Hokitika Wildfoods Festival

Its main attraction is an array of unusual foods, including huhu grubs, lamb's testicles, and horse semen.

[3] By that year visitor numbers had increased to 3,800, so in 1993 Wildfoods moved to its current venue of Cass Square, which has a capacity of 10,000.

[10] At its height the festival attracted 25,000 under-age revellers, who smashed windows, lit bonfires on the beach, and left litter over central Hokitika; 20 were arrested, and there were calls for Wildfoods to be cancelled.

[26] Subsequently ticket sales were capped at 15,000,[4] and a liquor ban was introduced downtown, with all alcohol being sold in plastic cups.

[17] The festival had cut expenses by $120,000, reintroduced a pre-party at Hokitika Beach, and revived the after-party that had been cancelled in the preceding two years.

[17] The Westland District Council had continued to run the festival, despite losses, because of the economic benefit it provided to local businesses and the community.

[20][30][23] Mike Keenan ran the Wildfoods Festival for 21 years but was made redundant in 2014 when the Council disestablished its events department.

Its most notorious offerings include: Other foods offered at the festival have included chicken feet, jellied fish eye shots, lamb tails, crocodile and kangaroo bites, baby octopus, fish heads, pig pizzle, sheep brain pâté, sweetbreads, wild pork, whitebait fritters, pāua, pipi, wasp larvae ice cream, deer and bull semen, gorse-flower wine, earthworms, possum, pig's trotters, mussels, venison, scallops, hāngī, crispy tarantulas, bovine colostrum milkshakes, pork-blood casserole, cow udders, seagull eggs, live grasshoppers, and whisky sausages.

The prizewinning recipe at the first Wildfoods Festival was venison goulash, prepared by Pierre Esquilat of Hokitika's Cafe de Paris.

[22]The 1999 New Zealand feature film Magik and Rose, directed by Vanessa Alexander, is set before and during the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival.