Ethan Chiddy started Food for the Ears in 2023 while he was in high school. It would be an evening concert, hosted in Truro, supporting his local food bank: the Colchester Food Network.
In 2026, Food for the Ears has grown significantly. It’s now held in Halifax, with all-star artists from across the province coming together for a two-day festival with proceeds going towards Feed Nova Scotia.
This year is bound to be their biggest yet. Held from June 12-13 at Alderney Landing, Food for the Ears will feature a who’s who of local legends. Taking the stage on Friday will be Colrain, The Public Service, Avery Dakin, Feral Carol, Alvaro, and Chiddy’s own Ethan Tyler Band. On Saturday, fans can catch performances by Rankin MacInnis & the Broken Reeds, Elyse Aeryn, Morgan Toney, Mat Hughes, Good Dear Good, and a special contest winner.
Chiddy, now 19-years-old, is a musician and college student. Along with his regular schoolwork and playing gigs with his band, he is also the executive director of the Food for the Ears Society, a recently established non-profit that runs the festival.
“This is the first year that I really see how much it’s progressed and how much I’ve learned from just doing it,” says Chiddy in an interview with The Coast. “It’s like I’ve taken a music business degree, but I’ve learned it all by doing it all. It’s really cool.”
He’s always been invested in volunteering. His mother, Tammy, had gotten Chiddy invested in volunteer work through the World Changers group she ran at Red Cliffe Middle School in Valley, as well as through her own volunteer work at the Colchester Food Network.
When Chiddy was a teen, he wanted to find a way to mix his love of music and his passion for helping people out, especially after seeing statistics about how many families go hungry in Nova Scotia.
“I combined the two in my head,” he says. “I needed to do something.”
He was partly inspired by an event in Mahone Bay called Toonies for Tunes, a day concert which also sought to raise money for their local food bank.
“That showed me it was possible to do something like that,” says Chiddy.
Last year, they moved their donations over to Feed Nova Scotia in order to help as many organizations as they can. All of their ticket sales go towards the non-profit. Along with the annual concert, they also started what they call Appetizer Shows to help fund their annual festival: pop-up concerts across the province that bring local artists in to support the work they do. They have held four of these shows since December.
While the scale of Chiddy’s work becomes larger, so too does the number of people he has working with him. Thankfully, he now has a board filled with professionals, including his mother Tammy, to help out in different capacities. This hasn’t impacted Chiddy’s drive to do much of the work himself: he says he’d often rather pull out his laptop and work away at the festival than sit down and relax after class.
It’s this same drive that led him to start Food for the Ears, which he says has irrevocably changed the direction of his life.
“I knew I liked music. I was also contemplating going into culinary. I kind of settled on, OK, I’ll try and focus a lot on music,” he says. Now, with Food for the Ears, “this is quickly becoming my job and my career path. If it’s not Food for the Ears, it will be another festival in the future, or event curation and event management. I don’t think I would have ever expected that before.”
Early bird tickets for Food for the Ears are on sale until midnight on Tuesday, April 21. The festival is also still looking for sponsors, who can reach out to tammy@foodfortheears.com if interested.
