GIY Podcast: Food Matters

food-done-right-at-home.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

food-done-right-at-home.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Mick Kelly, and this is food done, right!

Speaker2:
I literally just picked up the phone and I called the white House switchboard. I knew the name of Michelle Obama’s policy director, and I just asked to be put through to that person. She was definitely a bit surprised. Yeah, I remember her saying, this is very bold of you, but I appreciate your boldness. We’re just giving this message. If I can plant a white House garden, so can you. Future president of the United States.

Speaker3:
The stuff grew so high that it was difficult to steer the boat, because you’re looking down the length of this boat, and then there are all these really tall plants. So I did spend the summer perched on the side of the boat, looking around the side of these plants to be able to steer with the tiller.

Speaker1:
Growing food completely changed the course of history. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become entirely removed from where our food comes from. But if we grow food, reconnect, and care about our food, we can change the future’s course.

Speaker4:
Between the 1960s and 1990s, South Korea transformed from a relatively poor country to a wealthy one. For almost every country that has this experience, the shift comes with a move from wholesome, traditional diets to the high fat, high sugar, highly processed Western diet. But this country took a different path, and vegetable consumption actually increased because South Korea does not just count rice as a staple food, it also counts as spicy fermented cabbage dish called kimchi. It’s one little example of food done right. My name is Barry Flynn and alongside me is Joey’s founder and hacker grower in chief. Mike Kelly has gone there. Mike, it’s going well.

Speaker1:
Buzz.

Speaker4:
Are you a kimchi fan yourself?

Speaker1:
I am a no, not really, I do. You know what I’m more of a I’m more of a sauerkraut fan, I think. And appropriately enough, we’re sitting in the larder. Today was the only place we could find that wasn’t rammed with people. Um, and so there’s lots of jars of interesting things around us here. But yeah, I’m like, I’m more more of a sauerkraut fan. I kind of got into it about being growing cabbage kind of on and off for years, and it’s an obvious thing to make a bit of sauerkraut from your from your cabbage. And, um, I find over time I’ve kind of got addicted to it. Like, I don’t know, is it like a physical thing that your body kind of craves after a while or whatever? But I absolutely love it. And the kids and my wife absolutely hate it because it’s like, as soon as you pop open that jar, you know, the stink of cabbage in the room. But, um, I just absolutely love it. And I kind of I think it’s a great metaphor for, like, with everything with growing your own food at the start, it was kind of a bit afraid of it, you know, like, Will I poison myself and will I poison my family? But, like, you know, you just get more confident with it. And now I just absolutely love the taste of it.

Speaker4:
Start to enjoy all that good bacteria in the gut. There you go. Um, so it strikes me that maybe you weren’t always eating sauerkraut. You probably didn’t grow up on a sauerkraut diet, if I’m not mistaken. I mean, that sounds like it would be a bit unusual for a man growing up in Mead than Waterford. Um, so can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up, you know, surrounded by all these pickles and chutneys and eating sauerkraut and all these unconventional food behaviors? You know, we know the DIY story all began in a supermarket spotting a bulb of garlic from China, deciding, enough is enough, I’m going to go and I’m going to I’m going to grow this garlic myself. But then what happened?

Speaker1:
Yeah, it’s that’s part of the story I almost never tell, I guess. But but, um, like, nothing happened very quickly. It was all it’s very slow, as with a lot of other things with growing your own food. And so the garlic kind of was worried after in my moment of sort of post garlic epiphany peak out in the garden, digging holes, shoving the garlic in there. And then of course, nothing happened for ages. And then, you know, eventually a little shoot comes out of the bare soil and you’re feeling pretty, pretty happy with yourself. But in the end, like, garlic is one of these weird things where it actually, um, it like it grew and the stalk is there in the ground. And I knew so little about food growing that actually, I thought, I think I was probably thinking about the ornamental alliums or something, where the sort of bulb forms at the top of the stalk. And I was, I was thinking, well, the garlic grow up there, you know, like a foot and a half off the ground or whatever. And will it be flapping around in the wind and is it not too heavy? And will that not, like, fall over? But then.

Speaker4:
Was this before.

Speaker1:
Google? This was before Google. Yeah. Um, so like I was kind of waiting for this thing to happen and then nothing happened. It didn’t turn into a bulb of garlic above the ground. And then when garlic is ready to be eaten, it actually the stalk, the stem goes brown and kind of collapses and falls over. And so I just thought it was dead because there was no garlic to be seen anywhere. So then I got out, got out a shovel or something from the, from the garage and, and went to dig this thing out to throw it away, like thinking the grand garlic experiment had completely failed. And there was this, like, magnificent bulb of garlic underneath the ground. And like in my head, looking back on it, it was like the size of an orange. But, you know, I was I was so chuffed with myself. And actually, you know, that movie castaway with Tom Hanks and he’s like, um, he’s, he’s he gets fired. He’s trying to light a fire for weeks, like, and eventually he gets it and he’s jumping around on the, on the beach bare chested. Like, that’s what I was like in the garden.

Speaker5:
You know? Wilson.

Speaker1:
I thought it was like Monty, Don. I was just so delighted with myself. And it’s like, it just it hooked me. Like I was smitten from absolute day. One, that you could produce this food in your own backyard, you know.

Speaker4:
And how did you get from there to, you know, preserving massive batches of cabbages and, and other vegetables into a year round supply of kraut?

Speaker1:
Yeah, like that’s a great question. I think slowly is probably the answer. Like it just it just it’s gradual, you know, it’s. 18 years later. I think every year you learn a little bit, you do a little bit more and you try a bit more and things go wrong and you make a you make a mess of them and then other times things go right and it’s great. And you just learn gradually. And the more confidence you get, then the more you’re willing to try things like like sauerkraut, you know, and having this amazing thing stored away for the winter months.

Speaker4:
And why do you think that’s so important?

Speaker1:
Well, you know, I think that one of the big things for me that just I suppose, was, was part of that, like, think, think, think about that garlic moment in the supermarket where you’re buying this Chinese bulb of garlic and then you’re trying to grow it and you don’t know where the bloody bulb grows on. You know, you just know nothing, I think, is a great metaphor for how completely and utterly disconnected we are from our food, from where our food comes from and from the food system. And so it’s like it’s it’s what struck me about the Chinese garlic, the thing that sort of like not quite outraged me, but just just that I could not get my head around was how does it make sense to, you know, for, for a poor Chinese farmer somewhere to, to grow this thing and then ship it halfway across the world and then have it for sale in a supermarket in Waterford for like, you know, 50 cent or whatever or euro? Yeah. It seems so illogical and stupid, you know, and so like for all, for all of the problems in the food system and I think there are, there are loads and while in some sense like it’s a logistical marvel and it’s, it’s, it’s incredibly miraculous in some ways that we have this food available all year round and so on.

Speaker1:
It’s also, I think, deeply flawed and practically broken in other ways. So like we’ve got the food system causing a, you know, a third of global greenhouse gas emissions or whatever. So it’s right up there with transport and energy in terms of the big picture, climate change problems. But for me, it’s just that general sense of kind of disconnection from our food that that is the big problem and particularly seasons. So like, you know, when you, when you, when you eventually get your garlic or you get your cabbage out of the ground, you make make kimchi and you’re reconnecting with this sort of the arc of the seasons through the year, through the year. And I think that that’s, um, that’s just a miraculous thing that for me has been the biggest change, like just reconnecting with seasonal eating and and with where my food comes from. It’s just been life changing.

Speaker4:
Yeah, it feels like we’re following the laws of economics as opposed to the laws of nature or common sense or culture or history or all of these things. And during this series, we’re going to examine these problems in the food system throughout our daily life. So we’re going to look at home, at school, in the community, at work, going out and in care. And we’re going to start today with the home. We’re obviously most food is eaten and we’re going to take a look at life in America.

Speaker1:
Yeah. Well, I think like America is the problems with our food system writ large, you know, and the Western diet that you talk about, um, which is I’ve heard it described as sad crap, which is an acronym for Standard American Diet carbohydrates Refined and processed, which I always think is brilliant. I’m glad I could remember.

Speaker5:
That as well.

Speaker1:
Um, but like, it’s, it’s yeah, all of those problems just on a vast scale and, and obviously where they came from in the first instance in many cases. So like we all know, it’s that kind of fast Food Nation sort of view that we have about America that that so little time is spent preparing meals and cleaning up, I think on average 30 minutes a day or something like that, 20% of meals eaten in cars, um, you know, it’s just it’s just an absolute mess as a food system. And so it seemed like a brilliant, a brilliant place for us to start.

Speaker4:
Yeah. And I mean, I think so much of that is about the economic disparity in the US, that that is also so great that I think drives a lot of those negative food outcomes that that forces people to have those meals in cars and everything else. But there’s also a peculiar middle class aspect to life in the US that that’s interesting for us to highlight. And another little disconnection from nature, and that is lawns. So, you know, we did a little bit of research on on this before the show and came across an interesting article. Um, it was actually citing a NASA study from 2005 and that showed the 2% of the continental United States is back garden lawns, and which might not sound like a huge amount, you know, in the context of the whole country, but it translates to an area of land ten times the size of Ireland, obviously, Ireland, you know, a renowned agricultural powerhouse. And but you know, all of those Americans just just sitting on, on all of that underutilized space. And that’s something that we’re going to kind of take a little bit of a peek at today as well. Yeah.

Speaker1:
And probably setting on their ride on mowers as well. Driving around like I even feel that with my own garden at home, like mowing a lawn is such a waste of time, isn’t it? It’s like it’s just the deadest time. Like you’re literally not doing anything and you’re using fossil fuels in the process to do it, like so, um, we came across a guy a long time ago, I think probably nine years ago. We invited him to come over to one of the original DIY gatherings that we used to have, kind of like a festival once a year. And, um, our first guest today is a guy called Roger Dworin who came over to one of those original events. And he’s he’s an amazing character. And, and I think I think what interests me about Roger is that he kind of looks on that all of that lawn space, all of that dead space as a, as a, as an incredible asset that can be unlocked if we turn those lawns or at least part of them into spaces where we grow their own food and, and he did something pretty incredible about it. Instead of just like having his garlic epiphany like I did, he decided to ring up the white House and try and get the the the incoming Obama administration to turn that into the white House, which is probably the most famous lawn of all, and turned that into a food growing space and successfully did so famously. So Roger started out by taking me back to the very beginning of the white House garden story.

Speaker2:
Well, a lot of things sort of fell into place at the right time. It’s one of those cases where the planets sort of aligned in terms of the right message being delivered at the right time to the right person. And I’ll only take a small part of the credit, because ultimately it was Michelle Obama who was the visionary, who could see just how impactful such a garden could be. And she was the one who took the big risk of actually going out there with a bunch of fifth graders and some garden tools and ripping up, you know, a very historic white House lawn without knowing necessarily how the American public would take it. But just to quickly go back in time. So, yes, this was 2008, and I was in a very fortunate situation in that I had just received a two year fellowship that gave me a great amount of freedom with which to spend my time, essentially. So the only stipulation was that I needed to do work that was related to what is called food systems change, and that ideally that work would result in media coverage. And because gardening was my thing, I was looking to get media coverage for vegetable gardening, home gardening, and I just saw this opportunity in 2008 because the American presidential election is sort of this crazy thing, which takes months and months. And I saw all of this attention that was being drawn to the candidates who were crisscrossing Iowa.

Speaker2:
And I said to myself, how could we sort of inject garden politics into presidential politics? And so what sort of happened after that was just a series of unfortunate events, you might say, in that I saw an opportunity to get the issue entered as a contest idea with the United Nations Foundation. They were looking for the best idea for the next president to take on upon taking office. And I proposed the idea of digging a vegetable garden. And at that time, my nonprofit organization just had a few thousand email subscribers. But I was able to get essentially every single one of them to vote for our idea in the contest. And so we we were able to sort of propel this idea to the top of this list, which then resulted in some media coverage. And then we put up a Facebook petition, and then we put together some videos that went sort of Semi-viral you mentioned mic about, you know, me using my my own garden. Just so happens that I live in a white house of my own. It’s a little, little white house. Not all the grandeur of the white House, but my wife and I just filmed the the digging of our white House garden, and I put it to some sort of classic American music and was just giving this message if if I can plant a white House garden. So can you. Future president of the United States. And then there were some little gimmicks along the way.

Speaker2:
For example, we symbolically put the white House lawn up for sale on eBay in one square foot parcels. That sale stayed up on eBay for all of, I think two days before somebody realized that you can’t actually sell the white House lawn. But but the point of that was, this is our lawn. We’re the owners of that lawn, essentially, and we get to decide how it’s used. So this would have been in January or so of 2009. So this was as the Obamas were moving into the white House. We’d had all of this media coverage, like in 500 different newspapers across the country. And I was sort of struggling, saying to myself, we’ve had all this coverage, but I still don’t know whether anyone important has actually seen any of this. And so I literally just picked up the phone and I called the white House switchboard, and I had done a little bit of research. It was it was terribly naive, but also effective in the end, in that I knew the name of Michelle Obama’s policy director, and I just asked to be put through to that person. And this was well before they had their their firewalls in place to prevent people like me from actually getting to talk with anybody important. And so I was just put through right, right away to the policy director. You got through to the right person. Like I got through a cold call.

Speaker1:
That is incredible.

Speaker2:
Yeah. So she was definitely a bit surprised. Yeah. I remember her saying, this is very bold of you, but I appreciate your boldness. And so I said, I don’t know, have you guys noticed all the excitement and energy around this idea of having, you know, future first lady Michelle Obama plant a. A garden at the white House. And she said, oh, no, we’re very much aware of it. So, you know, let’s see, let’s be in touch again and to see where we can sort of go with this. So I ended up having another conversation with a lower level policy person where they were asking me some questions about sort of what I had heard from having run this campaign for a number of months that might sort of give some pause to them. For example, was there something, some sort of political downside that I had heard about that they, they ought to know about, for example, and I quite frankly said, no, that that’s the amazing thing about vegetable gardens is that they’re they’re not conservative. They’re not liberal. They really, you know, cut across politics. And I really felt that this garden would have the, the, the broad support of the American people if, if Michelle Obama were to plant it.

Speaker1:
Roger, I know, I mean, looking looking from a kind of an international perspective into it. The garden was kind of foundational to a lot of the kind of campaigning work Michelle Obama did about about kind of wellness. She came under a lot of pressure from sort of the big ag, big ag industry about promoting organic growing and so on. So it felt like, and I know you’ve used that word subversive before, which I think is like you felt your own plot was was subversive, but did you feel like the white House garden was a subversive thing, or was it just was it written off as kind of, you know, the privileged elite sort of having their nice hobby? That’s one of the challenges we always find in. I think that you’re trying to combat that sense of food growing, being just just a nice middle class hobby that like it is something much more profound and subversive than that.

Speaker2:
Well, I do think the The White House garden was subversive in the sense that it wasn’t just a garden for the Obamas, and it wasn’t just a garden for the elite people who happened to be able to enjoy a meal served at the white House, but that it was a garden, sort of for the people. Michelle Obama always made a point of ensuring that whenever there was work to be done during the planting of the garden or the harvesting of the garden garden, she would invite young people from the Washington, D.C. area to help her do that. And so I think it was giving this important message, which is that good food is for everyone. And it’s not just for the elite and the, you know, the symbolism of doing that on the white House lawn just cannot be sort of overstated, I think, because it it was and I think continues to be the most publicized lawn in the world. And so the decision to use up some of that for that purpose was, I think, really quite important. And as you mentioned, Nick, she she did an excellent job of using the garden as sort of a platform or a stage for talking about much bigger issues simply than gardening, such as, you know, the health of our young people, for example, equity. You know, these really big topics. I think gardeners have an important role in. And to the extent that we can get out of our own backyard gardens and get into sort of the public space more when it comes to food issues, I think that that’s actually a very positive development.

Speaker1:
I was watching your Ted talk, and again, one of the things I love about the way, the way you speak about food growing, you know, the idea of the of the subversive plot, but also that sense that, you know, this can have a huge impact if it’s done at scale. And one of the things I think, and your own organization share is that that scale ambition. Right. What do you think is the real potential for food growing if it was done at scale?

Speaker2:
Well, I think the the impacts could be huge in terms of the impacts on health, the impacts on climate, the impacts on well-being. You know, as a gardener yourself, you know, the the the feeling of well-being that you get from spending an hour in your own garden connecting to the Earth. Yeah, using your body, feeling your body, maybe feeling it a little bit too much at the end of that day. But I think one of the things that I keep coming back to, and I’m sure you do as well with gardening, is that there is this feeling of satisfaction that comes with being able to do something tangible. These issues. Like climate change. They’re just so big and they seem overwhelming. And it seems like it’s really hard to to do anything that actually moves the needle whatsoever. And so I sort of have this little quote up on my computer screen, which is, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. And I kind of keep coming back to that. And so when you’re growing a little plot in your backyard, or when a school is planting a school garden, or when a community group is putting in a community garden in a blighted area in a city, whether it’s in Ireland or in the United States, they’re doing something. They’re taking some sort of tangible action, saying, I don’t have a lot of power, but, you know, darn it, I’m going to use the power I have. I’m going to do something with what I have in terms of my time, my resources, my space. And I think that that’s a very uplifting message. One thing that has come to my attention in the different talks I’ve given is that, you know, people say, does it really matter? This little act that I’m taking and I, you know, continue to emphasize that. Indeed it does, because all of these acts add up in the end, you know? And so that’s why it’s so important to to bring more people, new people into the gardening movement, because all those little gardens add up to, to something quite consequential in the end.

Speaker1:
One of the thoughts I had, though, to ask you was like the contrast between what the white House sort of plot and your own plot represent as a type of food system. And then the reality of what what the US food system is like, you know, can you speak a bit about the that kind of contrast? Because I guess, like, you could look at the the white House garden and think, everybody in America is is kind of doing something similar. But the reality is, is much different than that, I think, isn’t it?

Speaker2:
Oh, it is, of course. Yes. So in my Ted talk, I included a couple of slides where I showed an image of what the white House garden layout looked like at the time of planting with this incredible diversity of crops, you know, these very healthful crops, leafy greens, salads, you name it. And then I transposed on to that, that same layout of the white House garden, what the US agricultural policy would look like if it were sort of in that same garden space. And essentially all you see are things like soybeans, corn, cotton, wheat. And so the the focus of US agricultural policy continues to be these sort of industrialized grains, things that are essentially meant to make sure that food is very cheap, but that also the quality is not particularly good. So there’s definitely a disconnect there. But I think that to the extent that we get more people growing vegetables, obviously you’ll see more people eating vegetables too. And we need to certainly redirect the our policies, whether it’s in the United States or the European Union, to put more emphasis on producing the the healthy stuff as opposed to the less healthy stuff, so that that disconnect is still there. The white House garden was not a magic wand in terms of suddenly changing dramatically the way that US agricultural policy sort of played itself out.

Speaker1:
But I think it’s so interesting as a model, though, for what a kind of alternative food system could look like. And I always think one of one of the things I think is just the great, the great hope for me is that this planet healthy diet, like the diet that we know to be, you know, healthy for human beings and healthy for the planet, which involves way more fruit and vegetables, as you say, and much less meat and less grains and so on, is the diet that food growers, I think, gravitate towards anyway, that’s.

Speaker2:
Definitely the case. You know, I always tell people that the garden tells me what’s for dinner tonight, and I build a lot of meals around what happens to be available. So, you know, here in New England at this time of the year, we’re looking at, you know, the last crops of the year. We’re looking at a lot of cabbage crops, the last of the salad greens, the root vegetables. And then of course, the different things that we’ve we’ve preserved. But it’s a very healthy way of eating when you build your meals around the vegetables that you have available as opposed to, you know, maybe starting in the, the meat section of the grocery store. Door and thinking in terms of what vegetables can I add to this plate to sort of balance it out a little bit more? It’s just a it’s a complete paradigm shift, you might say, when you put vegetables first and think about what else you might serve to sort of go with those vegetables, much.

Speaker1:
More, much more challenging situation in the kitchen, but a lot more fun I think, as well. I think you’re right. I think and I guess that when you follow the seasons the way you’re suggesting, it’s the healthiest, it’s the most sustainable, and it’s also delicious because it’s so fresh and straight out of the ground. You know, Dan Barber talks about the carrot. Carrot when you eat food that’s just out of the ground. It just tastes totally different, doesn’t it?

Speaker2:
It does for sure. Yeah. There’s just this sort of vibrant, alive quality to the the foods that have just been harvested from the garden. They haven’t traveled across the country as, as is often the case here in the United States. That’s one of the reasons that with with my organization, Seed Money, we’re focusing so much these days on public food gardens, trying to make sure that the people who don’t have access to their own yard, for example, can still grow some healthy foods by having access to some space, you know, somewhere within their community.

Speaker1:
That’s really interesting, because I was going to ask you when you when you came to Waterford nine years ago, it was Kitchen Gardens International. And then it’s become seed money in the meantime. And as you say, focusing on funding community growing projects. Was that because you felt the biggest challenge was access to growing space, or was it that, you know, you felt food growing is best done in the community, as opposed to sort of isolated at home by yourself or what? What was behind that change?

Speaker2:
Well, it was the result of quite a bit of reflection and a fair amount of research, too, in that we had been doing some surveys of our membership back when we were called Kitchen Gardeners International, and we were asking, you know, people on the ground, what what do you think we ought to be doing? You know, we have some ideas about what we think we should do, but what do you think we should do? And what we kept on hearing more and more of was we’d like to see more gardens planted in our community, more public gardens. So school gardens, community gardens, food bank gardens, gardens behind senior homes, gardens associated with, you know, juvenile detention centers. And so we we decided to sort of move into that space just because we obviously continue to believe really strongly in home growing. That’s why do it myself and why I love it so much. And so that is certainly, you know, still really important to be done. But I started to think more, I guess, about this question about accessibility and how we could sort of grow the garden movement by thinking in terms of who’s not invited to the table at this point and how do we invite them? And so that was sort of the reason behind sort of this shift to to public food gardens as opposed to, you know, private backyard gardens.

Speaker1:
And the scale of it, I think is pretty amazing. Like, I think 1600 projects are read in your website that you’ve you’ve supported, which is incredible. But any any of them jump out for you in terms of any favorites?

Speaker2:
It’s like saying what? Which is my favorite son of my three. Yes. Um, there is actually a project that continues to sort of amaze me and inspire me each year. It’s actually a prison garden project from Rhode Island that we’re very happy to give a grant to every year, and it’s just so moving to see the photos of these men who are sort of re discovering their own dignity by growing food and feeling like they’re able to do something good. There’s like a sense of redemption, I think, on their part. And they’re actually preparing for their lives after prison as well. So that’s a particularly moving project. And it does remind me of something I read a number of years back about Nelson Mandela. During his many years of incarceration. He, too, found a lot of peace in the garden. Yeah. And so there’s there’s something quite powerful about that.

Speaker1:
I think that’s very cool. I think I think we did a couple of projects in Ireland, which that resonates with, like the there’s an open prison in Cavan that we worked with. And also there’s a system of housing migrants in Ireland or asylum seekers in Ireland called direct provision centres, which is really awful. But we’ve seen support in some gardens. Getting getting established there. And again, you know, people in absolutely dire situations, the most basic thing we can do is feed ourselves like they have that taken away from them in these, in these centers and and just seeing gardens, giving as you say, empowering people and giving back that sense of purpose and reconnecting with them with something really fundamental in life. Roger, I have to ask you before we finish up as as Europeans, we sort of watched through our fingers over over the last four years as the Trump administration sort of demolished many an international norm. Um, but without getting into the politics of it, I suppose. Did did the white House kitchen garden, do we know, did it survive Donald Trump or what? Where is it at now?

Speaker2:
It’s alive and well. And once again, first Lady Michelle Obama gets all the credit because she’s she had such foresight that she thought ahead of time to sort of understand what would be the potential threats to the garden. And so one threat that she anticipated was that there were people there would be people who would say, oh, we can’t maintain this garden because it’s going to be too expensive to maintain. So before leaving office, she raised a lot of money and basically created a sort of an endowment to make sure that no one could use that argument against the garden. But perhaps more importantly, she hardscaped the garden by putting in these large stones that these massive, heavy stones that, you know, would have required some very heavy machinery to, to remove. So, yes, the garden is alive and well. It’s being maintained by the white House kitchen staff and the ground staff, and it’s still doing all of those amazing things in terms of providing vegetables for not just the white House, but also the the greater DC community.

Speaker1:
That’s brilliant. I was worried, I saw a picture of a new tennis court and tennis pavilion. I think in the in the garden. I was worried it had been tarmacked over or something. So that’s that’s very good to know that the food garden sort of transcends politics. And Roger, as always, I’m just I’m so inspired by your work and it’s been way too long. So it’s been brilliant to reconnect and it just continued success to you and all your team doing what you do, fighting the good fight and keep running that subversive plot.

Speaker5:
Well, it’s.

Speaker2:
What I do. And right back at you, Mick, for all the great work you and Gigi are doing as well.

Speaker1:
So I just love that idea of the subversive plot that Roger talks about. It’s just class. Like, I think we should steal that part and use use that ourselves. You’ll see that in Joey press releases in the months ahead. You know, one of the things, though, that strikes me like for all the like just the brilliance of that story about about getting the white House to grow their own food and then, you know, multiplying that out across America. And you do kind of think about American kind of gardens as being like big spaces, whereas I guess, you know, that’s not always going to be the case. And like, we have to keep food growing kind of accessible to everyone, whether you’ve got sort of much space or not really, don’t you.

Speaker4:
Yeah. And I think, you know, I’m obviously newer to the food growing game than you are, Mick. But, you know, I’ve learned myself in the last couple of years that there is a bit of a misconception about how much space you need, you know, and just how valuable even a small space is. You know, I’ve been growing tomatoes in a bedroom, you know, the last couple of years growing chilies on a windowsill. And, and, you know, even if you’re not going to feed your whole family for the year, there’s still so much to gain from that, you know, so much just sort of pride and pleasure to take from it. And I think that’s that’s sort of the moral of the story for, for our next guest, who is kind of taking it to the next level a little bit, in that she has set up her subversive plot on a floating rooftop somewhere around chicken heaven in Kildare. So, you know, if you can grow food on top of a houseboat along the inland waterways of Ireland, then there’s no stopping you. So let’s go ahead and meet Aaron Fornoff, a supporter from the very early days. She helped to raise funds for the upstart DIY movement over ten years ago. Now she’s a full time writer and poet and mother, and she continues to spread the joy word from her houseboat rooftop garden. Aaron, thanks for joining us.

Speaker3:
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Barry.

Speaker4:
So first of all, can you tell us a little bit about your earliest experiences growing food back home in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina?

Speaker3:
Um, yeah, I my mother was always a brilliant gardener and had beautiful flowers. Um, and then I worked on just an Appalachian farm for a summer, mostly in their massive garden. Um, and so there was this older lady who lived her entire life in this farmhouse who used to just go out with me and give me just this education on, you know, on how to grow things and particularly how to grow things in an organic way. And it just, you know, I just I loved it and it was so peaceful. And, you know, you worked so hard and it’s so peaceful. And then when stuff actually fruits and flowers and it’s just it was just deeply satisfying, even for like a pretty cynical 19 year old, I guess. But it just kind of sparked something, I guess. Planted a seed, you could say.

Speaker4:
So when you left home for college, um, you know, you began a bit of an odyssey where gardens effectively fill the role of home, you know, pretty much wherever you went. So can you tell us about your first kind of home away from home garden experience in college?

Speaker3:
Yeah, well, I went to a huge university with about. Things are about 25,000 undergraduate students. And I just, you know, was looking for a kind of my tribe. And I grew up with lots of, you know, kind of nice hippies, you know, like, very capable people. And I was just kind of looking for that. So I ended up starting the Carolina Garden Co-op. It was like a teaching garden. So it was a community garden, but less focused on getting lots of stuff for people to eat out of it. Because the one challenge with the college garden is that everyone’s away for the summer when all the good stuff comes in, so it was more a way where people could go and, you know, be a part of this garden and learn how to do things so that they could then go back and do on their own. And I scouted the whole university looking for pieces of land to put it, and they just told me, no, no, no, every time. And I finally found this, like vacant. Just vacant big piece of grass and looked in the tax records and the public library to figure out who owned it.

Speaker3:
And then I just like, called them over and over again until they let me put a guard in there and ended up starting that garden on like the worst drought in recorded history. And we got water from like a university building across the street. So we had to, like, sneak in at midnight to water the garden because there were all these drought rules. But it was great. And, you know, we had like t shirts and lots of members and we’d have garden days and people come in and talk to the garden. And I had I realized that if, you know, you send out emails to say, oh, there’s a work day in the garden. And I realized if I sent out an email that was like, hey, come and work in the garden or garden day tomorrow, you get you get people showing up. But if you send out an email that says x, x x Hot Garden action X x x, then you get loads of people showing up for work days. Then so many.

Speaker4:
More capable hippies coming in. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker3:
That’s a useful tip for DIY there.

Speaker4:
How to recruit capable hippies. Yeah. That’s fantastic. So when you moved to Dublin then about ten years ago and, you know, you continued your work finding and supporting social entrepreneurs like Mick, but again, you turn to community garden projects to kind of settle in and feel at home. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Speaker3:
Yeah. Mean was like lonely. It’s lonely to move to a new country. And so I was kind of up for doing lots of different things and meeting people. And there was something, I can’t remember who kicked this off. It may have been some kind of political stunt or something, but it was a guerrilla gardening initiative where people descended upon this empty piece of land near Booterstown Dart station and just put in a little garden. And it wasn’t vegetables, it was mostly just flowers and like bedding plants and stuff. But it was just a day to take this ugly piece of land and make it a pretty piece of land. So I went to that and it was fun. And I met this guy Owen, who became my first friend in Ireland, and then we from there. We ended up starting this project that was a rooftop garden on sundial House, which is a it’s run through DePaul and it’s a wet shelter for street drinkers. And it’s this sort of state of the art shelter. And the residents, there are permanent residents, so they have their own rooms and they usually, you know, they’re there like late stage alcoholics. So they kind of make up drinking plan with the staff. And it could be, you know, it’s pretty bleak. It’s like I will only drink two bottles of vodka a day. And so they get like a distribution of alcohol every few hours. And there’s a nurse on call and a canteen and stuff, but they have this gorgeous roof area.

Speaker3:
So we just started working with the residents to build this rooftop garden. And, you know, like we’re carrying railroad sleepers up five flights of stairs and hauling all this dirt up to the roof. But it just became something so lovely. And gardening, you know, is really it’s really good for all kinds of people because you don’t really need to be fluent in the same language. You don’t need to be able to read because a lot of those guys couldn’t read, or they had brain damage from drinking and so on. And you can also do it while you’re drunk. Um, and a lot of those guys either grew up out in the middle of nowhere in a rural area, so would have had some experience with growing, or they worked with things like landscapers or, you know, there was one guy who used to, you know, this hanging flower baskets that go over the old school pubs like he used to make those. So there was a lot that people could do even if they had limited capacities otherwise. But it did just develop into this stunning space. You know, we had about 50 cans of raspberry and lettuces and cabbages and spuds and a bunch of stacked up tires and, you know, sweet pea all the way around, like the fences and just loads of different vegetables and then hanging baskets over the whole the walls of the space. And, you know, you could see it driving up Thomas Street, which is so exciting.

Speaker3:
And the residents started spending a lot of time there, and even the directors of the place started having their like, funder meetings up there. And it was really lovely. And that place was pretty bleak. And people were, you know, in a difficult spot. And honestly, like all of the people I worked with on that garden have since passed away because a lot of them are very close to, you know, when you’re a late stage street drinker or alcoholic, like you’re very close to death. Even in your when you’re in a nice place with a warm bed and a nurse on call. But it was just. And it was it was lovely. And I think that’s something about gardening that that always attracted me is it’s an it attracts a lot of people is it’s something that’s like visually positive, like it’s a hopeful thing. And I wonder if that’s why people like community gardens and murals so much because it’s it’s just this visually positive thing. And it was like a source of achievement. You know, part of why I moved away from working on that project was that they kind of just started doing it themselves, you know, like I’d come for the work day and they would have like planted up all the flowers already and I’d be like, oh, okay, great. You know, but also at the same time that, that sense, like, you don’t even need me anymore.

Speaker5:
Nice.

Speaker4:
Um, the kind of the community garden journey of yours. So between, you know, college and then in Dublin, I guess it had to come to an end at some point for yourself because, you know, you found a place to call home. And. But of course, sure enough, that place is a home on water. It’s a houseboat. And you’re kind of adventurous. Spirit of finding gardens is obviously alive and well. Um, I’ve seen you tweet at Mick and call him responsible for your addiction to to to growing, which feels like a little bit rich, given that you’ve been doing it for so long. But it does suggest that he might have played some kind of role in enabling this floating rooftop garden in around Navan in Kildare at the moment. Um, so can you tell us a bit about, you know, Mick and Joey and anything that, that, you know, he or the organization has done to, to help you on this journey?

Speaker3:
You know, while they talk about like Instagram influencers, you know, like put up all these pictures of themselves in like, private jets, designer clothes, like mix, like the version of that, but with parsnips, you know. Also, he wrote this book called grow, cook, eat. Um, that’s both a cookbook and kind of a really beautiful guide for how to grow food in Ireland. And gave me a copy of that book. And that’s really what I’ve gone to as a lesson for what to grow when and what grows. Well, in Ireland. Because like the stuff from North Carolina, some of the things you learn in North Carolina don’t really apply here. You know, at home, they say like corn should be knee high by the 4th of July. And you know, that’s not a thing over here and with a different weather and so on. But I really went to his book as a guide for the kind of things that would grow here and when to start growing them, which was really it’s really handy. It’s a great book.

Speaker4:
So, Aaron, I think that takes us to, you know, the business end of things. Right? So, you know, one of the reasons we wanted you to come on the show was to help other people who are starting gardens at home, you know, with some, some advice of your own. Um, and, you know, we, you know, we’re all about encouraging people to grow some of their own food, no matter what space they have. And and you’ve managed to build a garden on a houseboat of all places. So surely if you can do it, then there’s no excuses for anyone else. So can you give us a little bit of a kind of, you know, mini masterclass in how you set up your rooftop garden and, and maybe some people can listen in and figure out how to do the same.

Speaker3:
Yeah. So our boat is is 55ft long and seven feet wide. And one thing it has as a benefit for gardening is that you can move to get the best sun so you can kind of chase the sunlight. Um, but we, we did gardening on the roof for the past two years, and we did it different each time. But the first time we had a big it was a big storage box on the roof that was about maybe four feet long and three feet wide. Just the box with slats on the bottom. And we got bags of compost, just the ones that you would get at Woody’s and put those in there, and then had a few random little pots for for herbs. How do you guys say it? Herbs, herbs.

Speaker5:
And.

Speaker3:
You know, and some little flower things, just three of those in a row. And then cut a big square out of one of them and planted it really heavily with spinach and lettuces and chard. You know, if you plant lettuces and stuff really close together like that, it kind of grows into like baby lettuce leaves. And the tightness keeps some of the bugs from going away, but you have to thin it out, which I didn’t do enough of this that year. And then we planted mangetout and French beans. Oh, and we had leeks in there. And then we also had a courgette plant. We could just produce so much out of that little space. Tons of man shoots, tons of beans. We had, like salad. All. Summer. Tons of chard. You know, about 20 leeks. Americans don’t even know what a leek is, really. But I had to use mixbook to look up recipes for leeks because I was like, what am I supposed to do with this leek? And then, just like a truly ludicrous amount of courgettes and courgettes when they go well, like those plants are just ridiculous. Like there used to be these cartoons in the paper in the US about how the courgette plants were so overabundant that people would just pile a bunch of courgettes on their neighbor’s front door and ring the bell and run away. That’s like to get rid of the courgettes. So like we had so many courgettes and we’d go through the locks, you know, the canal has the locks and there are these lock keepers who sometimes help you, you know, fill up the chamber, let the chamber down so we’d hand them bags of produce. Sometimes, which hopefully like some people, hand them like a can of Guinness or something, you know, or €5.

Speaker4:
Using the bags of compost that the way you did. Like, that’s just sort of I’m having like a moment now thinking about all the times that I have like emptied bags of compost into other containers to create containers, and you were just like, no, I’ve got everything I need right here.

Speaker3:
Yeah, it’s great because and you cut, you know, you cut holes in the bottom so they can drain. But and if you’re doing something like planting lettuces close together, you cut a square out of the top. But for stuff like the courgettes and the beans, I would just cut a slit in the top and make sure there was enough space for, you know, this, the little sprout to come out. But then most of it’s still covered with plastic, which cuts down hugely on weeds, and it’s a bit of a more of a pain to water it, because you have to make sure the water is like going into the hole and not just on top of the plastic, but then once you water it, the plastic keeps the water in so it doesn’t dry out as fast either.

Speaker4:
And it’s obviously it still drains because it’s still it’s such a nice long, tall bag I would think.

Speaker5:
Yeah.

Speaker3:
Exactly. Yeah. And the only problem with it was that the stuff grew so high, particularly like the beans. And then when the spuds were going was that it was difficult to steer the boat because you’re looking down the length of this boat. And then there are all these really tall plants. So I did spend the summer kind of like perched on the side of the boat, looking around the side of these plants to be able to steer with the tiller. So that was the only. I was a bit happy when they finally harvested all the potatoes, just so I could see to steer the boat again, and our tomatoes also kept. We think we should have like staked them and tied the stakes to the front of the boat because they were really top heavy and they kept falling into the canal. So we’d have to like jump into the canal after them and like, push this like waterlogged jute sack of with like a metre tall tomato plant back onto the boat.

Speaker5:
Oh that’s.

Speaker4:
Perfect. I have this vision, you know, you’re like, drifting downstream. And there’s a crowd, like watching a Gaelic football match and turn around and just see, like these capable hippies, you know, just fishing for tomatoes out of the the old canal.

Speaker3:
Marginally capable, truly capable hippie would have tied their stake to the boat and reinforced it. But I did like people loved the garden on the boat. We just got so many comments about it and everyone took pictures of it. And I mean, that’s one thing I really love about the community of liveaboard house boaters. And there are maybe 400, I guess, around Ireland, maybe probably more now because it’s getting more popular, but they are just really capable. Like they know how to do things and make things. And that’s one thing I really love about gardening is like you, once you start growing your own food, you know, you actually do know the process of how this happens and how this is made. And we live most of our lives not knowing that stuff, like we live in the house that we don’t know how to build. We use plumbing and electricity that we don’t understand. I’m speaking generally here like we don’t understand how to do use a like internet on machines that we don’t understand. And then here’s a thing where you actually do learn to understand, like where this apple comes from and how this happens and be able to make it yourself, then it gives you such insight into how the whole system operates and then all the flaws in the system. You know, like once you start your own garden, like you go to the shop like a stalk of broccoli costs like €15 for any amount of work. It is. I’m like, how did I just buy an avocado $0.49? Like, that’s ridiculous. It should be €25. For this. And so you just appreciate like, hey, how much work goes into it and how much it takes. And then also like how broken a system is it that where things can cost so little, particularly like when there is such a great cost to it, whether it’s labor cost, whether it’s land, water and fertilizer, and then all the like packing and sending it from New Zealand or Chile or wherever these things come from, it just it really gives you insight on how broken things are.

Speaker5:
Yeah.

Speaker4:
And it allows you to start fixing them, you know, even in a, in a really small scale. You know, I think that that satisfaction also speaks to the sense that you’re fixing the problem as well as just enjoying, you know, your tomatoes or your lettuce or whatever. Yeah. Maybe. Finally, could you tell us a little bit about what next? What’s going to happen on the houseboat garden next year? What kind of big plans have you cooked up?

Speaker3:
Well, I’ve always wanted to do this, but I think it would be hopeless. Is like this three. The three sisters. It’s this, like, Native American style of farming where you put in corn, the corn grows afoot. Then you plant beans, the beans grow up the corn, and then you wait a month after that, and then you plant courgettes, and the courgettes grow along the ground and shade the ground and keep the weeds down. And the beans, you know, do nitrogen into the corn, and the corn lifts the beans to the sun and they call it the Three Sisters. And it’s just this perfect synchronicity. And I would love to try doing that, but I don’t know. I mean, if the beans were a problem to see around on the boats, then a stalk of corn would be like ludicrous. I don’t know how well corn really grows in Ireland either. I’d have to check Mick’s.

Speaker4:
Book if you’ve learned how to steer the boat without seeing where you’re going, then you should just, you know, just drape the boat in all kinds of climbing vegetables and figure that you’ll find your way, you know? I mean, it’s only one direction, right? When you’re going, you know, on the inland waterways of Ireland, there’s not too many left turns and stuff. Right. It’s.

Speaker3:
No, that’s true, that’s true. Particularly with the Grand Canal. It’s pretty straight across.

Speaker4:
Nice. That is beautiful, Aaron. That’s that’s a very inspirational note to leave it on a little bit of kind of connecting in with some of that ancient wisdom getting back to your American roots and yeah, continuing that connection back home. So thank you for joining us today. That was a delight. So what do you reckon? Make €15 for broccoli?

Speaker1:
I mean, it’s such a brilliant, brilliant point, isn’t it? Like that our food is too cheap and our veg are too cheap. Like, I kind of struggled with carrots for years. Growing carrots because they’re kind of little, little temperamental, you know, and it’s hard to get the soil right for carrots to be get those perfect carrots like. And I always think when you’re pulling them out of the ground that that kind of moment of peak carrot, you know, where you’ve got this. Like I grew these carrots. And if somebody came up to you and said, like, I’ll give you 49 cent for them, you’d be like, you’d be chasing them down the road. Like you might throw them at them, maybe to injure them, because it’s like.

Speaker5:
These are just like.

Speaker1:
These are just precious, you know? So I think, I think, I think we do need to get back to really respecting food producers and the work they do, because it’s hard, bloody work. Let’s be honest at times, you know. Yeah.

Speaker4:
And it’s a hard one because you want good food to be accessible to everyone, you know. But at the same time, we need to come at it from the perspective of, you know, paying food producers the right price for what they’re providing, for sure. So every week we’re going to finish off with some practical tips. And this week we’re going to go first to our head grower Richard me.

Speaker1:
Yeah. So Richard is like I think the real he’s the real grower here. Like I have to I have to confess, um, he’s got vast experience growing. I don’t know, he’ll tell you. Decades has grown commercially for restaurants, grown vegetables. He’s been a teacher, um, down in Africa and just knows everything about everything when it comes to growing. He’s an amazing, amazing. And when I’d be on the TV show doing my stuff, Richard would be off off camera somewhere, feeding me my lines. You know, he’s like, he’s the real, the real grower buzz around these parts.

Speaker4:
That’s how the sausage is made around here. Cool. Let’s go find Richard in the garden. Right. So, Richard, as you know, I’m a bit of a beginner grower. Um, I’ve got a small backyard that you are, I know. Thank you for your patience. So I’ve got a small back garden at home. I’ve got a few raised beds I’ve got, most of which are now empty. I’ve harvested pretty much everything I can, and I’ve got a little bit of extra space that I’m always thinking. Maybe there’s another patch to be to be made into for next year.

Speaker6:
And what is under that? What’s the ground under at the moment then?

Speaker5:
Grass.

Speaker4:
And, you know, all kinds of deadlines and docks and everything. And I’m always anxious to put some stuff into the soil whenever I can. So have you got some advice for for me. Yeah.

Speaker6:
The first thing with the beds where you’ve been cropping is to ideally have the ground covered with something growing bare soil is bad, it’s unnatural, and the soils are thriving. Ecosystem, the basic food of which is rotting vegetation. So things are growing. They’re growing and rotting in their natural cycle. So to leave soil bare actually leads to it effectively dying to some extent. And the traditional advice of winter digging and autumn digging actually isn’t very good for soil. It’s something that goes back to the old Victorian kitchen gardens, where there was lots of labour. There was lots of horse manure to resurrect the soil, but there’s no need to do it. So in practical terms, what you need to do with your bare areas in your your beds ideally put in a green manure or a crop. Pretty much the only crop you could put in this late on in the year would be garlic. You could just about get away with some broad beans if you moved very quickly. So that’s something growing. So the roots are in the soil keeping it healthy. And or a green manure you can still put in would be cereals of various sorts. So you can buy rice seed or you can buy oats not rolled oats but whole oats. They could go in, but when you put them in, make sure the birds can’t eat them because they’d clear them before you put a bit of net or something over them. And failing that, you can let weeds grow. It seems you know we shouldn’t be doing that. Keep the garden nice and tidy. But weeds don’t do much seeding this time of year, so leave your weeds to grow. And while the soil is still warm, because that’s when the bare soil will lose an awful lot of its nutrients and so on.

Speaker6:
So leave weeds growing or green manure growing into the new year. And then if you want to clear that ground for growing, which I assume is what you want to do, the easiest way is to kill the weeds by depriving them of light or the green manure. So that’s covering them with something. I use silage cover here. You can use cardboard if you pin it down really well. We live in a windy island, so lots of rocks or bits of wood or whatever to hold it down. So cardboard will do the job. Some people use carpets, so a little bit worried about those because they often contain various chemicals that will leach into your soil. So. I wouldn’t personally use them, but old I don’t know anybody has it anymore. Old Lino would do the job if that still exists. So something to deprive the plants of light. The same technique can be used for your grass and weedy area that you want to grow veg in. Cover it over with something that deprives the plants of light. Do that fairly soon after Christmas. You can work off your Christmas pudding and get out and lay something to lay with lots and lots of cover, and say lots of rocks. Wood to keep the wind from blowing it away and leave that for maybe two months. Three months. The grass will then have rotted away underneath. The worms will move it up and down, and then he can come through and dig out the roots of any nasties like scutch grass or docks that are in there, and away you go. But big thing to remember is don’t do traditional autumn winter digging. It’s not good for the soil.

Speaker4:
Okay, so that is smothered, deprived deprive grass from light for a bed next year. Let the weeds grow in the beds that already exist and don’t sow porridge oats into the bed. Yeah. Perfect. Thanks so much for listening. You can get involved and find out more at geidai. And to say thanks, you can also get 20% off anything about our online shop by using the discount code G 20.

Speaker1:
And remember that we are a social enterprise, which means all income that we generate goes back into funding the mission to get the world to grow their own food. And we couldn’t do this podcast without the support of Rethink Ireland and the Community Foundation for Ireland.

Speaker4:
In our next episode, we will be exploring food done right in the community, where we will be looking at an incredible local agriculture project in Holland and meeting another amazing Jagwire here in Ireland.

Speaker1:
If you want food done right, grow it yourself. Until next time, happy growing! Please subscribe to Food Done Right, the food sustainability podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including automatic transcription software, powerful integrations and APIs, upload many different filetypes, world-class support, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.

food-done-right-at-school.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

food-done-right-at-school.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Mick Kelly, and this is food done, right!

Speaker2:
Fundamentally, it’s about starting to work with the teacher, training colleges with the teachers. Ask them how we can support them to do this. I think there’s a huge amount of teachers who know that this needs to be done. They just don’t really know how just yet. And we as food people or people working within food can offer our services to help.

Speaker3:
The name itself grow it yourself. I think there’s a lot in that that got me thinking to say, I think we can grow our food on our own. We don’t really need our donors to come and give us food. We don’t really need these sort of handouts per se.

Speaker1:
Growing food completely changed the course of history. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become entirely removed from where our food comes from. But if we grow food, reconnect, and care about our food, we can change the future’s course.

Speaker4:
Grated carrot vinaigrette, fillets of hake in cream sauce with mushrooms, peas and onions. Point of Brie, diced peaches A typical four course lunch for the students at La Colle Communal de Garcons in Paris, as fastidiously documented by tech blogger Bob Cromwell. His report comes complete with photographic evidence, as weekly school lunch menus are posted on school doors as a requirement of law. The Ministry of National Education also require children to sit at the lunch table for 30 minutes. Fresh fruit for dessert four out of five days per week. No sweetened and flavored milk. No daily menu to be repeated within a month, and ketchup can only be served once per week. A rather striking example of food done right. I’m here, as always, with Mick Kelly, the boss man at G-a-y. Has gone there, Mick.

Speaker1:
It’s gone good, buzz. I have to say I’m very impressed with your friends pronunciation there. I’m very glad I didn’t have to do that intro.

Speaker4:
Thank you very much. I was practising all week.

Speaker1:
So we are sitting in the kitchen today and it’s a very heroic project and it’s very quiet because we’re closed today, thank goodness. We wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves otherwise and we have done. I think it’s kind of an appropriate enough venue for today because we have done deliveries of hot lunches out to schools from here in Grove HQ, which we’ll talk about a little bit later on. But I loved your your description of the way things are done in, in France. And it’s such a like, it’s such a kind of an ideal for us to aspire to, isn’t it? Like it’s just unbelievable the way, the way it’s done. Like the idea of like, I know in, um, Michael Moore featured the whole French school lunch thing in his documentary Where to Invade Next. And like, they’re sitting down having their, you know, the hake with the cream sauce. And then afterwards the cheese course comes out, you know, and it’s just like, so different to the way things are done here. I just think it’s, um, it’s just unbelievable. And I think speaks to like the level of, of kind of cultural awareness of, of food in France that we could, we could sort of sorely do with here.

Speaker4:
So tell us, make what was a typical school lunch like for yourself back in the day?

Speaker1:
You know what? Like I, I kind of when I look back on primary school, I always feel like actually we got really good lunches from my mother, and I always hated it. Like, I just, I just like she used to send in, like, cold burgers from, say, the night before, like stuff actually, that looking back, you think like, fair play to her, you know, and but I just, of course wanted a ham sandwich like all the other kids. Um, and then I went to boarding school for secondary school, and it was like it was a school meal disaster zone, you know, like, really questionable shepherd’s pie where it could, could be kind of dog food underneath the potato. You’re not quite sure. Fish fingers and chips, you know, something else. And chips. It was like a bit of a disaster zone. So I kind of a mixed bag where in hindsight, primary school actually was probably the better of the two, you know. Yeah.

Speaker4:
Interesting. I, I kind of look back on that myself and all I can think about is yeah, white bread, sliced ham, spreadable butter. But also kiwis are a big thing for me. For some reason. I feel like they maybe had a moment there in the 90s. Is it posh because, well, it’s posher.

Speaker1:
Than what I had. Well my lunch.

Speaker4:
Well, I remember biting into a kiwi like it was an apple, which is how I used to eat kiwis and. But then. But I was in a I moved school and I remember biting into this Kiwi and turning around to people next to me and said, was someone eating a kiwi with a spoon, having cut it in half and sort of spooning it out very, very delicately, which apparently is how most people eat kiwis.

Speaker1:
That’s how you’re supposed to do it.

Speaker4:
That’s how you’re supposed to do it. But I must have looked like a savage.

Speaker1:
Absolute savage.

Speaker4:
Yeah, I thought it was normal.

Speaker1:
There was a guy in my in my class in primary school called Kirt Kike, and like, such a great name. Sounds like a villain. Yeah, but he had, like, he’s really cool guy, but he always had Capri Suns and he was. It was just like the most exotic thing because this is in the 70s, like late 70s. And it was like he I just was so jealous. And I used to get milk, like cartons of milk and Marietta biscuits. If I was like, if if mom was feeling really, you know, really generous. I just remember the the jealousy. It’s amazing with with food. It has that power to sort of just just these moments in your childhood around food that you always remember throughout your life, I think.

Speaker4:
Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, we’re going to explore this topic in more detail today and I suppose really focus in on on the problems at a more serious level in, in Irish schools. And our first guest, Michelle Darmody, is a real authority on this topic. Can you tell us a bit about her?

Speaker1:
Yeah, so Michelle is really cool, lady. I’ve known her for probably 5 or 6 years now and. I got to know her through. Actually, she contributed a couple of recipes for her first book, grow, cook, Eat Back back a long Time Back. But Michelle has a really interesting route to being a sort of authority on on food and schools. So she had her own business and like traveled, traveled the world in her 20s and came back and set up a cafe in still in her 20s actually. So really kind of brave move and called K cafe and it was a fantastic success. She was, you know, went from from sort of one of thousands of cafes in Dublin to being quite a well known place quite quickly. And she was a writer, I think she had a column in the Irish Examiner and then sort of set up her her second restaurant called slice, and I guess she was kind of heading in the direction of kind of, you know, restaurant owner at scale, you know, around Dublin. And, and she decided to take what I think is a really interesting step away from that and decided to do a PhD looking into into food and schools in particular.

Speaker1:
And she’d always been sort of she’d had that grounding in her own life, I suppose, of always having really fresh, local, seasonal food served up at the table at home. So she had that in her, in her, in her DNA along the way, did all sorts of really interesting and really cool projects. She had a big campaign around the food in direct provision centres in Ireland, which are, you know, detention centres effectively for people seeking asylum here. And she worked with Ellie Ketchum on a programme called Our Table, which was celebrating food for people in direct provision. And Michelle is on an absolute mission to transform food in schools in Ireland. And I think what really comes across from her is the, you know, the passion to embed the kind of culture we we’ve, we’ve talked about in French schools and into the Irish school system. So let’s jump in and have a listen. We are absolutely delighted to have Michelle Darmody along to the podcast today to talk about all things food and school. Michelle. You’re really welcome. Thanks a million for taking the time.

Speaker2:
Thank you very much.

Speaker1:
Your focus on on in the PhD is around food literacy and the broader issue of food and schools, and I think during lockdown and school closures, again, the kind of our kind of well, the dependency of some people in society on school, school meals was exposed. But I think it also maybe brought a bit of a spotlight again, onto, onto the standards of, of food in schools. But how would you describe in general the problem we have with school meals? I suppose in general, first of all, I think.

Speaker2:
The dots aren’t connected. And so just as a quick overview, the Department of Social Protection from the school meals, the Department of Health would write the school meal plan, you know, healthy eating plans for schools and work with schools as part of education and work on the curriculum Department for agriculture. Run some food tasting workshops like Food dudes or the ones like that. So and the department children advocate for the children within the school. So we’ve got this loads of different departments tapping in. So in a way it becomes nobody’s problem because everyone is involved. And I think that is one of the big issues with school food. So if we do have education in schools and we can talk about that in a few moments, that is absolutely not connected at the moment to what is served on a plate in a school meal or in a bag is more. The way a school meal is served in Ireland is generally in paper bags delivered to the door. So first and foremost, those connections aren’t made and they are made in other countries. There is other places that we can learn from, you know, in France and in Japan and different countries where the school meal and how we educate and how we impart information about food in schools is connected. So I think that is one thing that we need to connect all of those things together. Secondly, in Ireland, we fund school meals, which is, I have to say is lauded. I think it’s really, really admirable that our government wants to fund food for children who may not be able to eat, or for families who may not be able to afford food. So first and foremost, I think it’s I am so proud to be living in a country where we really care about how our our children are fed and that there’s no child. Hopefully by the end of the school day, who’s going to be hungry. So first and foremost, that is a brilliant thing to have. Yeah.

Speaker1:
And the funding for that, in fairness, has grown exponentially over the last few years and has gone into the hot meals as well because it was it was very much kind of, as you say, sandwiches and, and things up to then.

Speaker2:
Yeah. Whereas now it’s, it’s branching out and there’s a bit more money going into it. But in saying that, I think we could do it better. I think we can aim higher. I think we’re a small country. It’s a manageable amount of food and a manageable amount of people every day that we could sit back, we could look at this in a much more holistic way. We could look at in much more nutritional way, much more enjoyable way we could talk to the children. First and foremost, we could talk to the children’s families secondly, and and see what we could how it could be done better. At the moment, I don’t think we’re doing that. It’s very much a top down. There’s a decision being made and it’s not filtering down. The children aren’t necessarily enjoying what they’re being given. And feedback from teachers is there’s a lot of waste, packaging waste and a lot of food waste. And then, you know, there’s loads of different issues. And because of the fact that you can’t spend that money on staff or equipment, it lends itself to pre-packed food. If you are given money as a school and you’re told you’re not allowed to pay for a dinner lady or a dinner man to come in and cook that food for you, and you have to buy pre-packed food. I mean, that’s I don’t understand the logic behind that. And I love to actually find out more about why that stipend is there. And and you can’t buy equipment. So if a school is given money, they have to pay for food from someone else.

Speaker2:
And that by its very nature starts lending itself to this idea of pre-packed food through there has to be transported, has to be preserved, to be transported, and has to be processed in a certain way to be transported. Whereas if we’re cooking from scratch in a school or cooking from scratch in central kitchens for a number of schools, and as they do in a huge amount of other countries. That’s much less processed food. It’s much more food that’s just nearer to nature. It’s food that is more wholesome for the children. It’s food to hopefully be more enjoyable for the children. There’s a huge amount of research being done on food that’s served on a plate, rather than packed about how much children eat and how differently they eat that food. And so I just think there’s a huge amount that can be done to overhaul the system that we have there. And I think that can be done when we all start talking to each other and also support. So if a small business in a local area wants to run and could very well run a really amazing cafe in the school at the moment, that’s not an easy thing to do. Even if they do fund themselves for the staff and fund themselves for the equipment, there’s very little support for them as a small business to go in there, and instead of making barriers and making it difficult, perhaps we could have, you know, some sort of mentoring system, some sort of government support for businesses to go in and do that in their local school.

Speaker1:
Yeah, it’s a brilliant point because actually we, um, we ran a programme with some local schools in Waterford here called Eat Together, which was sort of it wasn’t so much it it was delivery of hot food, but it was focused around social eating. So to, to to get the children to eat together. And you know, instead of it being, you know, a rushed ten minute lunch or whatever, golf and in a sandwich that they were, they were getting the opportunity to eat, eat together, sitting down at a table, you know, talking about food and so on. And, and like, as you say, for for us. And I know the Fumbally tried something similar with the Warren Mount Canteen, like to, to actually get into that system of kind of, you know, school, school lunch procurement is practically impossible because you’re competing with, you know, 2 or 3 very, very large catering companies that that are, you know, centrally producing the food and distributing it out and so on. So I agree with you. And the government in one sense is saying we want to support social enterprises and so on. But but I don’t think the procurement sort of is matching up to that investment in capital equipment for schools, setting up kitchens in schools, on the face of it is a brilliant idea. I completely agree with you, but it’s not a guarantee of quality either, as we know from the hospital food system. So, um, I think that that’s a challenge, but that sort of probably brings us to the next point, which is around education. Um, and, and the kind of joined up thinking, why do you think food is such an afterthought in our education system when it’s, like, so central to all of our lives? Basically, it is the thing that keeps us alive, after all, why? Why is it not embedded in the food system the way it should be?

Speaker2:
Um, I think what you just mentioned there about capital investment is one only one of a number of reasons, but food seems difficult, um, to teachers. You know, you’ve got a very busy school day, and it’s easier to open a book and to teach in that sense than to actually have a kitchen and have children chopping and have food. And and that comes to that. There is a perceived difficulty in that. And schools don’t have the facilities, maybe that that they feel that they need to have for, um, for learning about food. I think that’s one thing. So the the spaces we’ve created to educate children in don’t necessarily have facilities within them. And I think there’s. A very, very full school day. Teachers are exhausted. There’s an awful lot to do in a school day in any school. And so the idea of another thing to come in and another subject to be kind of transported onto them is exhausting for them. I think the food historically hasn’t been within our curriculum either. We just don’t have a massive food culture in Ireland through the legacy of famine, through the legacy of Catholic Church, through the legacy of, you know, poverty and colonial rule. I mean, there’s there’s so many different reasons why food isn’t not central to our culture as it is to France and education.

Speaker2:
My French is very bad. And but you know that they would have in French schools. You know, it comes from a real deep embedded cultural standpoint, as well as from a nutrition and a health and a feeding one’s body standpoint. So in French schools, it’s, you know, the proud French tradition of food is imparted and it’s considered very important by all the teachers, by the government, by the people. So we unfortunately just don’t have that in Ireland. I think we have a really, really interesting food culture that’s growing over the last ten, 15, 20 years. And we have a huge agricultural history that is very, very rich. But unfortunately it’s just not transported into our education system at the moment. And there is a huge review being done on the primary school curriculum right now. Yeah, I think now the door is open. It’s a brilliant time for people working in food to start engaging with Yanka, to start engaging with the Department of Education. I think, like I said, the door is open and we just have to start working with them. Also within that review, if we’re looking at what has happened within the junior cycle and which has been reviewed most recently, it’s also moving away from the set idea of curriculum. It’s moving much more towards learning outcomes. What what you want children to learn on a whole, working much more towards project based work.

Speaker2:
Yeah. So in those senses, we can maybe as a country start looking at food rather than a certain food subject. And that’s just one and only food subject. We can start looking at food in different in cultures, start looking at food histories. We can start looking at food through science. And with the green schools that we’ll talk about in a few moments. We were doing testing of the soil and we were making school gardens out the front. Kids were measuring the soil. They were testing it for moisture, testing it for. These were all science projects effectively, you know, they’re writing, they’re drawing up a little graph and they’re writing the we added mulch into the soil or we added manure into the soil. And then they were testing the pH after another few weeks. So so this is how the health of the soil is crucial to almost all of the food we eat. So this is a food subject, you know. So if we start looking, working with teachers, working with Yanka to see how we can introduce different aspects of food into an already busy day, and I think that’s going to be a quicker and easier in than waiting for to create this one and only food subject. Yeah, and I think.

Speaker1:
That’s been a frustration. Like there’s a lot of a lot of well-meaning, I suppose, kind of activism and agitation around including food as a subject. And I think it fundamentally sort of misses the or misunderstands the way the system works like to, to, to sort of lobby for that. And, and actually, to me, one of the most positive developments like Healthy Ireland have set up a food and schools forum, which is a cross department, sort of like across all the government departments that you mentioned, to look at food from a much more holistic approach. And I think that’s that’s exciting. But but I guess the easy, the easy headline in a way, is food as a subject, whereas the hard yards here are finding ways to weave it into the whole the whole food system effectively in schools, isn’t it?

Speaker2:
It is. And that is one is changing culture and two is working with teachers. You know, sitting myself or yourself or people who work in food are embedded in food. And we all, we all have our reasons why we think food education should be on the on the curriculum or in the school. We need to start looking at how and I think that’s talking to teachers. I think that’s talking to teacher training colleges. It’s talking to the A.s.a. It’s looking at CPD days, curriculum days where teacher teachers go back and do in-service training days. It’s about starting on those on that level, and then maybe looking at how we can change culture and how to can be seen as a pleasurable, enjoying and enjoyment part of the day. That food isn’t seen as a separate lunch break. It’s like when you take your break from education, you quickly shovel the food into you for your quick minute, run out in the yard and you come back in. Yeah, in a perfect world, that would not be the case, that the lunch break would be part of the education. It would be. As I said, there is other countries who have started doing this pedagogical meal or food empathy or there’s different ways you can start.

Speaker2:
Describing that and if anyone is interested, there’s loads of research that I’d be very happy to pass on to people. Yeah. How they’re doing that in other countries. And I think fundamentally it’s about starting to work with the teacher training colleges with the teachers. Ask them how we can support them to do this. I think there’s a huge amount of teachers when you talk to them one on one or you talk to people, even within the colleges who know that this needs to be done or feel very strongly that this needs to be, that there needs to be change. They just don’t really know how just yet. And we as food people or people working within food can offer our services to help, I think, and to support. And the forum, as you said, is a really, really, really welcome and welcome step and hope that that would amount to new ways of looking at education. Presently, education within food education is dietary advice or nutrition advice is how I was classified it rather than food education is looking at the food pyramid is looking at what calories do to your body rather than looking at food as a whole. Yeah.

Speaker1:
And of course, there’s the issue of the environment of food around schools and so on. Like I only dropped this morning, dropped my young lad to school, secondary school. And you see the kids like walking up the road before school like eating bags of chips and stuff like that, like does that to deal with as well. But I think fundamentally there’s the sense of working with existing structures I think is really important too. And not to be sort of naive about about kind of the kind of changes that can happen. I think it needs to be incremental hard work, I guess. And so so on that point, you’ve you’ve been doing a lot of work around the Green Schools program to address some of these challenges. Can you tell us a bit about about that work?

Speaker2:
Yeah, I suppose I wanted, you know, when I started doing a PhD, it wasn’t necessarily for to create a piece of writing that sat on the shelf. I really wanted to do something out in the real world for wanted Better. There’s probably better ways of putting that. But talking to teachers, actually, and chatting to people working in schools, and they all people mentioned the green schools as one of the most long lasting. I suppose organizations that work with worked with schools. They’re 95% of schools all over the country. It’s 20 plus years in existence. And and schools are really proud to get their green flags. You it’s not an easy thing to get. So schools work together to get their flag. And for people who don’t know the green schools, it’s part of eco schools, which is an international sustainability education project. And they are in schools all over the country. And schools work on a theme for two years. And that theme will generally be to will always to do with sustainability. So say the travel team as an example. They will encourage children to start walking to school, maybe doing little walking trains from houses. They’ll encourage scooters and they’ll encourage bike riding. They’ll start looking at how travel affects the environment.

Speaker2:
They’ll start looking at different ways to that. The school as a whole can cut down on their carbon emissions on the way to school. So that’s an example of a travel theme. So the school will work on that for two years. See how they can improve over the two years. This children form a committee. It’s very much child centred. The children form the committee. There’s someone from every single class in the school is on that committee. So it’s a whole school approach. And so these things really attracted me to it. And I approached green schools and was talking to them and was saying, look, there’s there’s no food within the themes, you know, there’s water, there’s marine, you know, there’s recycling and litter and waste. So they were like, yeah, we know there’s no food, but we haven’t kind of broached that subject yet. So I was like, listen, I’m going to start a PhD. I’d love to start working on this with you. So maybe Boylan in Green Schools came and worked with me on it. So the two of us developed a two year theme around food and biodiversity. And we piloted for my PhD. I piloted it in eight schools, had two control schools, but piloted in eight schools around the Greater Dublin area.

Speaker2:
So over that two years we worked very much talking with the children in the schools and talking with the teachers about how it worked. Got loads of different feedback from them and developed this programme. So the first year they start off by creating garden if they don’t already have one, an edible garden within the school. So they map out their school area, look at the biodiversity and what’s already in the ground is already map out where is the best place to have a garden and dig the soil. Look at the pH of the soil and test the water content of the soil and develop a garden. Each class plants they plants a specific plants and they work with that over the year and then they harvest it. Each school is provided with a cooking kit, so within that kit there’s a hot plate, but there’s also like six bowls, six graters, six knives, real knives. The children were very anxious to be given real knives, and we talked with all the teachers and they were all very happy to have real knives in it, which for me it was quite important as well actually. I was really delighted with that outcome. So the children learn rather than given, you know.

Speaker1:
Yeah, like knife. Proper knife skills.

Speaker2:
Proper knife skills. And it’s actually, you know, safer in many ways to learn how to chop properly with a proper implements and something that’s made of plastic. So and they’re paired with a chef and they work and they harvest from the garden, from the garden. And then in the second year, the look at food on a more global scale. So they start looking at the children, deciding what projects they want to work on. But things like air miles, pollination and packaging, they can look at the packaging that’s coming in and out of the school on the food. So it’s very much looking at food in a much broader sense. So that’s over the two years. That’s a very brief overview of it. So within that there was loads of learning for me and I would love. Thought it was. The Department of Education was working with this project. Rather, the green schools and everyone in green schools would say the same themselves, and we can only do so much with in green schools. It’s incremental. So it’s 145 schools this year and then it’ll it’ll grow and move on. But each school will only do it for two years. And they’ll move on to say, travel again or move on to marine life or move on to recycling. So it would be a brilliant to use this as an exemplar and use what we’ve learned within these few years, what we’ve learned, and take this and bring it further into the curriculum and start working with, like we were saying, the teacher training colleges, work with the NCC, work with the Department of Education, and have this embedded in a wider setting or parts of this, you know, there’s there was huge learning in it, and I’d hope that that learning can be shared and yeah.

Speaker1:
And like it’s just again, it just points to the diversity of stakeholders that are in the mix here, which is why this is such a complex issue. Like it’s it’s so there’s so much to it. And you know, all of those different departments need to be involved in what’s happening with food and schools.

Speaker2:
And yeah, and I mean, food is I suppose it can be overwhelming because it’s everything in a way. And because of that, like it’s in our culture, it’s in our bodily health. And, you know, it’s our mental health, it’s our nutrition. It’s, you know, it’s our enjoyment, it’s our comfort. So it’s almost it can be overwhelming of where to start. And I think looking at like choosing those few things, choosing sustainability, choosing enjoyment, choosing hands on participation rather than just, you know, rote advice and can be starting blocks. And I think the cooking kit was was a really good learning curve for green schools, because we did a lot of research on on what to put in that. And also we kind of demystified for a lot of teachers. They were like, oh yeah, actually we can do some of that. We provided recipes and a lot of the recipes are no cook recipes. So, you know, there’s salad. You’re learning to use the peelers and you’re peeling the carrots to make nice slivers, and you’re tossing that with the herbs, making it dressing and doing that. A lot of the children were interested in learning how to make hummus, so we made commerce with a hand blender and we made summer rolls. So you put the rice paper into some warm water, again with the herbs and the lettuce and different things from the garden. They wrap those up and then they make a really nice dip with that. So those recipes that children can make within the school and within the classroom, any access to Harbutt and any access to a cooker.

Speaker2:
And we also provide a hotplate for some of the cooking recipes. And the recipes were very much building blocks. So it’s about teaching how to sort it, you know, waiting for that onion to get translucent, teaching how to season. And these are really, really important things because you want your food to taste good. Yeah. You don’t want to making something. At the end of the day it doesn’t taste great. So, you know, child isn’t necessarily going to want to go back and make it a second time. So teaching these building blocks of how food can be enjoyable and the hands on experience of doing those things, I think resonates hugely with children. And then it can be fed back into the home or it can be it can be built on with a local chef, it can be built on with the Green school staff member coming in and doing a workshop again and reiterating again what was done in the classroom. So I think that kind of continuous education over the two years. So it’s not just a one off, you know, we go in and we disappear again. Yeah. They’re constantly the children are working on the project, but it’s constantly reinforced by green school is constantly reinforced by the teacher, by the local chef. And, you know, schools are encouraged to make connections with local food producers, with local farmers. And they really very much enjoy that. And Covid has thrown quite a few spanners and quite a few different aspects, but we’ve worked really well considering the, the, the spanners that are in the works.

Speaker1:
There’s so much to that. I mean, we could we could absolutely talk, talk all day about this, Michel. But maybe to finish up with like when, when your PhD is finished, if you’ve any have you any exciting projects knowing you you’ve like about ten I’m sure.

Speaker2:
But industry working eat the Streets was a great project last year and we’re hoping to look to the future for that as well. Again, working with food and sustainability, which has always been a passion of mine and Eat the Streets, was a Dublin City Council approached me to help them work on a project around food and sustainability within Dublin city, and Eat the Streets came out of that and it’s been a fascinating journey working again with schools, actually reopening more schools into it and working. It’s very much an educational food festival, working with children and working with and the structures in Dublin city, which has been fascinating, the working in Dublin foodways. And so we’re hoping that that will grow.

Speaker1:
Absolutely. That sounds absolutely amazing. And listen, we’ve run out of time. There is there’s absolutely so much more we could talk about. But thanks, Emily and Michelle for taking us through all that. It will be fascinating to watch what you do next. If you’re a career so far, is anything to go by. So. Thanks a million for joining us. You very.

Speaker2:
Much. Thanks a million.

Speaker1:
You know, there’s so much to take out of that conversation. I think one of the things that jumps out to me is that, like schools are kind of a microcosm for for society, almost. And so I think you’re confronted there by how much school can kind of reinforce the, the distance between food and, and, and the people that eat it. And, and she mentioned a couple of really good examples of countries where, where they do it differently and. Right. I think um, but the French example, I think going back to that is like it just it just feels so, so sort of natural and so embedded, um, that the culture they have around food is just writ large in the school setting. Whereas even though we’re doing, I think a lot right in Ireland and starting to do a lot right, and particularly, you know, bringing hot lunches into children who need it. Let’s be honest. Like that’s, that’s a really welcome development. And the Food and Schools forum, and as a sort of whole of government approach is great, but I think we’re still schools. Food and school feels really disconnected, still and really fragmented and really kind of transactional. Um, whereas I think the core challenge for, for us always is to get people feeling really, really connected to food. And of course, food growing, we would say is is the best way to do that, to reconnect with your food and can be done in schools in a way that that really helps children to connect with food in a really meaningful way.

Speaker4:
Absolutely. And I think from all of the other schools that that we’ve been lucky enough to work with over, you know, numbers of years, we can see that happening at a, at a micro scale. Some incredible examples of teachers and principals and whole school populations really getting behind food growing and seeing how that that changes the way that the whole school body thinks about food. And so there are lots of amazing schools in the joy network, as you know. Mc but there’s one in particular that we’re going to get a bit more familiar with now. So about over a year ago, you yourself actually, I think, received an email from a gentleman called Charles Banda in Zambia, and Charles got in touch to let us know that he’d come across at the TV show at home in Zambia, and it inspired him to set up a school garden of his own. So as well as getting the the prize for the most far away jaw wire, he also had the the ambiguous honor of of joining us on the podcast. So I got in touch with Charles to hear more about his story. First of all, Charles, can you tell us how you came across grow, cook, eat and what it got you thinking about?

Speaker3:
Yeah. So I came across your program on satellite TV network, which we have here in Zambia. It’s called DStv. And they have they sort of buy shows from other channels. So they have your show that is running on a channel known as the Home Channel. That’s why your show is showing. So so I came across uh, uh, the grow it yourself. Uh, and that’s how I got interested. It got me thinking to say, I think this can also help us with the challenge that we are facing at our school. Yeah. I think for me, it was all about the name itself. Grow it yourself. I think there’s a lot in that that got me thinking to say, I think we can grow our food on our own. We don’t really need our donors to come and give us food. We don’t really need these sort of handouts per se.

Speaker4:
That’s really interesting. And yeah, not not something that I think we’ve we’ve thought about before and certainly, you know, we’re we had no idea that that people in Zambia were even able to access the show. So it’s incredible to to think that, you know, it was able to reach you there and, and have that kind of effect. Can you tell us a little bit more about your school and the problem that you face when it comes to food at the school?

Speaker3:
Our school is located in Shinga Province of Zambia and it’s a new province. It was just created just recently. So the problem that we’ve been facing of late have noticed we have these children that come from the outskirts, and mostly these children who come to class, and their attention is not that much. As we teach. They don’t really pay attention to our our lessons. We started even having cases where the children would maybe collapse every now and then. We’ll get those cases where children collapse and, and whatnot. We’d rush them to the hospital and then we’ll be told, no, I think this is not really a complicated issue. This this child has just not eaten. So it was a very big challenge for us because our core business is simply to teach the children. We don’t really have the capacity to feed them. So it was really a challenge on our end. Uh, that’s where maybe we started thinking of how best we can help these children, because at the end of the day, if we teach and they are not able to get what we are teaching, then we are doing nothing as teachers as well. So it was it came to a point where we really needed that help to say, how do we help these children to eat first before they come to to class? Yeah.

Speaker4:
So so you decided to to take the matter into your own hands, which is an incredible thing to do. And just before describing the school garden project itself, can you tell us a little bit more about life for your students? You know, I know there are about 15 to 18 years old. So at that age, you know, they must be thinking about things other than growing their own food.

Speaker3:
The biggest issue that we have there as well is they don’t really have people they can look up to to say, who are established to say, when I grow up, I want to be like, uh, like that person. And this person. I think most of them are just growing up freely. To say wherever life would take them is where they will be. So we don’t really have children who have role models looking up to to people to say, if when I grow up, I want to be like this person.

Speaker4:
And when they’re looking around at the role models that are around, you know, what kind of activities or what kind of businesses, you know, are young people getting into.

Speaker3:
So right now we have parents who are into poaching. We are our school is actually situated in between two national parks. We have the Swazi National Park, and we also have, uh, the South Luangwa National Park. So our school is just somewhere there in the center. So mostly what we have are parents who are indicating they would go into these reserves and then poach animals, come back and sell them. There are these caterpillars that are, uh, drop around this time of the year and they fetch quite a lot on the market in the capital city, which is Lusaka. So we have children who leave school to go and collect them, dry them, and then take them to the capital city for for sale. It’s quite a big market around this time of the year. So that has really confused our pupils to they look at it as a very productive business venture, forgetting about all the school stuff. So they leave for maybe a month or so. They. Will disappear, and then they’ll go and collect them, process them and sell them. And we also have parents who actually encourage the children to go and collect those. So they’ll come and then just collect the the pupils from school and then leave with them for adding added manpower, they say.

Speaker4:
Okay. Yeah. Mean people must be under a lot of pressure if they’re. If they, you know, if they’re thinking about leaving school for a month to, to sell caterpillars or if they’re forced into poaching at the national park, you know, there’s obviously a lot of pressure on on people at home that that would force them to do those things.

Speaker3:
Yeah, that is the case, actually. That is the case here. We also have parents that are in the business of selling clothes and also petroleums. So we have children that look up to such things as being the main cream of life. So yeah, that’s where we are right now. Mhm.

Speaker4:
So so do you, do you think that your role is to, to try to steer, steer your students into, into a direction where the work that they will ultimately do will be of more direct benefit for, for the local area.

Speaker3:
We that’s one thing which we are trying to to do, to maybe try to focus their attention on other things that would be on of benefit to the area as well, other than to to themselves and their families. So we we try to look for role models that can focus on to say, this is actually better than what you’ve been looking at. So yeah, we we’ve been trying to to really steer them into that direction to say you can also look at this as being of benefit to to the community that you are in and yourself as well.

Speaker4:
Yeah. And when, when you’re trying to, to motivate students and get them thinking about growing their own food, you know, I presume at that age, they’re also they’re very interested in just their, you know, their regular social life. There are so many different, different things that that, you know, you’re interested in at that age. Are there are there other activities that that that students are spending their time on, that you try to encourage them to to sort of think differently about the.

Speaker3:
Activities that they are mostly spending their time on is music. There is this wave of music that just come in. It’s called the cappella music. It’s a music from the Copperbelt of Zambia. Just really, I’d say it’s quite a disturbance per se. It’s um, it’s promoting certain activities in these young children and they have really been steered towards that. Most of them have have gotten that aspiration to try and be musicians and jump onto that, that wave that is currently there. So we have three quarters of our students who are really, really interested into music right now and trying to turn them to say they can maybe look at food production as well. It’s a it’s a it’s a very big challenge for us.

Speaker4:
Yeah, I can imagine. Although hopefully it’s possible to integrate the two that, you know, music and dance can, can can happen in the garden as well as as well as everywhere else. So can can you tell us a bit about the school garden project that you’ve you’ve been working on? I know it’s been interrupted with Covid, but I know you’re persevering. Um, how has it gone for you so far?

Speaker3:
After looking at a few things in terms of the same issue of children coming to school hungry, we thought of coming up with a garden which can maybe try to sustain us in that area just as far as we can go. The school has a lot of land which we can use for gardening, and we thought maybe if we can maybe interest these children to to start up a garden, maybe each just get a portion and grow their own food, it can be of benefit to them. So apart from the garden, we also went as far as digging a fish pond which is a 25 by 15m. So we are stuck on a few things, but we are getting there bit by bit. But the whole project is all about trying to grow food for these children to eat. So the the challenge that we have surrounding that is that we cannot force the children to go in and and grow this food, because there are measures which the Ministry of Education has put in. We can’t really get into maybe getting these kids to maybe do these, this kind of work by force. So what we are trying to do is maybe interest them, get a few that are interested, maybe in the in the long, long run will get everyone on board, will get to interest everyone to say they can get a portion from our garden and grow their own food.

Speaker4:
Yeah, and it must be difficult, especially if the first job is to dig a fish pond. That sounds like a lot of hard work. It must be difficult to inspire students to to take on a project like that.

Speaker3:
Yeah. So for for the fish pond, we are quite lucky. Yeah, we started with a few pupils, but we also got the prisoners to, to, to to help us during the we had a Covid break where the government just told us to say we need to close all schools to see first how the numbers will be. We got lucky, we managed to transfer a number of prisoners that came to help us dig the the fish pond. The only thing that is remaining right now for the fish pond is to line it. There’s a liner that is supposed to be put there, and also put water and just get the rings and and put them in there.

Speaker4:
The hard bit is done and now it’s just about the next stage. That’s brilliant. And so can you tell us a bit about how you’ve managed to keep the project going? I know that the school has had lots of closures, you know, due to Covid outbreaks. How have you managed to to keep everything moving in spite of that?

Speaker3:
So yeah, just after we started, we had to close. Then we had these pupils that really didn’t have anywhere to go. We had four pupils that remained in school. We have a house that at the garden. So we thought maybe because they don’t really have anywhere to go, we can maybe keep them in school so that they can continue looking at looking after the garden, as well as get the chance to to study within school. We we had people that were still looking after the garden even after we closed. And that’s how we managed to to keep it sustainable after this.

Speaker4:
And what kind of impact do you think the project has had on them? Have they been inspired to to take it on and and lead the way?

Speaker3:
Yeah. So what I’ve seen in these boys is that there’s a sense of responsibility that has come, come upon them. They are able to plan their time properly. There is also this sense of having that sense of ownership. To say this project is ours is also something that I’ve seen in them. They are quite organised in a sense that they can time themselves very well. They will wake up early, take care of the garden, prepare for, for, for class and then get to class. They also have a time where they can actually go out and and enjoy themselves, have fun, maybe somewhere and then come back, come back to school, study and then sleep and then like that they are well organised. Other than these other pupils that I’ve seen that simply come to class and then they’ll leave whatever time they want and then come back whatever time they want. So with those boys, I think in a sense of being organised.

Speaker4:
And do you think it’s getting them to think about about food production, about agriculture as a, as a career.

Speaker3:
That, that I’m sure will eventually manifest in them? I’m sure they, they are looking at that as something they would want to do. And if, if maybe we can give them more guidance, more guidance to say this is supposed to be done this way and you can get this out of what you are doing right now. I’m sure they will look at food production as something they would really want to do in future.

Speaker4:
It just it just sort of struck me there as well that all of the, the work that goes into picking caterpillars to, to sell them as food, you know, they’re in some ways there are lots of people involved in, in food itself and, and in that trade. Do you think that that maybe that that piece of work has a role as well in, in inspiring people to be involved in food production, to, to find role models in that kind of industry?

Speaker3:
I think what is lacking there is really guidance if we can maybe nurture that part of them and then maybe guide them into a sense where they’ll they’ll get into maybe value addition into those caterpillars, maybe it might be beneficial for them because the case, as it is right now, is they go out and pick these caterpillars, dry them and then sell them. And once they are sold, they don’t really get to the point where they buy food for, for, for their households and whatnot. They would rather spend it on clothes or these fancy, fancy things at the end of the day, they still come back hungry and there was a potential for them to get food. So it’s all about guiding them to say what really needs to be done. Maybe is this after you sell, you can use a portion to get your own food. Maybe that way it can be beneficial for them. Otherwise, as it stands, I don’t really see the benefit as it is.

Speaker4:
If somebody is listening to this who’s thinking about a school garden project here in Ireland or somewhere else in the world, would you have one piece of advice for them?

Speaker3:
I think it’s a it’s a it’s a great thing to, to start for, for, for, for children. I think the whole part is getting them to look at it as something of benefit, not as a punishment for them. They shouldn’t look at it as more work, but look at the bigger picture, what comes out of it. I think that is the the approach we should all take. They should not really see it as a lot of work, but. Get them to see the the bigger picture where they are going to benefit. I think that can really help. If we get that approach.

Speaker4:
That is perfect, Charles. We’ll have to leave it there. But thank you so much for joining us and we’ll hopefully talk to you soon. Best of luck with the project.

Speaker3:
Thank you very much.

Speaker4:
So, Mick, when you had your first group meeting at the library in Waterford, did you ever think that one day you might be connecting with people from Zambia and maybe who knows where else other jars might be?

Speaker1:
I’m just like, I’m I’m just baffled and blown away by the idea that anybody is watching grow cookie. Never mind. Never mind Charles down in Zambia. Like it’s just just the mind. The mind mind boggles. It’s just amazing. And we get we do get like, I’m not going to say like our mailbox is full of emails from all over the world on it or anything like that, but because it’s, it’s it’s out there on Amazon Prime, I suppose we do get, you know, connections like that from, from the US and from different parts of Africa. And it’s always incredibly exciting. And the thing, the thing that always strikes me is that food growing is such a kind of a universal language. You know, it’s a brilliant it’s a brilliant icebreaker. Like anytime I’m ever at an event and you say to somebody like, you know, if they ask you what you do and you tell them, it’s like straight away you can have a chat about, you know, oh, yeah, my granddad used to grow his own food or my dad grows his own food, or I grow my own food. So it’s such a it’s such a leveller, I think and I think, I think that’s, um, you know, the basics of it work anywhere in the world. I think that’s that’s the thing, you know? Um, so again, I guess the thing listening to Charles, um, you know, I think reminds me that we should be growing food in every school.

Speaker1:
I think it’s like a it should be a sort of a basic skill that that children learn and to to grow and to cook their own food. And, and so, you know, I think I think it’s a good time to introduce Richard back into, into our discussions today because not only does he grow all our own veg here and grow HQ and keep this kitchen very, you know, very happy in terms of lots of lovely veg and fruit and, and so on. And he’s also a very experienced teacher of teachers because he’s been in various different roles over the years. He’s been teaching teachers how to introduce school gardens into their schools. And we do a teacher training course here in the summer that’s always oversubscribed. It’s like the first week after the schools break up for the summer, and the place is awash with teachers here, like walking around, following Richard behind, you know, with their lattes and looking very pleased with themselves to be out of the classroom. And he’s also designed a growing plan for our school garden program, grow at school. So no better man to talk to us about getting a school garden established.

Speaker4:
Richard, thanks again for joining us. Can you tell us your top tips for setting up a school garden?

Speaker5:
I can, I would go first of all with the site. You’re not going to have much luck with a school garden if you put it in a shady, out of the way spot to a windy spot. So it’s the two ways is really sunlight and shelter and very good time of year to go and check how much sun your garden gets, because you want it to get sun throughout the year. If it’s in shade now, then clearly you’re not going be able to grow through things through the winter. So you want to make sure that the sun is reaching it all the way through the year. So go and check it out. And vegetables don’t grow in the shade. So essentially it has to be a nice sunny spot and shelter. We live in a windy island and very important that we get some shelter from wind. So ideally it’s a spot that has a hedge somewhere on the south west side where most of our or buildings or fence or something, and most of our wind comes from the southwest. So we would want some sort of shelter belt there, but not to the extent that it’s shading the garden. Okay, so sun and shelter, when you’re choosing your spot, choose your spot carefully. Otherwise you’re not going to get very far. And the third ask really is a soil that you need to have some soil to grow your crops in. There’s a general belief that you have to spend a lot of money, make a raised bed and bring soil in, but actually you can use any any soil you have on site really and improve it.

Speaker5:
And so yes, if it’s an urban school and the only area you have is a concreted area, obviously you have to make a raised bed and and put some bought in soil in it, but any rural school will tend to have an area of soil somewhere, often in grass. So if you’re setting up a school garden, look for a nice bit of soil. And first thing is it probably be under grass. Now schools have a lot of grass usually, and you can cover it with something like silage cover or old floor covering. Or if you use an awful lot of rocks or planks to hold it down, you can use cardboard. Cover it over now and then in the spring, most of the grass, the grass should have been killed off, and you can break the seal up and improve it by adding some compost or some manure or some potting material, and you’ll be able to grow veg in it straight away when you break it up. So find a good site and ideally use the soil on site. If you have soil and if you don’t then you’ll have to bring it in. Final thing is use our calendar that we have available for schools to use because again, obviously you don’t want to be coming in July August. So if you follow a calendar and carefully plan that all the work is done when you’re in school and all the harvesting is done when you’re in school, so that will make the whole thing worthwhile for you.

Speaker4:
So obviously there’s loads of things you can do at this time of year. You don’t need to wait for spring to start sewing things you can really benefit from, from doing some work now over winter.

Speaker5:
Yes. You don’t. Our timetable includes some autumn planter things which, unless you’ve got ready dug soil, leave for this year and, you know, get everything ready for starting for outdoor sowings next March. So if you’ve got grass, you can kill it off. Like I explained, if you’ve got a nice bit of clear soil, then make sure it’s nice and clear and maybe you get find something like compost or whatever to put into it. And you can certainly set up a composting unit so you have something nice for next year to mix in with it. So yeah, a bit of preparation now will pay dividends in the spring.

Speaker4:
And it sounds like everything you’ve just said would apply to any garden at home, a community garden as well.

Speaker6:
Absolutely. Yeah. But you.

Speaker4:
Know, at school there’s there’s probably more people around to help make make life.

Speaker6:
Work. Absolutely.

Speaker5:
Well, hopefully lots of willing hands. But obviously you don’t have the calendar constraints for your own community garden or back garden schools have there. The teachers get their well-earned two months in, and I’m sure they don’t want to be coming in to do watering and weeding in that period.

Speaker4:
Beautiful, Richard. Thanks a million.

Okay. All right. No problem.

Speaker4:
Thanks so much for listening. You can get involved and find out more at. And to say thanks, you can also get 20% off anything at our online shop by using the discount code GI 20.

Speaker1:
And remember that we are a social enterprise, which means all income that we generate goes back into funding the mission to get the world to grow their own food. And we couldn’t do this podcast without the support of Rethink Ireland and the Community Foundation for Ireland.

Speaker4:
In our next episode, we will be exploring food done right in the community, where we will be looking at an incredible local agriculture project in Holland and meeting another amazing Jagwire here in Ireland.

Speaker1:
If you want food done right, grow it yourself. Until next time, happy growing! Please subscribe to Food Done Right, the food sustainability podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including secure transcription and file storage, automatic transcription software, world-class support, upload many different filetypes, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.

food-done-right-in-the-community.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

food-done-right-in-the-community.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Mick Kelly, and this is food done, right!

Speaker2:
What we call it is nature driven farming. A plant in nature does never stand alone. There is never black soil around the plant. There is also herbs and another thing growing. So why are we producing in black soil? Why are we constantly fighting the things nature wants to do?

Speaker3:
Get out there, look for waste ground and start growing. It’s not complicated. It’s not rocket science. It’s very simple and very basic. Have a go.

Speaker1:
Growing food completely changed the course of history. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become entirely removed from where our food comes from. But if we grow food, reconnect, and care about our food, we can change the future’s course.

Speaker4:
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, communist Cuba lost its only major trade partner. Agrochemicals and fertilizers disappeared almost overnight, throwing the country into a local organic urban farming experiment. The last 30 years have not been agricultural utopia, but with 50% of the island’s fresh food produced in urban and peri urban areas, guided by the principles of agroecology, local production and affordable access, the future in Cuba continues to point towards food done right. How’s it going there, Mick?

Speaker1:
It’s going good, buzz. Nice to be sitting here, I suppose. Looking out on our own urban farming experiment here in grow HQ. And I always think, like, the Cuba thing is fascinating, right? I suspect it’s not as perfect as it kind of can be, sort of framed as sometimes, but it does kind of, I think, point to the fact that sometimes out of crisis, the necessity, you get these huge breakthroughs and huge system changes and, you know, they’re in their case, it was obviously they couldn’t get fertilizers or agrochemicals anymore. We’ve seen it when we talk to to Roger about the World War II, like, you know, introducing people to food growing and that crisis, I suppose, bringing about this huge explosion, the number of people growing their own food. And we’ve even seen it with Covid, I suppose more, more recently with the pandemic, where, you know, the sort of unthinkable things like a whole nation working from home suddenly happened overnight and that maybe, unfortunately, it may take that sort of a crisis in our food system to bring about the kind of change that’s really, really needed.

Speaker4:
If I’m not mistaken, it was a bit of a crisis point that led to the beginning of G as well. It was 0708. It was the financial crisis around that time, possibly a little early midlife crisis for yourself, you know, really getting riled up by that garlic in the supermarket. And, you know, it began your journey of kind of striving for self sufficiency. So I know you’re doing pretty well on that on that count, Mike, but how much of the rest of your food are you able to source locally?

Speaker1:
And I guess we’re like, we’re really lucky here. Actually, Waterford is has a fantastic sort of landscape for food production, I guess, like lots of farming. We’ve got the mountains, the Comber Mountains. Like you can get lovely mountain lamb from up there. We’ve got the coast obviously, right right beside us. And actually my cousin Tony sounds like a like like an Italian mobster. And I get my fish direct from him. He has a fishmongers in Dunmore East and, and I’ve learned so much from him about, you know, what seasonal fish like, which is not something I think about seasonality of vegetables all the time, but never really about the seasonality of of fish. And I with meat, I’ve tried to sort of cut out beef altogether on kind of, you know, planetary health sort of basis, but still love chicken. I buy chickens from Rings Farm, which is an organic farm as well, local enough to hear. So I think we’re really lucky to have that. And I think that’s that’s the key to it, isn’t it? Like to if whatever you can’t grow yourself and that you at least get in a, in a small and short a supply chain as possible.

Speaker4:
Yeah. And I’m in a similar situation to yourself, you know, cutting out a lot of meat and and also very lucky to have a local chicken supplier and someone who I can buy chicken bones off of and just go and buy a bag of frozen bones and make broth. And it’s the kind of thing that you could never get that in a supermarket. You kind of need those, those sort of more local connections to be able to do that. So our first guest here at Vandervere is kind of taking all of this to a whole new level, really trying to connect people with with local food. Can you tell us a bit about him?

Speaker1:
Yeah, I’ve, I’ve had nightmares about pronouncing his name and the name of his organization. So hurt, as you said in your in your intro is exactly right. Um, and the organization is called Huron Born, which, which I think is Dutch for gentleman farmer. And so it’s a brilliant name, but I got got to know him through a European project we’re involved with called weaving for a Thriving Planet, and which is run by Ashoka around Europe. And it’s basically trying to pull together projects which are have a focus around biodiversity and, and got to know him through that. And really his organization is like the way the way I’d summarize it, it’s like community supported agriculture on steroids. And so I think a lot of people will be familiar with the idea of community supported agriculture, where it’s like people coming together and paying a certain price every year, and to a farmer and, and, and getting delicious food out of that so brilliant sort of way to really connect with your food in a meaningful way usually has an element of volunteering in it and so on. But I think, I think what herringbone has done is take that to the next level, where they’re actually going out and buying farms and using the investment from the community to do that and effectively. And I think what, what just I love about it is the ambition in it, like it’s got it’s got this real underlying objective to be an alternative food system. And and I think that that’s pretty astonishing. So, um, let’s jump in and have a listen to hurt and he’ll tell us all about it. So I’m absolutely honored and delighted to welcome to the podcast, a guy that I’ve known for. Ah, about a year now, I guess. And from the very beginning I’ve just been fascinated by his project and his organization, and I’m apologizing in advance for getting his name, hopefully somewhat right. But here, van der veer, you’re very welcome to our podcast.

Speaker2:
Oh, thank you very much and well done. I think you’re very close to what it should be when you were here in the Netherlands. Yeah. Thank you.

Speaker1:
That’s that’s pretty, pretty good then listen, take take us back maybe to how it all began, because I, I understand that, um, the journey can be traced back to hamsters of all things. Is that is that true, or is that urban myth?

Speaker2:
No, it’s. In a way it’s true. I’ve been working with the farmers Association here in the Netherlands. Um, as a farmer, I’ve always, as I’ve been in all my life. But I was working with the association, and there was something in the southern part of our country, in the province of Limburg, where the soil quality is okay for. For the common hamster, you know, to to live there. And it was about to how do you call it extinct? The extinction like it was. And there was a program set up by the Dutch government to save this, this species. So it was in our country. And then I was involved with a research project. We went to farmers and make agreements on the protection on the common hamster. And I thought, okay, what’s happening here? You know, are we this animal only has an existence when farmers are there. So it’s directly a yeah, a result of the way we are farming and the way we are using the land and the soil, etcetera. So yes, that was one of the moments my thoughts start running up. And what can we do differently. Yeah.

Speaker1:
But when you, when you say were you, were you a farmer yourself or were you working with, with farmers or what was your day job back then?

Speaker2:
My in my youth I’ve been a tree nurser. So I think that’s that’s the way I got really involved with the agricultural sector or the, the rural activities, so to speak. Yeah.

Speaker5:
Okay.

Speaker1:
And how many years ago are we talking about your your hamster epiphany? When, when how long ago was that?

Speaker2:
I think it was the late 90s. So okay, maybe early 20s, but I think the late 90s.

Speaker5:
Yeah.

Speaker1:
Okay. And so like when, when Irish people and I think probably most of the world when they think about Holland, we think about it as an agricultural powerhouse. I mean, it’s got I think it’s the world’s number two food exporter, just behind the, the United States, even though the land mass is about half the size of Ireland. And like it’s one of the world’s leading producers of fruit and vegetables, if not the leading producer and all of the like, you know, flowers and forestry and so on. So it’s like it’s considered to be one of the world’s biggest food producers. Right. So how how is it though, to be to be living there in terms of the food environment? Is it sort of self-sufficient or is it sort of similar to everywhere else, importing a lot of food still and very business focused? Or how is it?

Speaker2:
Yeah, I think first of all, I think we in the period after World War two, I think we built a great system. And the perfection of that moment and the what we thought of that at that moment, because there was a slogan here in the Netherlands and it said never hunger again. You know, that was what we have to establish, had to establish at that moment. And I think looking backwards now, what about it 60 years ago or something? I think that that we overrun ourselves, you know, we we went too far in, in, in, in being more efficient and taking more out of the soil, taking more out of animals. So at this moment, we’re in this really it’s it’s it’s the we’re going we’re going to flip the coin. You know, the the one side of the coin is, of course, we are what you said, one of the biggest exporters of food, not necessarily agricultural food of our our own agricultural production. And we have a big harbor, you know, Rotterdam, Rotterdam is also encountered in that kind of. Facts and figures. But okay, we are very efficient in producing food. And right now we see what, what what what we are, what the spin off is. You know, we have a soil quality which is very degrading at this moment. We have a decrease of biodiversity, we have environmental problems. We have a very big social distance between the farmer and the consumer. And yes, what you said is also correct. We are importing a lot of food. The stupid thing is we are exporting our products and we are importing Italy, Italian or whatever, broccoli back into our country. So that’s the way our system had been growing and had developed in the last decade. So when you look at it right now, this sounds really stupid to exchange these word, isn’t it? Like like producing enough but exporting it and importing the same project product at the same time. So it’s I think it’s very illustrative for what we are, we’re getting into.

Speaker1:
Yeah, yeah. And we have the same problem here in Ireland where it’s, you often hear our, our, our government talk about how we’re producing enough food on the island of Ireland to feed, you know, to feed our own population five times over or something. I can’t remember the actual statistics, but when you look at it, actually what we’re doing is exporting a lot of beef and dairy, and then we have to import pretty much everything else, um, including 90% of our of our vegetables and so on. So it sounds like it’s a similar what what else other than the, the sort of dead soil and, um, you know, the sort of environmental impacts and biodiversity impacts, like what what other problems does the food system in, in the Netherlands have?

Speaker2:
Well, for me, I already referred a little bit to it, but I think it’s a social problem. You know, like we think that it’s normal that our supermarkets are fully stocked with food. And to me, when you are into this system, it’s not so sure and guaranteed it’s not normal for me, you know, you know, because we know the system behind it. So I think it’s also a social thing. Like are we connected enough to our food, the food we eat, the food we buy? Do we know how our food grows? Growth is and how how it’s been produced and how it’s been harvested. And do I know how to prepare it? You know, a lot of people in the cities, they have no kitchen anymore. They they have they bring the food in every day by a restaurant or a catering or whatever. And what you also see is that preparing food for a lot of people is nothing. Nothing more than 1000. What. And being six minutes and the microwave does it you know. So I think that’s I think that’s a real big problem because I think when we are more connected to our food and our food production, I think we are more aware of a lot of other things we encounter in the food system. And then you’re getting back like, like you said, like environmental problems, biodiversity problems, soil, soil degrees, etcetera. Um, so because there is this big distance, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding, you know, and a lot of discussion on what is good and what is not good. What should we do, what’s not to do, what’s to be done. That also leads to a polarization in society at this moment. You know, we have the professional food producers, the farmers, and we have also people who wants to change and want to be more progressive in the way we, we, we design our food system. Um, so that’s that’s yeah, I think that’s the main issue.

Speaker1:
So, I mean, you were looking around you at a system, I suppose, where regulators and producers and consumers weren’t sort of aren’t collaborating for, you know, for an outcome that’s good for for the planet and good for people, everyone acting from their own self-interest. And out of that here, Byrne was born. But like, what was the what was the like? How did it start, I guess, and what was the like? I know you had that insight around the system was broken, but how did you decide to want to get in and try and fix this?

Speaker2:
Exactly. Well, there were a few things happening and it goes back to 2012. Um, and after I just told you that I was occupied working with the Farmers Association, and after 2003, 2004, I think I started my own business as an entrepreneur, and I was aiming for a short chain projects like the shortest way from from producer to consumer, and I’ve been doing that for ten years. Um, so until 2012 and I was looking back at ten years working on short chain projects, and I, I had to reckon that, um, there was a little change, but it was not changing the system. I was with the farmers working with me. We were producing like gifts instead of different system and and different opportunities for them as a business. So just a few strawberries go into the jelly. But there is no there is a lot more produced on that same farm. And what you do with that. So I didn’t come get get far enough to be honest. And then I start analyzing everything I knew at that moment, like we were already talking about the planet aspects like soil, etcetera, etcetera, but and the social aspects and uh, I also the reason, the reason I started my own business in short chain project was because I learned at the Farmers Association that we are having a very bad return on investment because soil is so expensive here in the Netherlands that the return on investment is about one half to 1% on the investment you have to do of 3 million at least. So I.

Speaker5:
Thought so.

Speaker1:
The farmers weren’t happy either?

Speaker5:
No.

Speaker2:
So there was no income and there was. As a farmer, you die rich. That’s what we always say here in the Netherlands, you die rich, but you live poor. So I had planet issues, a people issues and profit issues. And I thought after ten years of working, I thought, I have to do something. I have to lay back now and, and get rid of everything I build up. I did already, I did also sold my, my business at that moment, like in a management buyout with all the people working at that moment in the business. And then I thought, okay, I have to lay back. I really have to reconsider what I, what what am I doing? Why am I doing what I’m doing and what is really need to be done? And then, um, and then, yeah, I gave myself one year and I started to make a list of all the challenges I’ve seen, like, we should improve this or make sure we are not depending on that or whatever. It was a list, I think of 46 issues. You could call them challenges for the sector. And I gave myself the assignment. Like, is it possible to design a concept, not the. The concept that a concept that could answer and could conquer all these challenges.

Speaker2:
And, well, I start writing and thinking and and have discussions with people and then, yeah, you know, there is I think you can recognize that sometimes when you are really relaxed and you step out, you step away under the shower and then there it is. And that’s that’s how it went. You know, I’ve had been thinking a lot. And then at that moment I thought, okay, we should do it like that. And that’s, that’s what, what really happened. So actually in 2012, I looked back at all my experience in the agricultural sector, and I brought it all together in one concept. And I didn’t want to start this concept without knowing what the prospective for our, our country was. So am I one little nice concept. Like there are more, which I’m not judging because I think it’s okay, but I want to have the story behind it of when we do it more, then we can reach for all the benefits we wanted to wanted to reach. So I always had a bigger story behind the first farm. We started it in the Netherlands, so in in 2015 we actually started here as in, as in the first farm. And right now we have ten up and running and 40 still in development.

Speaker1:
And what really what really jumps out at me that um, I think I think certainly if I compare it to my experience with GE, like I certainly didn’t start thinking this could be an alternative to the to the food system. But you it sounds like you, you sort of did. And you speak about, um, if you could get a third of the Dutch countryside to operate this way and we’ll get into the model in a bit in more detail, but that you could feed, you could feed all of the people in, in Holland, 17 million people through this model like that. That strikes me that the ambition was there from the start for it to be a genuine alternative food system, if it could be done right.

Speaker2:
There is a little nuance, because when we do it the way we do it right now, we still have inputs, so we are not able to do it on one third of the surface, but that’s the other. The other way around is we were, when we do it on one third of the of the area, the rural area here in the Netherlands, we can involve every Dutchman with his food production and, and that that became our goal. And yes, we are convinced that when the way we eat or what we eat, how much like proteins for example, animal or plant, you know, when we change our diet, yes, we can also feed everyone, everyone from this area. We already know that. But it’s too early to say that out loud right now because yeah, we are still have some inputs in the farms.

Speaker1:
So okay, so like I think most people listening to this would be sort of familiar generally with the idea of community supported agriculture. You pay whatever €500 a year and you get a box, you know, a box every week or whatever. And the farmers have the certainty of income and so on. But it strikes me that here in Bern is, is is, you know, it’s like community supported agriculture on steroids. But just can you explain? That’s not a great analogy. I’m sure there’s no steroids involved. But you know what I mean.

Speaker5:
Yeah. Of course.

Speaker1:
Like can you explain the model to us? So so what what actually happens for the members and the farmers involved?

Speaker2:
Exactly. What we do is we establish the farms on the cooperative base. That means that the cooperative owns the farm as the economic entity, you know.

Speaker5:
So what do you do?

Speaker1:
You have to buy an existing farm to, to.

Speaker2:
Know that’s that refers to the discussion of ownership of land. So what we in principle we hire land. So that’s that’s the first thing. And so we hire land about 20 hectares each farm. Uh. And the land is hired by the co-operative. The co-operative to become a member. People pay €2,000. Just one time. Of course, that’s the entrance fee. And we do that with 200 households. So 200 households do pay one time €2,000, that’s €400,000. And we use that amount of money to establish the farm. So to do to buy the tractor and the animals and everything needed to start the farm, the investment, so to speak. And these 200 households, they represent 500 people, like two and a half men behind every door. And these 500 people, they share the cost of the of the farm on an annual basis. So what they do is they calculate everything they need to run the farm. They split it over 500 people, and they split it over 52 weeks a year. And that brings to an amount of money per person. It’s about €10 per person. Or calculating with two and a half, 25 per household. And that’s what they pay per week. But that’s not a it’s not a payment, it’s the contribution to the cooperative. And the cooperative hires the farmer to do the job for, for them. So the the farmer is in a sense not the entrepreneur as in the free man, but that is the role the cooperative takes.

Speaker5:
Yeah. So and.

Speaker1:
So. So 20 hectares is about what, about 50 acres, I guess. Um, and so the, the people, the members or the households decide what they want to farm, but presumably that’s are there any kind of principles in terms of like for you that they have to be farmed organically or regeneratively or.

Speaker5:
Yeah, we have um.

Speaker2:
There are seven points every farm commits itself to, you know, and one of them is that they are a cooperative. So every member has a say in what has been decided and, and so on. There are but amongst these seven points is also the way we farm and the way we farm. We have defined that as a search for a no input system. So the dot on the horizon is there will be no inputs in the farm in the future. And well, we are traveling towards that goal and we are starting from the organic point of view. So we are not having the certificate of organic farming because we have no anonymous market. You know, the members do check their own themselves. So there is a no need to to pay for the certificate or something else. So we, we we but we are organic as the baseline. And from there on we are walking towards the no input goal. And important for us is to do that while listening to nature. So what we call it is nature driven farming. And what we try to do is we try to read the processes in nature and translate that into techniques of into production. For example, a very simple example in autumn there is leaf falling and leaf falling is actually compost for nature. So what nature tells us is you have to compose in this period of the year and start with that to have a lot of nutrients in spring, when, when, when when your production products need it.

Speaker2:
So that is a very simple thing. But there are a lot of more like a plant in nature does never stand alone. There is never black soil around the plant. There is also herbs and another thing growing. So why are we producing in black soil? Why are we constantly fighting all the things nature wants to do? So we try to combine different species. We try to combine different. And that’s also the way we look at animals. So animals are not only there for meat or chicken, for eggs or meat, they are there having a function. So the pigs in our farm do eat all the the, the leftovers or the too much harvest or whatever, you know, so nutrients are still in the, in the system. So they are the cleaners, but they are also kind of workers in soil because they are going with their snout, with the snout into the, into the, into the soil. So what we try to do is we, we, we mix them up with our vegetable production. You know, in, in summertime when vegetables are growing, we are separating them in a different area. Like there they are grazing on grassland. And when it’s the season after we have been harvesting, they are literally eating every leftover in the soil while giving some nutrients back while working the soil as well. So oh yeah, they are also giving meat and in.

Speaker5:
That way byproduct.

Speaker1:
Almost.

Speaker5:
Of exactly.

Speaker1:
Of everything else.

Speaker5:
Exactly.

Speaker2:
So we also we always say everything, every element in the farm should have at least 2 or 3 functions. Will it be introduced into the system.

Speaker1:
So so like straight away it jumps out at me as like how difficult is it to get the the 200 families in any given farm? Because you’re asking a lot of them in terms of, you know, by comparison with just head down to your local supermarket and, you know, grab what you need, you’re asking them to invest €2,000 upfront, uh, volunteer, sort of, you know, at times when it’s needed and so on. Is it is it difficult to recruit the families or how has that played out?

Speaker2:
I’d like to say it was difficult because the first farms they yeah, you know, they a lot of people thought, okay, this is nice, but I have to see whether it works or not before I put my money in there.

Speaker5:
Yeah.

Speaker2:
So the first farm, at least the very first farm established in Boxtel in the southern part of the Netherlands, referred to as the real heroes, you know.

Speaker5:
They took they.

Speaker1:
Did all the hard.

Speaker5:
Work, they did the hard work, you know.

Speaker1:
Figuring out the model.

Speaker5:
And exactly, you know.

Speaker2:
Exactly. And now we have a ten farms up and running. Um.

Speaker1:
The first one still going.

Speaker2:
Yeah, it’s, it’s for seven for seven, seven seasons right now. So and.

Speaker5:
That says it all.

Speaker1:
About the, the success of it I guess.

Speaker5:
Exactly.

Speaker2:
And there is a little how do you call it that. There are not many members leaving the farm. So I think the feeling that it’s your it’s really yours. And that’s also the difference with the, with the CSA you were referring to a little bit earlier, you know, there is still a farmer in control, you know, and it’s his company. And right now the business is the business of the families, you know, the household. So. I think there is a bigger commitment because it’s yours. You know, something like that. Yeah. And so in the beginning it was very hard. And I like to refer to them as the real heroes. But right now we have 10,000 households and, and, and when a farm project right now, when it starts, well, the phone rings at our place and it says hello, we are already 60, 65 households. We already have a location and the local community is is really wanting us over there. So please help us for the last straw. You know, over the last, the last miles to run and establish the farm here. So that’s.

Speaker1:
Amazing. So how hard has it been then to get the farmers? Because it sounds like, you know, in some ways it’s a dream job in the sense that it’s guaranteed income, etcetera. But also they need, you know, much different skills, like they’re diversifying into vegetables and fruit and meat and all sorts. Is it hard to get the farmers to, to get to get them on board?

Speaker5:
Well, we see two things.

Speaker2:
Of course. I was referring to the families who started the first farmers as the heroes, but there was one hero that was the first farmer who said yes to the concept. And in the beginning, to be honest, I’ve been doing it myself. But that was only a half a year, I think. But because then the organization started to grow. But then we have to find someone who could do that, and luckily we find one. And it wasn’t it. A son of a farm farmer, a dairy farmer who said, I really like to do this. I see the challenge and after and now and we they they are there is there is not a real difficulty anymore. But in between there was a very difficult period because, yes, there were more households wanting to be wanting to have a farm, but without a farmer it the concept wouldn’t come. So that was a difficult period. But what we see right now is that there are farmers really who wanted to work with us and not for us, with us. We want to work with us. But what we see right now is that I think 75% of the job on a farm has to do with vegetables. And what we see is that we in the Netherlands, we have not enough farmers with that skills anymore, you know, because they they are already occupied or have their own business or whatever, and whatever comes from the schools, you know, with a with an education towards vegetables, they are already occupied before they leave school. You know, they, they there is a lot of demand for these kind of skills. And that’s also what we, what we encounter.

Speaker1:
So and also here, here in Ireland, I’m sure it’s the same as, as, as the price pressures on vegetables, you know, get worse. Um, more and more growers are leaving the industry or being bought out by the bigger guys and so on. So those skills, which are real skills, like it’s not something you can pick up overnight, um, are lost and they’re lost forever effectively. So I can I can see that. Do you do you have a sense from the most successful farms, how much of people’s sort of overall food is produced from the farm? Are they still having to buy a lot or.

Speaker5:
No, we.

Speaker2:
Have a promise, and the promise is 60% of your needs, and 60% of your needs is something different than 60% of your.

Speaker5:
Choices. Yes.

Speaker2:
So what we produce is 60% of the needs. And that’s the promise. And I see already that some farms are getting over. They’re getting more because, well, we’re starting to produce grain, for example, which was not on all the farms originally. So, so there is bread involved and something to do with pizzas and etcetera, you know, so, so that’s, that’s, that’s what’s happening right now. And I see also that for lunch in summer period, people skip their bread meal. What’s actually very common here in the Netherlands as lunch and as breakfast. You have some bread and they replace it for salads because there is a lot of salad and lettuce produced on on the farm. So I think the promise for 60% is still there.

Speaker5:
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker1:
And, and, and the farm sort of as it evolves and as it adopts this principles, it’s changing diets as well, I guess. I mean, people are I guess eating more plants, wasting less foods and so on.

Speaker2:
Yeah, exactly. And we are not telling them they have to like with the finger. You have to do better. Now what we do is we offer them experiences. So in the gathering of all the members they can a few times per year, they can have this discussion, what are we doing? And for example, already you said 50 acres like 20 hectares. When you look at the farm, 50% of it is able to put a plate full of food like a pigs for meat and chickens and eggs and and vegetables and potatoes and whatever. And the other half of the farm is needed to produce beef. Uh, so it’s very clear when you stand on the farm and a few farms do have everything in complete area. So that’s that’s 20 hectares in one. So you have an overview over the farm, and you can exactly see what the consumption of beef does on the occupation of the landscape. And because you are the owner of the farm, every year you see the results. You know the facts and figures, and then you start thinking, okay, I see that we have half a surface needed for beef, and the other half also already provides me with enough food. Okay. And I have to make this cost. You have to. Okay, let’s start the discussion. Guys. What are we doing? And that is right now, after seven years, like the first farm started seven years ago, this discussion comes up right now. Are we doing the right thing? Should reproduce this much beef. Couldn’t we do it more efficiently? What could we do with the surface? Something differently than producing beef? Can we? Can we introduce grains or nuts or whatever we are going to do with plant protein or etcetera? So without pointing the finger like you should do it differently, this is the experience that makes people come to decisions.

Speaker1:
So like it sounds like complete utopia. If it’s if it’s working right, you know, as, as a, as a household, you’re getting access to this incredible food, you know, that’s, that’s, um, you know, potentially transformative for the planet, etcetera. It also strikes me if it goes wrong, it could be a complete, complete and utter nightmare. Like, what are the I’m sure you have a million stories, but what are the ones that sort of speak to the whole thing at its best, and maybe examples of where it hasn’t worked out and why?

Speaker2:
Okay, well, I think I can best illustrate it with the second farm we opened. Like the first farm went really well. So okay, we can do this. So let’s do it exactly the same. And then we are able to so we didn’t were enough aware of the context of the next farm. You know like we discussed already. So we started it at the really same. It was a copy. It was.

Speaker5:
Copycat. Yeah.

Speaker1:
Like a franchise.

Speaker5:
Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker2:
Exactly like at the beginning it went very well. You know, the first year there was harvest, there were happy people, etcetera, etcetera. Um, and we felt an urge to start the second farm, because then we could speak of a movement and not of a one single farm, you know. And that was something I really wanted to do. So there were not enough households also, you know, all we have, the first 100, the next will follow when we are producing, you know. But they didn’t came and there were a lot of lessons learned in the in this second farm. We started, it ended up with a farm. It’s also still open and still exists, but with a very, very poor harvest per year. And it has everything to do with not enough money because there were not enough households. It has also to do with not enough attention for the context like said. So actually everything went wrong. So and then it comes to and then I can change it. I’m sorry for not having a real example with, with everything going bad because what happened was. These families, these households, they stood around the area and said, okay, we have to accept this. We do understand that this was a necessary step for the movement to get forward, because with one farm, there is no movement. We made it able to become a movement. Therefore there are now 40. But can these 40 help us now? You know, can is the community bigger than just the community around the farm? Is there a community in in, in the, in the, in all the farms and all the participants and all the families who are joining? And then we are starting this discussion with the chairman’s and farmers of all the other farms who are already producing. And the beauty of it is was, okay, let’s stand all around these farms who are not doing very well at this moment because they were at the first one, know their lessons learned made us being successful. So. And now, right now we are they are exchanging products. So everybody in the community has enough food.

Speaker5:
That’s so cool.

Speaker2:
So you see that that it’s not only a social community within the farm, it’s also the community of Harrisburg in the national organization.

Speaker1:
That’s amazing. And so it’s become its own. It’s like an organism in its own right that’s evolving and changing and supporting each other as well. That’s, that’s that’s just brilliant. And so maybe final question, like, what do you think the potential of this is, is now, I mean, do you feel I know, I know from talking to you in the, in the Ashoka context that that you do see potential for this model outside of, outside of Holland. Um, how far do you think this you can take this.

Speaker5:
Exactly.

Speaker2:
Well, I think also when we take it out of Holland and going to other countries, we have to consider, of course, the context. So I’m not I’m not saying that the model as it is right now is the right model for every country, but I think there are some principles, like the design principles and working principles and values underneath these, this, this concept that we could use in every country and to make and to build the farm, the new system on that values. And I think the exchange of that values, I think that’s the that’s the important thing and the lesson learned, lesson learned, of course, to exchange them and the knowledge we build up. So that’s that’s my my real goal.

Speaker1:
Incredible story. And here thank you so much for for taking the time to speak to us. We’d love to see here Bern, come to Ireland, I think, and whatever we can do to help make that happen, we’ll do. But in the meantime, thank you so much for talking to us. And it’s been, it’s been such, such a pleasure to listen to you speak about your project.

Speaker2:
It was a really honor to be here. And thank you very much for that invitation.

Speaker5:
Brilliant.

Speaker1:
Continued success. Thank you. I think if you’re like me, you’re probably listening to that and thinking, when is that coming to my community? Where can I sign up? It’s just like such a brilliant model. And, you know, one of the things buzz that jumps out at me is that, like it, it highlights, I think, some of the work that’s involved in getting to know your food system better and and getting fully involved in it, like it’s not something you can kind of phone in and you have to actually really get get stuck in if you want to make these changes. I think that’s one thing that strikes me. And the other thing is that, um, you know, the idea of knowing the people, really knowing the people who produce your, the food that you eat and is something that like, I suppose the big food companies and the supermarkets, like they’re trying to replace that with, with marketing, you know, they’re trying to sort of suggest that you can really know your, your, um, your food producers because there’s a poster of them, you know, holding a bunch of carrots up in your local supermarket or, you know, cute names for, for, for, for the farm or, you know, that kind of idea. And it’s kind of it’s not real. Whereas I think what, what, um, herringbone have done is, is the real thing and it’s, it’s that, um, you know, maybe it’s a kind of a romantic idea that, that, that you’d really know the people who produce your food. And, but I think it’s, it’s, you know, it’s something that we absolutely have to aspire to. And Michael Pollan, who I think most people would would know about, he has this brilliant list of, of food rules. But one of them which really jumps out for me, is that you should shake the hand that feeds you as opposed to biting it off. So, um, I really, I really like that it’s a bit romantic, but, you know, I think that’s exactly what Heertje is doing.

Speaker4:
Yeah. And I think it’s okay to have a bit of romance. I think romance is what we need for for anything to really work, you know? That’s that’s okay. Yeah. Um, and.

Speaker1:
Let little uncomfortable. You’ve brought that up in the setting, but, you know, it’s okay. I think we’ve known.

Speaker4:
Each other a long time now. Um. For this next shot, we’re going to bring in our community manager, Molly. How’s it going there, Molly? Hi, Barry. Can you do the honor of introducing Mr. Pat Pender?

Speaker6:
I sure can. Pat Pender is a wonderful human. He saw a disused acre and a half and immediately thought zero waste community garden. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with him, and I trust that you guys will too. We started where he started at the very beginning.

Speaker3:
I had retired, and there was sort of kicking my heels and finding something to do. And Carmel. My wife there, you look after the flowers all around here and the flower beds and that and the hedges were a bit overgrown. And she asked me, would I go and would I put the hedge for her? And I finished up going. If you could see the whole place is quite a long hedge to them. But anyway, while I was at it, I was thinking about the amount of ground that was wasted here. It’s over well over an acre. And having been a gardener like. And my father was a gardener, when he came in from work in the afternoon, in the evenings and half day on Saturdays, as it was then he would out in the garden. So I’d be with him. And I just loved it. I just loved the garden and, you know. But our own garden here at the house is very small. We live in an estate here where we’re located, and just a resident association meeting one night. Just thought I would make a would suggest maybe that we approach the council that might let us use it as a community garden. And we did it and they jumped at it. And it’s been just an absolute, absolutely fairy tale story ever since. It hasn’t stopped. And I would say that Kildare County Council have probably put in a probably maybe 50 or 60,000 into this space over the last three years in one way or another, like this year.

Speaker3:
They put in all raised beds here for us, which cost a considerable amount of money. I would say they were here for two weeks working on it and has made it life, life a lot easier for everybody. We want people aren’t too keen on the idea at the beginning because they kind of, you know, used to the ways we were working, but now it is brilliant. So we just keep developing it and adding to it. And over, over the last three and a half years now, we’ve added in chickens, ducks, bees. We have beehives here at the moment and at the back of this cabin. Now we have a honey honey house which has been donated to us and we’re have electricity in it, more and more green energy. And we’re hoping now just to have a water supply put into it. And, and we’re going to equip we’ve been given loads of stainless steel equipment to put tables and all that sort of thing that pretend to have been donated to us. And the thing itself, the building itself is made from coolroom panels, so they’re well insulated at about 5 or 6in thick, and there’s great insulation. And I think that we will have probably the best honey room in Ireland for a small little community garden.

Speaker6:
And Pat, you have to help me here, a honey room is that where honey is made or honey is kept or both.

Speaker3:
It’s where you separate the honey. It’s a very sort of hygienic sort of a situation because honey is messy, you know, sticky. And unless you have everything right and proper amount of hot water and all that to keep it clean, we try. We did separate. We have our own separator here, which we got a grant for, and we tried it earlier on. We only had one harvest of honey this year, so we tried it and we realized we had problems. So we went looking for this honey house as part of the requirement anyway from the Department of Agriculture. So we got their their sort of spec and we have this is exceeding the spec. So we’re just looking now to get everything fitted, get it working and have it ready. Then for the summer when we start harvesting again.

Speaker6:
It’s a very exciting thing to be able to eat honey made from the plants in your area. Now Rathcoffey the zero waste community garden. Is it in the estate or very close by?

Speaker3:
It’s in the actual council. It’s a listed a council at Moortown Drive, and it’s in that it was ground that couldn’t, for one reason or another, couldn’t be built on. And it was lying here idle. And we’re here now. This house is about 21 years going, and it’s been lying idle until three years ago, the three and a half years ago. And we got our hands on it, you know. But it is. I’d love to be able to give you a shot of what it’s like outside, but I can’t. You know, the way it all looks and everything else, you know.

Speaker6:
But it is 1.5 acres. And you mentioned that it arose from a meeting with the members Association. What I’m interested in is who is your community at the moment? Is it everybody living in the estate? Do you have people coming in from outside of the estate? Can you speak to us a little bit about that?

Speaker3:
Yeah, no, we have some people from the estate because gardening is not everybody’s cup of tea. And we have about 5 or 6 now and from the estate. So other than that, tennis is open to all of County Kildare. So we would have people from like Maynooth and celebrating Kilcock nice prosperous caragh. We even had a person come to us from Kilcullen, which is acquired this about 30km away. So, you know, places like this are scarce and you know, the whole idea behind what we’re at is to try and encourage communities to use the little bit of space that may be in their garden. And like we have people coming to us here now from all over the country. Have a look. We get phone calls. How did it get started where, you know, anybody that wants to come look for a bit of information, advice, help. We spend days here sometimes talking to people, telling them they’re just amazed at what goes on and how it was done. A lot was done with scrap, you know, like as I said, everything that we have here virtually apart from the tunnel was the only thing that was new. Everything else has been upcycled, recycled, whatever, one sort of a cycle you want, but it’s there, you know.

Speaker6:
Can you give an example of something that was upcycled that you’re particularly fond of or proud of?

Speaker3:
Well, I would have to say maybe the this cabin that we’re in, because when we got it, it was fairly there was no roof on it. The roof was badly damaged and leaking. It was probably in his origin. It was a school room and there it was belong to a local soccer club originally, and they had built themselves a new clubhouse, so they didn’t need it. And it was a kind of half in a ditch and half out of it. So we rescued it and we brought it here, and we stripped it out and stripped it down, and we put a new roof on it. We have electricity in it now. We’re actually got a water connection into it. And if think that would be probably one of the biggest, you know, it was quite a bit of work and quite an expensive bit of work, but it’s working. It’s used for everything at the moment. There’s a store, there’s a kitchen in it. We have a kitchen fitted into it here and we well, I don’t know. We use it. It’s the intention eventually would be to use it as a classroom and we’d run classes and various things like that, you know, and there’s we have great plans for it, and we just need to get a bit of more stuff out of it and make more room in it. So we could really use it for what it’s meant to be used for.

Speaker6:
And would you like to tell me a little bit more about that idea about the education that Rathcoffey can give?

Speaker3:
Well, we have what we call our school of gardening here to start with, and that originated in the first lockdown. We were fortunate enough to have a lot of plants at the time and. We were we had we were on a cottage market every month, and the idea was that we’d be able to sell these plants at the market, but then no market. So eventually people found us. They couldn’t get plants anywhere in the first lockdown, couldn’t get seeds, and we sold a very large amount of plants at that time. And people coming in and were saying, you know, don’t mind about sowing. I never took ground before, but parents coming in with children and all that sort of thing. And so the idea came to me that maybe we should try and see could we get a school of gardening for beginners? So we did that the first year round. We put it out there and we we got a professional horticulturist and she took it on Lucybelle. She took it on and she it was a great success. And from that then there was more demand from schools and from more adults. So what we did was we approached Leader Declare Leader programme and they financed for this year. Now of course is just finishing. So we had primary school, secondary school and had an adult class running during that and a great success.

Speaker3:
So we figure that on an average of 15 people per class, we put about 60 people through here. This year, we know a bit more about gardening than we know or did know before they came in. So now this year we’re looking at going back later came to us again and asked us, would we do the same thing but extend it? So we’re doing a two year now and I’m going to finance it for the next two years for us. And the schools are booked in already. People didn’t want to go home. Even when their holidays came. They wanted to stay. They had such a good time and enjoyed it so much. So that’s the way we’re at. That’s how it all started and it’s gone on from better and better all the time. But, Molly, what I would like to say like to people as there’s huge amount of waste ground, small and big around every state in Ireland, private states, public estates. It doesn’t matter what they are. Get out. Somebody, just one person to get out and start. We started with three and the following year we had 14. And this year I think we have about 22. And we have no more. No more rooms.

Speaker3:
We got another 12. We have more room. So we’re looking looking at that and to get like we are going to have to go back to where I grew up, when I was a child, where people were growing their own food. We’re going to have to go back to that because the way things are looking, the distance food is traveling. And everything else. And this carbon footprint and all the rest of it. Like I believe when I started was started by Michael Kelly thinking, why would why would garlic come from China? So to save the world, you know, and like all of this is the same thing like with any supermarket and it’s there. But we here can’t grow enough fresh food for the demand we have at the market. So that’s why we need more ground. Like when you get into this. Like when we got into this, we were amazed at the amount of help that was there. Financial as well from, from from Kildare County Council. Never mind. And I’m sure every county county council in Ireland must have the same sort of basis. You know, they have grounds for, for, for, because there’s the department. The main department to deal with in your county is our parks department head for them to health them and they’ll help you.

Speaker6:
Part with everything that you have going on. It sounds like you might be even busier now in retirement than you were when you were working.

Speaker3:
Absolutely. But the difference is, I love this. I loved working, but this is better. I was I was never like gardening, you know, and would used to be driving along. When I’d be driving. I used to do a lot of driving and I’d be looking at these big houses, big gardens outside houses, and there’d be some fella pushing a lawn mower or sitting in a lawn mower and jeez, I’d love to have that bit of ground, you know? So here we are. We finished up with it eventually, you know.

Speaker6:
Very good. And with 22 people as well, there’s probably no end to socialising.

Speaker3:
Yeah. If you’re lucky enough. Like, I was lucky enough that I had the support of a committee that there’s just four of us, 3 or 4 of us, and that was it. And then the way we look at it, we have a chairman and a secretary and a treasurer and maybe somebody else deputy chair, but then all the members, then all the gardeners are all members. So we can have a little chat and discuss various things. Then when they’re here, you don’t have to have organised meetings every, all the time and things like that. And it’s amazing. And people are willing and want to learn how to garden. So we need to be teaching them, just encouraging people to get out and grow. Have a look. Just one person, have a look and see. And if you approach your council or wherever you live, set up your little committee and off you go and just keep at it. And if you don’t know how to, so there’s always someone no everyone will know a little bit, you know. And then what will happen is gradually you get to know what so what not to. So we are, I think kind of stuck in Ireland on our traditional food, you know, the padillas and the bread and the cabbage and all that type of thing. But we’ve tried various things here as well, different plants. We have two gentlemen here working on a C scheme. One chap is from Syria and he’s trying to influence us now. And his way of growing and how it works, you know, and the simplicity of it all. And when we make a deal to sell something so something we’ll put the plant on the top. But he puts it down in the bottom of the, the plant of the bridge, so that when it rains, the water will run down and circulate, you know, water, the plant where we have so much water, we just take that for granted. They’ll go anywhere but with his country. No water, very little. And that’s how they save it and how they grow it. And all the things we learn from them, you know.

Speaker6:
Well, Pat, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you. It’s really, really inspirational. Would you like to give us your parting one liner?

Speaker3:
My parting one liner? Well, I think it might be more than one liner, but just get out there. Get out there, look for waste ground and start growing. It’s not complicated. It’s not rocket science. It’s very simple and very basic. Go to holiday for one liner.

Speaker7:
That is perfect.

Speaker6:
Thank you. Pat. Lovely to meet.

Speaker3:
You. A pleasure to talk to you. God bless you. Thank you.

Speaker1:
Part is just an amazing character part, isn’t he? Just incredible to listen to that and also incredible to think about the vast tracts of land around the world sitting in housing estates, and imagine what it would be like if they were unleashed as and unshackled as community gardens.

Speaker4:
Just like the back gardens that we talked about in the first episode. And school gardens, there’s there’s so much, so much potential out there. So let’s go back to Molly to get some advice on how to start a community garden. So, Molly, you started a community garden yourself as a college student and have been a regular member at many more over the years. So what does it take? How could listeners get the ball rolling on their own community garden project?

Speaker6:
Cool. Well, there’s a few basic stuff to consider from the get go. First, you need a core group. You need a core group of really enthusiastic people. Hopefully with a diverse set of skills. This can arise out of a DIY group. Or it could be your neighbors. It could be the people that you met over lockdown. It could be somebody that you see in the street every day. It could be your extended family, whoever it is. Point being is that they’re all enthusiastic about growing their own food, or they’re as enthusiastic as you are. Then the next thing you need to do is source some land, figure out how you’re going to organize. But first and foremost, what your intention is. What do you guys intend? Yes, you intend to grow food, but also maybe there’s a specific community need you could support. Maybe you guys want to specifically focus on fostering the bond between generations. Or maybe it’s simply to develop community in your area. It’s really handy to set out some aims and objectives at the very, very beginning so that can direct your first few years or where you really want to focus your time and energy. Most community gardens are voluntary, community growing initiatives. Let’s think about. They can be gardens, but they can also be in schools or in hospitals and workplaces. This this whole podcast has demonstrated that community growing can happen all over the place. But the main three things you need to consider with any growing initiative is where? Where are you going to grow? Who? Who are you going to grow with? What resources do they have and what what knowledge, what materials, what funding? To find out more about those top three things, head over to Change.org, G Group or check out our friends at the Community Garden Ireland. That’s G ireland.org.

Speaker4:
Excellent Molly. Thank you so much.

Speaker6:
Thank you Barry.

Speaker4:
Thanks so much for listening. You can get involved and find out more at. And to say thanks, you can also get 20% off anything at our online shop by using the discount code GI 20.

Speaker1:
And remember that we are a social enterprise, which means all income that we generate goes back into funding the mission to get the world to grow their own food. And we couldn’t do this podcast without the support of Rethink Ireland and the Community Foundation for Ireland.

Speaker4:
In our next episode, we will chat about the food we eat in restaurants as a potential force to end hunger and meet the chef turned grower at Michelin star restaurants.

Speaker1:
I’m sure if you want food done right, grow it yourself. Until next time, happy growing! Please subscribe to Food Done Right, the food sustainability podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including generate automated summaries powered by AI, enterprise-grade admin tools, share transcripts, automated subtitles, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.

food-done-right-at-work.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

food-done-right-at-work.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Mick Kelly, and this is food done, right!

Speaker2:
You saw this job for an artisan chef in Dublin. We looked at the job spec and it ticked all my boxes and then we sent in the applied for it anyway.

Speaker1:
And you didn’t know it was Airbnb?

Speaker2:
Airbnb. And to be honest, I didn’t know who was at the time.

Speaker1:
Early days in the garden. We thought, we’re in a brewery here. We’re in the home of Guinness. We should try growing some hops, and then we would use them later in the year to make a small brew for the gardeners. We brew out in the Open Gate Brewery, and once or twice it’s also appeared on tap within the Open Gate Brewery tap room as well. Growing food completely changed the course of history. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become entirely removed from where our food comes from. But if we grow food, reconnect, and care about our food, we can change the future’s course.

Speaker3:
Google’s New York offices feed 10,000 people every day. While food at Google is famous for its lavish abundance, the company has also embarked on a campaign to encourage healthier eating among their employees. Plates on the buffet line are two inches smaller than standard vegetables are served before meat, and the gummy bears near the coffee machines were moved ten feet further away and hidden in opaque canisters. It’s one slightly dystopian example of food done right. How’s it going there, Mick?

Speaker1:
How’s it goin, buzz?

Speaker3:
Are you a gummy bear kind of guy?

Speaker1:
I don’t really know what that means. What? What’s a gummy bear type of guy? I mean, would you eat gummy bears? Would you be.

Speaker3:
Prone to shoving your hand into a canister full of gummy bears when no one is looking?

Speaker1:
No, I wouldn’t. Especially if it’s an opaque canister, I don’t don’t that sounds very strange. No, I’m not a gummy bear fan. Oh that’s good. Ted, how are you doing?

Speaker3:
I’m not too bad. I’m a little bit lonely here, you know, away from the office.

Speaker1:
So we’re back. We’re back to remote working, which means our normal sort of rendezvous point somewhere in growth HQ is is is not working this time. So I’m. I’m in grow HQ today. But you’re working from home in your in your lovely home office.

Speaker3:
Well home office is a bit generous but this, this cold, barren room full of full of some books, but not quite. The aspirational bookcase is. It’s keeping me company today.

