaller and smaller and the obsessive, competitive nature of the small group of friends gave rise to an event that grew bigger and bigger, requiring a shift to a larger venue. Annual entries increased as the event was opened to the public, and the scope of the competition grew to include categories like the Golden Toothpick – the best miniaturization of a food, and the Blue Plate Special – the best meal in miniature. This year  there will be 7 categories of competition, the winners of which compete for the Grand Prize, a giant can of miniature corn.

Notable past grand prize winners have included ‘Crappy Meals’, an assembly line-type performative entry in which apron-clad ‘employees’ distributed tiny red and yellow printed boxes filled with French fries, burgers, along with a soda cup, complete with straw and lid, as well as a tiny, simply-prepared and executed (and oh-so-delicious) pulled pork sandwich, served on fingernail-sized freshly baked biscuits.

Baltimore Small Foods party Shrimp Coktail

Photo: Jefferson Jackson Steele

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