This Sunday, more than 25 local chefs are going to go head to head (to head to head to head to head to head . . . ) in a cooking competition.

Broad Appétit, a new festival in this festival-happy city, combines food and art in an afternoon celebration of the stuff of life. Naturally, the food and art will be available at reasonable prices.

Want to try a mini-dish of duck confit barbecue from the tony French restaurant 1 North Belmont? It will be three bucks. Is a Louisiana seafood gumbo from Louisiana Flair more your style? Three bucks. Or barbecued ribs from Buz & Ned's Real Barbecue? Three bucks.

The chefs are competing to determine who has what event organizers are calling the "To Die For Dish" in Richmond. Each chef will make three dishes -- and they'll all be available to the public for . . . well, you know.

But Broad Appétit isn't just about an exceptionally wide variety of food (organic crab cakes from Mosaic, Kahl?a chocolate mousse served in filo dough from 27, African vegetarian dishes from Africanne on Main) at a low price (three bucks). It's also about art at a low price (50 bucks).

The key to the art is you won't know who created it until you've bought it. Seventy-five artists -- some known, some not so known -- are making original art, all of it 6 inches by 9 inches. Each piece will go for half a C-note.

The works won't be labeled, although they'll be signed on the back. Only once you've bought it will you know who made it.

Broad Appétit is one of a number of events designed to spotlight the resurging Richmond downtown.

"The idea came up with a lot of us who are involved in First Fridays that is 12 nights a year. We wanted something for people to come downtown to during the day, to showcase the restaurants and merchants during the day," said Kathy Emerson of the Downtown Neighborhood Association.

"We started talking about having chefs here, looking at Spoleto, looking at Taste of Cincinnati, looking at Taste of Chicago. The thing with Taste of Cincinnati is it started one day with 5,000 people and now it's 300,000 people."

At Taste of Cincinnati and Taste of Chicago, restaurants in those cities gather to sell small sampler portions of some of their most popular items. Spoleto Festival USA is a massive, 18-day fine-arts festival in Charleston, S.C.

Broad Appétit combines a festival of food and a festival of art. These two ideas will be brought together in an art buffet, a smorgasbord of crafts and art that are related to food.

For instance, Anita Humes of Richmond will sell raku ceramic fruit and vegetables, while Marius Valdes is coming from South Carolina to sell paintings of imaginative creatures eating food. Angelica Rovales will make the trip from Virginia Beach to offer crocheted food, while Richmond's Erin Taylor will present handmade aprons, tea towels and coasters.

At 2 p.m., Joel Salatin will discuss the free-range, healthful-food movement as embodied in his family's Polyface Farms. Polyface, in Swoope, feeds its livestock and poultry nothing but the grass in its pastures and pushes for everyone to buy food that is locally grown.

More than 30 vendors and growers will sell their wares -- everything from chocolate to espressos to fresh farm goods -- allowing attendees to meet the people who grow their foods and learn their latest growing techniques. These foods will generally be organic, free-range, pasture-fed and otherwise chemically unadulterated.

And just as it wouldn't be a picnic without ants, it wouldn't be a Richmond celebration without insects. But in this case, the focus will be on bugs that are edible, for those who are inclined to eat such things.

At noon, David George Gordon, the author of "The Compleat Cockroach" and "From Soup to Gnats: The Essentials of Bug Cookery," will discuss the finer points of munching on our six-legged friends.

At 1 p.m., David Gracer will also talk about the healthful benefits of eating insects and will apparently attempt to convince audience members that they, too, will want to try a sautéed giant water bug or two.

With two proponents of insect-eating at the same event, it almost goes without saying that they will engage in a cook-off. It will begin at 3 p.m.

Emerson warns that previous Richmond events featuring cooked bugs have sold out. Yuck.