Speaker1:
Yeah. And I guess, like all companies, big and small are grappling with kind of workforce, is working from home at the moment. And Google Google one of them presumably. Um, and it’s kind of yeah. Like I guess as part of our, our Growth Circle program where we work with companies and I’ve got to visit, visit a couple of, um, the big tech companies and look at the kind of the food offering. And it’s incredibly impressive. You know, it’s sort of as you would expect, I guess. Um, you know, that it’s all laid on for their employees. Does that sort of lavish abundance, as you said? Um, but I think there’s also a sense that they’ve got this opportunity in the same way we’ve kind of spoken about the chefs manifesto that chefs have, you know, this sort of outsized influence on what we eat through through eating out in cafes and restaurants, the, you know, the chefs in these corporate kitchens have have huge, um, you know, they hold huge sort of sway over what their, what their, um, employees are eating. And because it’s at such a vast scale, it has huge potential for change as well. So when chefs working in these in, in these big corporates turn their mind to sustainability and doing food right.

Speaker1:
It can have this it can have a massive, um, you know, even a wider societal implication, I suppose, beyond the company itself. And one, one of the I won’t I won’t say who it was, but I remember one of the chefs telling me that during a very because because employees are so reliant on on the company food offering for their, you know, often in often times they’re getting breakfast, lunch and dinner and, you know, in the corporate canteen. And they get so used to that that actually their some of their, you know, their cookery skills can suffer or not get developed at all. And, and during one of the really bad, the bad snowstorm a couple of years back in Ireland, and they had to actually open the office back up so that employees could come in and get their food, because they were actually worried that they, they wouldn’t know what to cook for themselves. You know what I mean? So it has this huge influence on on that, that demographic, I guess, of of employees working away in companies like that.

Speaker3:
That’s amazing. Um, so before the pandemic turned the world of work upside down, various studies showed that about 50 to 70% of people were eating lunch at their desk. And so aside from the food itself, you know, that also means missing a chance for exercise, you know, not taking a mental break from emails and so on. And so I have to confess, you know, I was one of those people myself, but of late have been working from home. Um, you know, for, for most of the last two years now. And, you know, one thing that that, that has brought about is given me the chance to harvest my own greens to start with, but also, you know, spend a bit of time with my wife and baby son having lunch. Um, which has been obviously really, really nice. Um, and so as work evolves into these more hybrid setups, is there an opportunity to improve the way we eat during the working day, do you think?

Speaker1:
Um, I think it’s a kind of double edged sword, isn’t it like, because, um, I think I think the challenge is like in the word hybrid, because if it’s if it’s a mix of working from home and going into the office, then I think routine suffers. And I think routine is, is probably central to, to sort of healthy eating. You know, I think you need to get into a kind of routine. So I think if you’re doing a few days in the office and a few days at home, maybe that suffers a little bit.

Speaker3:
I think that is interesting. I mean, I’ve definitely haven’t, um, haven’t got into that that mixed setup at the moment. It’s been been pretty much all working from home for, for the last couple of years. But um, but yeah, you’re right. You know, I think I think the more it’s a funny one, isn’t it? Because in some ways, the more programmed we are. You’re right. The easier it is to make sure that there’s the time allowed. But maybe you could also start relying on bad habits that way as well. Sometimes being being kind of taken out of your out of your normal, normal rhythm helps to kind of remind you of what you ought to be doing. So.

Speaker1:
So what do you eat for your lunch then? When you’re, when you’re. Working from home.

Speaker3:
Um, that’s a very personal question, isn’t it?

Speaker1:
I you weren’t expecting that, were you? Well, you were about to ask me, so I said I’d jump in and get that in first, you know.

Speaker3:
Well, I’m at risk of sounding like a massive cliche here, Mick, because, as you know, I live.

Speaker1:
What I’m hoping.

Speaker3:
Well, as you know, I live not too far away from Seagull Bakery, which is undoubtedly the best bakery in Ireland. And so we do spend basically all of our money on, on sourdough bread. And, and we have tried making it. It hasn’t been very successful, to be perfectly honest, although it’s actually it has been successful, but it just, it propagates so much you just end up swimming in sourdough starter. So it’s a lot of sourdough bread. It’s a lot of soup this time of year. And we’ve still been harvesting greens from, from, from the beds outside up until I think, I think we’re just about finished with the last bits of the rocket and the kind of hardier, hardier greens. So still, still just about keeping the salads alive. But yeah, a lot, a lot of hearty soup, a lot of a lot of sourdough bread. That’d be the kind of staple you get.

Speaker1:
The focaccia from Seagull. That’s that’s a winner every time, isn’t it?

Speaker3:
Oh, only on special occasions. That’s wedding anniversary stuff right there.

Speaker1:
Um, you could live a little buzz. In fairness. You know, it doesn’t have to be just wedding anniversaries. It’s not that expensive. I know.

Speaker3:
It’s special.

Speaker1:
I’m kind of a batch cooker, like. So I’m the lunch. The lunch guy. So my wife’s a teacher. Um, and so she’s heading off to school as well as the kids. So I just batch cook on a Sunday and lots of things in flasks for myself and Alicia. And then the kids get their get a sandwich or whatever. But it means that then you’ve got whether I’m working from home or heading in here to Gro HQ, it’s kind of I’ve got something that I can put into a flask and have a bit of a bit of a bit of a slurp on during the day, you know.

Speaker3:
Nice. And you’re not pining too much for the regular lunch at HQ. I suppose you are still getting your lunch that Gro HQ sometimes yourself. Yeah.

Speaker1:
Like I’ve, I’ve taken to start. Like I like organising lunch meetings now on Thursdays and Fridays so that I can, I can um, because the, the meze menu here, which is a kind of, you know, it’s the most changing, changeable part of our menu. So it reacts to based on what’s coming out of the veg garden. So I love trying the mezze every, every week. You know try a couple of couple each day. Nice. So I’m well fed. It’s fair to say good stuff.

Speaker3:
Um so we’ll have to find out how other people are fed. Not not just ourselves. Mick. So our first guest is Maurice McGee, and he’s a chef who has been creating some of those sort of out of the ordinary food experiences for a range of interesting workplaces. Can you tell us a little bit about them?

Speaker1:
Yeah, Maurice is a really cool guy. I met him up at, um, a food festival. We were on a panel together a couple of years ago, and, um, Maurice has a really interesting background, like chefs, um, um, chef down in, in South America for a couple of years, owned his own restaurant, um, and came from a farming background in rural Ireland. So he’s got that kind of understanding of, of local seasonal food. And, but the thing that really interested me about him was that, um, and there’s a bit of a bit of a thread here, I think, of, of chefs and leaving the very busy restaurant world for, for something, something different. And so when I first met Maurice, he was, he was the, um, he was the head chef in Airbnb and, and, you know, providing that corporate, you know, corporate, um, dining environment, but doing it in a way that was just basically like grow HQ, you know, except without the growing, I guess. But everything, in every other respect, he was doing unbelievably sustainable local seasonal food and actually Airbnb are unusual in the sense that they have their own. You know, he was an Airbnb employee. It wasn’t outsourced to somebody else, which I thought was really, really, really interesting. Um, and then more lately, he’s he’s made the move into becoming the, um, performance chef for the RFU, which is another just, you know, such an interesting career sort of sidestep or change I think as well. And so he’s bringing that sustainability focus then to you know to our, our elite athletes in the country. Um, so just a really interesting guy with an unbelievable passion for sustainability and seasonality and an understanding of food, which is not as common as you might, you might hope for or expect in chefs. Um, so let’s jump in and have a listen to Maurice.

Speaker2:
First of all, Michael, thank you for having me on. It’s an honor to be on your podcast. And yeah, going back to the very start. Yeah. So my parents had a bar and we had a farm. We had cattle, we’d sheep and predominantly sheep. You know, we had about 300, 400 head over the years. The cattle, you know, I grew up with the cows. You know, we used to milk our own cows. We had milk coming into the kitchen. We pasteurizing it. And, you know, we got rid of the cows later on, and we just left the sheep, like, I suppose, growing up in the farm. Give me, give me that relation of what producers, the procedures producers have, you know, whatever it may be, if it’s crops growing, if it’s sheep, like so, you know, when, when I get lamb into the kitchen, like I look at that lamb and I know exactly the process that that lamb got would take to get to be here in the kitchen. And that was a benefit to me. You know, it was good to see from kind of both ends. As a chef, you know obviously, you know years in the kitchen we have our end of things. But like seeing things from the other end as well, from the farmers perspective is very important. I think it’s very important for like building up relationships and working collaboratively with, with farmers and producers. I suppose it’s common ground really when you’re talking to them. Yeah, there’s an understanding and to build that relationship with with the producer or farmer.

Speaker1:
So when I kind of met you first, you were in Airbnb. I think most people would know Airbnb, obviously, but they have a huge corporate presence in Ireland. And and I met you. You were you’d come back from Brazil, you were executive chef in, in Airbnb and and hard to sort of paint this picture for people. But like obviously most big corporates now they outsource their catering function to one of the big, you know, the big catering firms. But Airbnb were doing something very different. It was all done in house. And I suppose my my interest was coming from here and grow HQ where we have a very similar you know, we have a very specific approach to food. We want it to be all local, all seasonal, home grown, etcetera. And it was like it was like almost like just seeing a corporate version of grow HQ. Like it was just phenomenal that it was. So yeah, it was basically like if you were to dream up from a kind of a sustainability and a and a climate change and seasonal eating and sustainability perspective and like, put that into a corporate environment, that’s what it was. That’s what it came across as like, which is just it’s just phenomenal. Like what what did you I mean, how did you get from, you know, owning your own restaurant in Brazil to, to doing that in the first case. And then what was your you know, it strikes me as they seem to have given you free reign to, to just go for it, like, and bring that ethos kind of writ large on a big corporate environment. Yeah.

Speaker2:
So I think what happened was we were having a first baby and um, we were finding it very difficult anytime in the restaurant. Our days were closed. We’re maintenance cleaning. We had a beautiful beach in front of us. We never went to it. And then when we’re. Priscilla was pregnant, we said, well, we can’t, we can’t. We can’t have a baby here. Misuse of time. So that was kind of we op shop and came back to Ireland. So we kind of work around a few places, short term Donegal to found something that I can actually fit into, you know, the German food ethos. And we, we saw this job for an artisan chef in Dublin and we looked at the job spec and like ticked it ticked all my boxes. And then we sent in the applied for it anyway.

Speaker1:
And you didn’t know it was Airbnb.

Speaker2:
Airbnb. And to be honest, I didn’t know who was at the time. I just got back from Brazil. Um, it goes a little bit behind everything that was going on in Europe. I know it was American company like, but it wasn’t in Brazil at the time. And I found out after the first interview it was Airbnb. But I think with my background in international cuisine, with ten years in London, my approach to sustainability, you know, we were like a hand in glove. Everything I was aiming for to achieve, they were too. So it was quite a lengthy interview process. You know, there was 13 interviews to get into the position, but holy moly.

Speaker1:
13 interviews over three months.

Speaker2:
Yeah, yeah, over ten months. And sometimes we had four back to back, you know. And it was an experience, I’ll tell you. But no, it was good. It was all positive. It was great. And we had a cook off you know, at the end and like a mystery hamper and I thrive for mystery hampers. I don’t know why. I just love getting mystery ingredients in us to be, to make something out of them. And so I’d done well on that. And, um, yeah. So I got the role and so we came. So I came in therapy and then and I was in for a couple of weeks, and then they sent me off to the US to help open up the Portland office. So they were just starting their food. As well. I think the whole thing about sending me over to their. Was that they wanted me to kind of get the essence of what they’re doing, especially when I went down to San Francisco for a week. So it was a week in Portland, a week in San Francisco down at the HQ, Airbnb HQ, and I just wanted to see the essence of it, not really replicate it, but see what they were doing and make it our own and build from it.

Speaker2:
And that was the blank canvas that I had. Now when I went in there, everything they were doing is everything I would have been doing anyway. So when we started off in Dublin, we’d just done this same thing, and our whole ethos was that every it’s going to be healthy, nutritious food for everybody, but it’s also going to be everything that’s made from scratch. So we kind of started off with six chefs and the kitchen was off site at the time. So we were delivering into the watermark building. And so it was a bit of logistics, but we were still able to provide really high quality, you know, food that was being transported, you know, from a mile away into the offices. And then we started doing breakfast and things kind of grew incrementally, and we ended up with a large team. In the end, I think we had about 25 to 30 between porters and chefs on the back of house team alone.

Speaker1:
And there was like, I mean, where I visited, you would obviously move then into its own, your own building and like, it seemed like it was like not not quite money, no object, you know. But you know what I mean? It was like the best of equipment, huge team working for you. And also then I know you said to me at the time that, like corporate chefs in particular, have this huge procurement power, like, so you had the ability to, to really support local sustainable producers because you were buying directly from them as opposed to through a true middleman or a middle catering company or whatever.

Speaker2:
Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, we were very lucky, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of companies will have nominate suppliers and these are the people you deal with and that’s it. And but we had we had great buying power from different suppliers. We could pick and choose who we wanted to fit into our criteria. And we had end. And when I left, we had over 200 small producers supplying the Airbnb. And that was everything from our own honey, from Hive Mind, from Michael Reardon down to Cork to Dunlavin Dairy, where it was a it was a small dairy in, in County Wicklow. We, we were getting urns instead of, you know, plastic bottles, milk bottles were coming in as well. So we eradicated thousands of plastics going to landfill that way and basically on farm as well, like organics, you know. So whatever was in season was coming through. We’d castleruddery farm as well. So we’d hundreds of amazing small producers around Ireland, you know, and, you know, it was challenging, you know, to the, to the point where sometimes it didn’t meet the quota that we needed. But it was fine because we had we had a couple of different farms so we could get X amount from here and X amount from there. So to make up, if we needed 50 kilos of carrots, then we would get 25 here and 25 there. But it worked well with them as well. Building relationship was the most important part of that, especially with the fish and the and the growers, because a lot of the time they’re left with excess stock that they can’t get rid of, you know. And I said to them, listen, don’t don’t be afraid to reach out to me and tell me what you have, and I’ll see what I can do. And a lot of the time, having flexibility with your menus is very important to to avoid food waste.

Speaker1:
Being able to react, then adapt.

Speaker2:
Exactly.

Speaker1:
So whatever they had.

Speaker2:
Whatever they had, listen, it was coming to the end. What were they going to do with it? Probably wanting to land onto the land again for composting, but we were able to work out a price and like if it was 100 kilo beetroot, which has happened, like we got 100 kilo of beetroot, like, so you know. But then we had we had avenues inside to deal with 100 kilo of beetroot of fermenting, pickling. You know, it’s the salad bars of the main courses like it didn’t last. Yeah.

Speaker1:
I remember you very proudly walking me around the cold room and it looked very similar to the cold room here, actually. Lots of jars of various things bubbling away and all of that, you know? So it was like it was really cool. And like obviously then the opportunity to for you and the company, I guess, to sort of educate and surprise people around, like climate friendly menus and zero waste and so on. Can you give us a couple of examples of like, yeah, zero waste recipes and things you were you were doing there? Yeah.

Speaker2:
So I suppose to kind of explain it, we were a little bit different from other tech companies. It’s like we didn’t provide multiple different options and services. We had one lunch menu, and that lunch menu over the week would cover every every test, every want and every need in the office. So most of the vegetarian dishes were vegan. We had a meat dish. We had a vegetarian dish. We’d have two veg options, two starches, a simplified protein option as well in their soup. Vegan or vegetarian or or a meat based soup. But in our production we had the left trust was a separate kitchen, so we do most of our production there and there’s always byproducts that come out of there. So we’re left with all these byproducts and the chefs on the service and producing the lunch at the time didn’t have time to kind of process it. So we had a craft program that was at the time wasn’t doing that much. You know, they were they were supporting the other chefs when they needed to, but they were kind of making stuff for breakfast. We’re making specialized stuff from the salad bars, you know, like like different types of dressings, hummus and all that kind of thing, you know, and then the evening, then they’ll be doing like healthy cookies or fruit, fruit bliss balls with dried fruit protein balls or flapjacks, granola, that kind of thing.

Speaker2:
So we always used to kind of distribute snacks around the office crudités with different types of dips running 4:00 to keep the blood sugar levels up with healthy, healthy, wholesome food. So I started developing the craft program for it to start taking in all the byproducts that’s coming in from the various kitchens. So we had two kitchens at that stage, so we got systems in place where we started processing it all. So it’s pickling. A lot of fermentation work was going on, you know, with the leaves like we used to have a lot of cauliflower leaves. We’d be fermenting cauliflower, kimchi, sauerkraut, that kind of thing. We also process and process them down so we could use them stir fries. But the key with the byproducts is that the product, when it comes in, it has to be fresh. There’s no point in having a byproduct. And you’re looking at it and it’s old and wilted. It’s no good. It’s gone. It’s been, it’s been it’s taken too long to get get to you. And that was the key.

Speaker1:
It has to be quick.

Speaker2:
It has to be quick. And that’s the key thing about food waste as well, is, you know, your byproducts are they’re fresh. They’re like a vibrant new ingredient. And I think that’s the thing that I trying to, to, to get across is that I think the chefs need to change the psyche of how they look at byproducts. I think they need to stop looking at it as a trimming or something going into the bin. They need start looking at it as something that beautiful that can be used in something. And example, if you get a lovely head of cauliflower to come in, you’ve got these lovely crisp, fresh leaves on the outside. If they get sliced off, you leave the leaves here and then you start working on the florets. You’ve just worked on the frets, but now you’ve got the leaves there as well. So I think don’t think, but I know, I think we need to change the way we think about it and afford these leaves. The amount of respect that the frets got and the prep. So we need we need to look at it as we need to spend time on this, because this is a gradient the same way the frets was ingredient. And we can do so many different things out of them as well.

Speaker1:
We’ve become like, it’s extraordinary how kind of myopic we are about vegetables actually, that like this is the part we eat and the rest we throw out when actually you’re absolutely right. Like they’re just different ingredients, like often just just as delicious and just as healthy for you and all of that. And I think we.

Speaker2:
Can take some inspiration from like different countries. I mean, even Pakistan, India where there’s a lot of vegetarian cooking, like if you see the cauliflower, like the leaves are going into that cauliflower and they’re beautiful inside them as well, you know, so, you know, and there’s loads of recipes there.

Speaker1:
I remember seeing in a market in France they were selling like the with chard leaves, you know, the actual stalks. They were selling the stalks and I presume people were using them in gratins and, and stir fries and whatever. Like that’s great. But that’s like, you know, that the stalks were for sale is such a French thing, isn’t it? It’s like we’re actually going to buy the things that normal people throw out.

Speaker2:
It’s brilliant. And like there’s been multiple times where I’ve done actually a whole service by just using cauliflower leaves and broccoli stalks cut into the stir fry. So that’s my whole veg for that day, you know. And it’s just an awesome feeling to do that. And and to be able to, to say that nothing went into the bin.

Speaker1:
So c’mere. I could talk for about five hours about Airbnb because I just, I was just blown away by it and any, any kind of, um, software engineers or techie people listening to this. If your next job, you could do a lot worse than move to Airbnb, I think. But I want to move on because your next career move I think is like probably even more interesting. So you ended up as as, um, performance chef for the RFU and, and hence my reference at the start about the autumn, the autumn test series. Uh go Ireland. Three wins from three and all that. Um, but obviously like what, what what jumps off the page for me about that job and particularly for someone who’s interested in sustainability and is interested in eating more plants and all that, like rugby player is obviously very, very specific need in terms of nutrition and protein. And the stereotype is that they’re going to need loads of meat. And you know, how how do you approach this, this then while, you know, trying to have climate friendly menus and sustainable and zero waste menus and so on with the needs for, I’m assuming, the needs around nutrition trump everything else when it comes to professional athletes like these guys. But how do you how do you approach that then?

Speaker2:
So my menus would be kind of written in advance. So I normally do a four week menu, rotate it three times for each season. So when I get that menu done, I would give it to the performance nutritionist who would put it through Neutronics. And 99% of the time it’s actually fine, because leaving Airbnb with a health food culture, you know, so we know deep fat fryer, all the food was like was made was nutritionally dense, homemade food, seasonal, locally sourced. And so I brought that into the earth with me. Now regards to the meat. I mean, yes, that’s true, but also it’s not true. You know, when the guys come into me, you know, they’ll eat a well-balanced meal, you know, you know, they’re big plates, the big guys, because they’ve got a high calorie intake for that day.

Speaker1:
Like, where are you feeding them? Like just just to give people a sense of this. This is like on training days, on match days that you’re actually providing.

Speaker2:
Yeah. So I’m.

Speaker1:
Only training.

Speaker2:
Yeah. I’m based in the High Performance Centre. So basically all I do is cater for their needs during their training sessions or training camps. You know, a lot of that’s got to do with recovery. Like so you’d have the three hours of recovery. You know, you have rehydrate refuel or rehydrate. So your your liquids you bring in like so we’d have a key for smoothie different one every day. So when they come up they’ll have the key for smoothie. So that’s the fluids and refuel. So that’s the carbohydrate content and then repair which is the protein. Now the lads they’ll come in and they’ll have a balanced meal. They’ll come in, they’ll take a bit of all the solids and they’ll have a soup and they’ll have have a decent plate of food. Now sometimes when there’s a really nice meat dish on, like they might kind of overload on it like, but but overall, you know, they’re very disciplined with, with the portions they take. And and I suppose going back to your question is how to make it appealing to be to do like, like reduce meat in that like we do do other options, like we do have a lot of beans and pulses in the salad bar and the soups and the main courses as well. A lot of nuts, you know, we corporate nuts where we can. Do a lot of bone broths with a lot of college into it. We use meat as a seasoning sometimes, so sometimes when we do a gammon, we have a gammon on for lunch. I keep that stock. Now that stock could be a source for the gammon or it could be source for something else. Or it could be a soup. But whatever trimmings come off that gammon we normally use, kind of like for a carbonara for the sevens would be more of a carb focused smaller plates for the Ireland sevens teams.

Speaker2:
So if you put in the trimmings from the from the gammon in there, they’ve got the protein from the from the egg and the and the parmesan as well. So you’re kind of you’re kind of making it more sustainable by reducing meat and just kind of being a little bit smart of it, smart about it, you know, even with meat soups as well, like folds or ramen or, you know, any of the meat broths we do as well. Like, you know, you’re only kind of you’re only using a little bit of meat, tofu and egg dishes as well. Like, you know, we put different kinds of egg dishes. If we’re using egg yolks for a sauce, we’re left egg whites. So what I do is I kind of spread the egg whites on a tray with a silicone mat and drizzle with olive oils, olives, basil and sundried tomatoes. You put it in the oven for 90 degrees for 15 minutes, and you’ve got this lovely sheet of white egg. You just cut off the sections. That always creates kind of a bit of a conversation on the salad bar. Go like, what’s that? You know, so things a little bit differently. There’s no meat that creates a bit of interest. And it always gets always gets, you know, devoured really I suppose. But then there’s other ways as well. There’s a company called basal. They’re doing a spent grain. So spent grain from the breweries to go around. And it’s so they’re dehydrated and make into a flour. It’s not really flour. It’s more of a, it’s more of a super grain kind of mix. But like a.

Speaker1:
Is it barley or what.

Speaker2:
Barley, oats and hops. Barley. Oats and hops. And the amount of spent grain discus thrower notes, you know, globally is like hundreds of millions of tons every year. It goes to compost or animal feed. But these guys are doing something great. They’re kind of reducing, reintroducing them back into the food system. So it’s lovely malty kind of flour that you can put into your like, the guys are having pancakes. I will make the pancakes. Oh, two eggs, you know, high protein sources. But this flour grain has a high source of protein in it. But also they’re messing around with with the liquid that’s coming out of it. So I’ve asked them for like a press liquid, and I’ve sent it out to me a while ago, and I’ve actually made a kind of a soy substitute out of it, which like, it’s identical, identical to a key cup, which is an Indonesian soy sauce. You wouldn’t know the difference. But the thing about it is it’s local. It’s coming from up the road, and instead of taking it from the other side of the world to come here, this is what I’m using. That’s brilliant.

Speaker1:
Key cup I saw some videos you posted on Twitter recently showing the food laid out for the squad and as you say, like it’s there’s lots of plant protein in there, lots of sort of like some of the things you’ve mentioned, the kefir and, and um, uh, tofu salads and date breads and all sorts. Like are any of the players kind of do they need convincing to try new, new things or are they, do they come across as adventurous eaters, or are they so structured that they’re afraid to try new things they.

Speaker2:
Like, they like something out of the norm, so they like something different? Yeah. And it creates it creates a topic, a conversation about it. You know, if you’re putting stuff on, you say, what’s this? And then you explain it, you know, and you know, yeah, they’re really, really adventurous and they really, really love trying new dishes. And as I said, like I try to do international dishes, but using as much heritage ingredients as I possibly can to make those and, you know, it makes it makes the camp more enjoyable. You know, when you have an intense training session, you kind of look forward to coming up to a really nice meal to kind of switch off.

Speaker1:
It strikes me Mars like, um, we’re talking about food done right in the workplace, effectively. Like you’ve you’ve been, um, cooking for one of the biggest companies in the world and some of the best athletes in the world. The best, you know, the best at what they do in the world. Um, and I think you’re like the fact that you’re bringing these like this, this focus on sustainability and zero waste and local and seasonal food into those environments, I think is just is just such a credit to you. But if if there’s one thing you could change about how the working world eats, what what would you like to see changing on a, on a global level?

Speaker2:
Yeah, I think in the global level, like I think the way we eat, you know, the world is changing dramatically and the way we eat is contributing to to this. So I think we all need to kind of take a step back and just just be aware of what we’re eating and how we’re eating and change. Change your habits. You know, you don’t have to have like a, I suppose, a complete change in a week, but make incremental changes over time and get used to trying new things, you know, so local and seasonal is key in that, but also just not buying. Unethical ingredients is a massive one for me as well. So, you know, look at look at the life cycle of the foods. You know, how much water travel, how many, what’s the carbon footprint of it. You know, you know, how long has it been in storage? You know, what’s the nutritional value of this now? You know, so it’s kind of being a little bit savvy about that. But I think the second thing for me would be food equality as well, you know, you know, accessible of healthy, nutritious food for everyone, you know, and this is a global thing. And even here in Ireland, like 1 in 5 schoolchildren go to school hungry or bed hungry because there’s not enough food at home. Like, and that’s 20% of the, of the, of the, of the children in Ireland. You know, you look at the US has been this wealthy country and there’s 50 million people in the US every day that don’t have enough food to put on the table, you know, and I think we like governments need to be doing more to help the developing countries to be self-reliant and promote food security more because the people on the ground locally, you know, they set their own rules on the food. You know, what they can and what they can’t grow. And what’s better for the area? What promotes biodiversity more than anything else, instead of like these large, monocultural crops, you know, that’s having the opposite effect. We need to be looking at food security for all.

Speaker1:
Brilliant way to finish Mars. And I think it’s fair to say obviously you can take full credit for Ireland beating the All Blacks. Well, thank you very much. You should be looking for a raise. Whatever they’re paying you, you need, they need to double it right away. So congratulations. Thank you. Um, and thanks a million for taking the time to talk to us and keep. Keep fighting the good fight.

Speaker2:
Cool, cool. Thanks, mate.

Speaker1:
Such a deadly story, buzz. Isn’t it like just that passion that Mars has to to eliminate food waste and going the extra mile for for for the planet, you know, I think is reminds me a lot of JB but here in Gro HQ but like I think just the the idea of these massive rugby players like chowing down on roasted squash and hazelnut salsa and wild rice and you know, it just it just can’t, can’t help bring a smile to your face when you think about it. But like, I really like that it challenges as well that notion that that, um, you know, vegetables can’t, can’t equate to performance either. So he’s, he’s combining kind of a climate friendly diet, um, with, with peak performance. And that’s just getting it all to taste as good as it does then is just some, some tribute to him, you know.

Speaker3:
Absolutely. Yeah. Mick. And I suppose to prove that point, we have a clip here from Irish rugby legend Paul O’Connell talking about Maurice directly. If we can play that.

Speaker4:
Certainly the guy, the chef in the High Performance centre, I’m sure you spoke to some of the Ulster players is an incredible guy called Maurice Mageean. The best food I’ve ever eaten. The players love going into the high performance centre.

Speaker1:
So that is that some some quote from Paulie there? I’d say Maurice will have that. Um, I’d say that’s his ringtone on his, on his mobile at this stage class.

Speaker3:
How do you get that on your LinkedIn profile is the big question. Yeah. Um, so from one Irish icon to another, we’re now going to head to the home of Guinness. Saint James’s Gate is not just home to a famous brewery. It’s also home to a famous garden, famous in our eyes at least. Our community manager, Molly is back to speak to our next guests. Molly, how’s it going there?

Speaker5:
Hiya, Barry.

Speaker3:
Can you tell us about this week’s star?

Speaker5:
Where are you? Sure can. So this week we are heading over to Dublin, chatting to Tim Holmes, a senior executive at Diageo who spearheaded the movement of food growing at the heart of Saint James’s Gate. He had a lot of wisdom about how to start a food garden in your workplace. But we began today’s conversation on a more personal note how he started growing food in the first place.

Speaker1:
My parents and grandparents were keen growers and always grew some of their own, their own food on both sides of the family. So I was always being exposed to food growing from from my earliest years.

Speaker6:
And, you know, obviously mainly when you’re a child, it’s about picking things and enjoying the fresh raspberries or peas or whatever it is that are growing and always helping out around the place. And I guess that that gets into you. And when I left home, I always seemed to have a few herbs growing on windowsills and patios or balconies or whatever it was. And those herbs travelled around with me as I moved around the place. And eventually, when I got my own house, I planted those herbs in the garden and then started to grow a few things as well. Things that I kind of thought I knew how to grow or grow. Rather because there are things that are grown. I’ve seen being grown through my childhood and started on a very small scale, and guess I’ve been doing it ever since. There’s always something to discover and always some something new to try. And I think that’s fascinating and always, you know, keeps the engagement going with a child or with with an adult in the workplace or just just in their own garden. There’s always something to learn.

Speaker5:
So you have this built up knowledge and interest and passion bringing it to Saint James’s Gate, and suddenly there’s an opportunity to start a garden there. What was that like? Yeah.

Speaker6:
So it was an idea that was bubbling along for a couple of years, and it takes a while to get these things up off the ground in, you know, in a corporate environment or, you know, or, you know, an industrial site like we have in Saint James’s Gate. Um, but once the garden was established or built and we can maybe come back to how we did that later on, but once it was built, actually people naturally gravitate towards it. And we put the call out very publicly for people who are interested to come along. And interestingly, most of the people that came along weren’t gardeners. They were people who had had a passing interest and were keen to sort of help out and learn on the way. Um, and, you know, so we had a lot of people beginning their gardening journey or their food growing journey, maybe more specifically with those in the garden in Saint James’s Gate. Um, and that’s quite a it’s quite an honor in a way, isn’t it, to bring people along that journey and to see them develop and see their enthusiasm grow as as they got more experience and success under their belt and take home a punnet of something that they’ve helped to grow, that’s really life affirming, I think.

Speaker5:
Tell us about the planning and the setup.

Speaker6:
Yeah, so obviously we were working with a, you know, a fairly limited area that had no soil or had a little bit of soil in it. Um, and so we, you know, we kind of figured out we’d have to go the, the raised bed route. Um, and to do that is going to be. There was quite a lot of effort involved in building those and bringing the soil in or whatever, and we realized that we weren’t going to do that through just employee people. We’d need to to get a bit of money together to pay somebody to do that. So we got some senior sponsorship going in the organisation from a couple of sectors, but people senior in the organisation who could support us from a financial perspective as well as a kind of, you know, role support within the organisation perspective. And so we got some money together, got a budget together and did the build one spring. And once that was done, you know, it was quite easy then to engage people around the site to come along and join the garden team and to be part of that, that process of growing on within the within the workplace.

Speaker5:
The idea of the self sustaining garden is quite an interesting one, and I think you can probably you can plan for that depending on what you select to grow as well. Could you speak to that?

Speaker6:
Yeah, yeah. So I guess you will have seen what we have in the garden. So so as I mentioned, there’s a courtyard area and all around the edge we have raised beds and in those beds we have fruit trees and we have a variety of fruit trees as well. We have apples as you’d expect. We have pears, we have plums and we have cherries. And the all the old kind of look after themselves. And we do a little bit of pruning once a year, but otherwise they, they do their own thing and produce a lovely harvest in the autumn time within the central beds. Then we have four big central beds and they’re used primarily for vegetable growing, although we do have some corners put aside for fruit bushes. So soft fruit like redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries and herbs. So the kind of perennial herbs like rosemary or so. Yeah, they are perennial and they are evergreen herbs and thyme. And we’ve avoided the invasive herbs like mint and lemon balm because we knew we’d struggle to keep on top of those. So that the central bed infrastructure is there and is four beds. So we do a four year rotation. We move things around so that we kind of build that fertility and avoid the pests and diseases you can get without rotating things. So there’s kind of a vague plan based on that, but that’s about it. So it’s more of a communal decision than about what we grow in those beds each year. And that’s often based on what the success of last year.

Speaker5:
And I would like to attest to that planning, because when we were in the garden a few months ago, it was at the end of an almost two year period of not being able to access the garden due to various lockdowns and various restrictions. And I can say that there were tomatoes and there were apples, and the plants were growing in spite of us, in spite of us not being there. They they still wish to to do what they do best. And I would love to add as well, that there was one of the things that was growing and that was the most happy was the hop wall.

Speaker6:
Yeah. So I guess the early days in the garden, we thought, we’re in a brewery here, we’re in the home of Guinness. We should try growing some hops and hops generally aren’t grown in Ireland, although they used to be. So hops were grown historically in Ireland commercially to supply some of the breweries around around the country. And it’s great to see actually, some of the smaller breweries these days are now growing some of their own hops. So we decided we better try growing some hops here, see what happens. So we selected some varieties that we were, you know, were kind of. Maybe suited to the climate. So it’s a cool islands of cooler climate. So there are some historical varieties that are suited to Ireland. So we chose some of those plants and planted them against a very tall wall, because hops grow really tall. And to our surprise, they’ve absolutely loved being there. And they give us a great, great harvest of hops every, every September. And we, you know, until until guess the recent couple of years, we would have had a hop picking day where we would have a large crew of employees in to pick the hops.

Speaker6:
And you’ll see, you might have seen them. The hops are like a little cone of A of A from the plant. So they’re quite an unusual thing and they’re very sticky. So the hop and they’re very aromatic, which is obviously why we use them in beer, because it gives a greater aroma for the beer. And the bitterness as well. Um, but so the hop growing day is, is always a joyful day on the site where there’s great aroma, a bit of buzz and very sticky hands as well. At the end of it, the hands smell great for a few days afterwards. Um, and we then we then dry the hops. Hops generally need to be dried before they can be used. So we have a couple of albums that we put them in to dry them off a little bit, and then we would use them later in the year to make a small brew for, for the gardeners. We breathe out in the Open Gate Brewery, which is our small experimental brewery, and we brew hops, sorry, brew beer for the gardeners and once or twice it’s also appeared on tap within the Open Gate Brewery taproom as well.

Speaker5:
I mean, that sounds like a huge success. And I’m curious, are there any other successes that you or some, or maybe a better way of phrasing that is, what would you classify as success in this workplace community garden that you’ve been involved with, have involved with heavily for the last six years?

Speaker7:
Yeah. So so for me, a.

Speaker6:
Successful garden is one that is used. It’s not just a garden for the gardeners, it’s a garden for everybody who’s on site. So it needs to be accessible in every sense. Um, so accessible in terms of people being able to get into it, but also accessible that if you do walk into it, there’s a picnic table for you to have your lunch or a cup of coffee out or benches around the place. So. So to me, it’s about creating a resource for the employees, not a garden for the gardeners, although there is that aspect to it as well. So the space is for everybody within the within the business, I think. And to me that’s success. And to see people from all sorts of functions within the business, all in the garden together, meeting people they’ve never met before, is is wonderful. Seeing people walking in with their sandwiches and picking a few salad leaves to put into the sandwich, or picking an apple or a plum or a strawberry as part of their lunch. That’s great, and we encourage people to do that. Um, and again, it’s not just the gardeners, it’s for, for the employees. Um, so always we always encourage people to, to pick and sample things as, as they’re in there.

Speaker6:
And if we’re gardening and there’s people sitting around, they might show an interest or we might engage them and they might start growing, or they might start joining us. Um, and really surprisingly, we found many people in the garden had never seen some of these things growing before. Um, so blackcurrants redcurrants. They were surprised people to see that they could be grown in Ireland on a bush very easily. Um, similarly with plums, um, and pears, you know, people, I think quite a few of our employees had never seen those growing. And actually people were asking me, what are those on that tree? Are they plums? And, you know, it’s yeah, they are. And try one. They’re delicious. Um, and that was quite a surprise to me that, that, that, that disconnection had actually happened within, within a certain population. Um, and it’s, it’s a way to address that I think as well. So people see food being grown and it helps them connect with it. And it creates that, that food empathy. Guess that that guy talks about a lot. It’s really important.

Speaker5:
And that potentially was an unexpected success.

Speaker6:
Yeah, it was hugely, hugely. Yeah. And I guess if if you’re a gardener and grower, you kind of forget about some of these things. And it’s important to, to to appreciate that and realize that I think as we garden and move along along that, that trajectory of learning.

Speaker5:
You’ve mentioned, I mean, there’s a huge number of successes in what you’ve just described there. The very fact of of growing the stone fruits, growing the hops, the getting the rosemary established and happy, these are all successes. But then, as you say, it’s the space to meet people outside of your your work setting in your break and to connect over how great the raspberry tastes or having never seen a plum tree before. It’s a really strong strengthening activity.

Speaker6:
It absolutely is. And, you know, I’ve seen people from, you know, massively different work backgrounds and ages working shoulder to shoulder, digging the ground for the potatoes or harvesting things. We’ve quite a lot of young people who help in the garden in the gardening crew, and it’s great to get that engagement with a few older lemons as well. You know, one of our gardeners retired last week, actually the age of 65, and he brought a great deal to the party. And you’d often see him working alongside people in their 20s. And, you know, these people might not have ever had a chance to talk to each other. So we’ve created that opportunity for them to engage and share learnings and share stories. And that is fantastic. In a workplace because it creates alliances. And that that keeps the gardening reference, I guess, cross-fertilisation between between people from different different departments, different parts of the business, but creating friendships and Satoshi has spin offs into the workplace as well, because then you get to know more people and you might begin to work with them in the future. And as you do so, you’ve already got a relationship established. And I think that strengthens the workplace for sure.

Speaker5:
Definitely going to poach that phrase. Tim. Cross-fertilization. It’s a very good one. And I would imagine also that the very act of getting your hands in the soil is a very good de-stressor.

Speaker6:
So it absolutely is. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it’s funny, you know, we have people coming into the garden for just half an hour at lunchtime and they may garden. They may not, they might just sit down and have a chat and chat with the people who are gardening, but they physically change over that half an hour, sometimes from being a bit frazzled, coming in to to walking away, you know, maybe with dirty hands. But they’ve done something very tangible and very, very different in that half an hour. And I think that can make a real difference. You know, particularly as we’re in a world now where a lot of people are spending a lot of time on the screens, on zoom teams or whatever it is, and getting that half hour away in fresh air or daylight or natural light and connecting with nature a little bit gives energy, I think, and, you know, sets people up for the afternoon better. Maybe there’s a very strong link to employee wellbeing, which, you know, is is not something we talk about really overtly, but but you know, we get strong support from our HR team around the garden for that reason. And you know, it’s there’s no agenda there. It’s just it helps it helps employee wellbeing. And it’s recognised to do such I think.

Speaker5:
Well Tim I mean talking to you makes me want to go out and start a garden in my workplace, which is incredibly ironic because there’s quite a few gardens in my workplace, but I feel incredibly inspired, so I’ll have to funnel my inspiration into something else. Maybe I’ll start a community garden in my local park. It’s been a real pleasure to speak with you, and thank you very much, Tim.

Speaker1:
Suppose I think of of all of the satisfying things in the world. Drinking a pint of Guinness is probably one of them. But if you grew the hops yourself, I think that’s a new, different scale of smog altogether. Absolutely. And they’re actually they’re a deadly thing to grow hops like they’re I’ve, I’ve, um, there’s a there’s a garden called Coakley Gardens down in Wexford where they grow some hops as well, I think, um, and they just get so enormous, like they’re incredibly impressive, like growing up against a wall. They go up to kind of 4 or 5m in height, you know. Um, so I think that’s just class. And I do love that idea that, um, they’re, you know, different employees from kind of different different departments and different levels within the organization getting to meet each other. You know, I think harks back to that idea that food growing is the great it’s the great kind of leveler, you know, um, between people. Um, so I think, I think that’s class and really proud that there’s a joy garden in the iconic James’s Gate. Um, I think I think, you know, there there’s moves afoot. I think with, with, um, the likes of Morris and what we see in, in Diageo and so on.

Speaker1:
Um, like heading, heading in the right direction. And I think we’ve even come across an example over the last few years of, of a tech company that actually hired a horticulturist. So they had a, they had space in a, you know, in a, in a kind of classic industrial estate. It was a bit of land there. And they hired hired a grower to grow the veg. And that was then making its way into the, into the, the canteen kind of the corporate catering scenario. And so I think it’s something that’s very, very doable. And I guess every, every company, if they had a small amount of space, they could move in that direction of what we do here in grow HQ, where the kitchen is kind of, you know, reliant on the the produce coming out of the veg patch. I think that’s, um, involving employees like in the food system in that way and helping them to make better food choices. It’s just got to be a better place to go. And it ticks all the boxes for, I suppose, the management teams in these companies, they’re motivating their employees. They’re they’re, you know, helping them become more sustainable and just creating a really top notch food environment as well.

Speaker3:
Yeah. And I think for any company that is trying to figure out what to do about climate change, you know where they’re going to go. A great first step is just get everyone talking about it, get everyone thinking about it, and let those sort of those conversations across departments, you know, lead to new ways of thinking across, across the business in any which way. And many companies are taking this approach, including several with ourselves as part of Grow Circle, our workplace engagement program. And, Molly, you’ve been delivering this program to all kinds of companies, big and small, this year. Tell us what you’ve learned. How can a company kick off a food growing program for their employees, and.

Speaker5:
What is needed for a workplace garden is quite similar to what’s needed for a community garden. You need a budget. You need a rolling, you need a start up budget and a rolling budget. And you also need an organizational plan. You need people who are going to show up regularly to keep the garden ticking over. And finally, you need to plant for sustainability. Plant perennials, plant things that don’t require too much, too much care or attention. I would like to say that you don’t have to have a garden to have a growing initiative. You can have a growing initiative in your team across Team Inter-Departmental. We also heard from Tim today that growing together can forge bonds that wouldn’t normally be forged in any other way. You might meet somebody that you would never meet in any other work setting, and that will be of benefit for when you do have to work with them in the future. If you find it difficult to access land, if you find it difficult to access funding, why not consider a Grow Circle program? These will support you in engaging in growing together without the challenges of the community. Garden in a workplace setup.

Speaker3:
Beautiful, Molly, thank you so much. Thanks, Barry. Thanks so much for listening. You can get involved and find out more at geidai. And to say thanks, you can also get 20% off anything at our online shop by using the discount code G 20.

Speaker1:
And remember that we are a social enterprise, which means all income that we generate goes back into funding the mission to get the world to grow their own food. And we couldn’t do this podcast without the support of Rethink Ireland and the Community Foundation for Ireland.

Speaker3:
In our next episode, we will chat about the food we eat in restaurants as a potential force to end hunger and meet the chef turned grower at Michelin star restaurants.

Speaker1:
I’m sure if you want food done right, grow it yourself. Until next time, happy growing! Please subscribe to Food Done Right, the food sustainability podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including generate automated summaries powered by AI, powerful integrations and APIs, share transcripts, secure transcription and file storage, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.

food-done-right-in-restaurants.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

food-done-right-in-restaurants.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Mick Kelly, and this is food done, right!

Speaker2:
Chefs really have an ability to create things that we love. And so working with chefs is really key to also get them to think about things like food waste, to think about biodiversity, because if they’ve got that information, they can then also guide people in a way towards other choices.

Speaker3:
You can eat in the restaurant and then you can walk down and you can see the produce grow and you can see how it grows. I mean, I didn’t know how some of these vegetables grew. I think everybody should understand that this is where their food is coming from.

Speaker1:
Growing food completely changed the course of history. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become entirely removed from where our food comes from. But if we grow food, reconnect, and care about our food, we can change the future’s course.

Speaker4:
Noma in Copenhagen has been named World’s best restaurant five times. In 2018, they stunned the world with a vegetarian menu headlined by a tower of shawarma kebab. Only instead of beef or lamb on that juicy rotating spit, it was made from nature’s ugliest vegetable, celeriac. It gave rise to an online craze as a potential plant based meat alternative, and you never know, it could prove to be the solution to late night food done right. Hey, Mick.

Speaker1:
How’s it going, buzz McNab?

Speaker4:
I know you love celeriac, but would you be tempted by a doner kebab?

Speaker1:
I wouldn’t know, I would if it was a shawarma kebab from Noma, though. I’d be. I’d be well into that. It’s a great old vegetable that I’m pleased to say I was. I was growing celeriac before Noma, when I was just a glint in his eyes. And it’s a brilliant veg to grow, you know that, because, um, I think it’s like. It’s like storable celery. That’s the way I think about celeriac, because celery kind of. When it’s ready, it’s ready. It doesn’t really hold all that well in the ground. Whereas celeriac, just like it’s like tough as old boots, just sits in the ground waiting for you to, to eat it right through the winter. So I try and grow about maybe 30 of them each year, and they’ll just sit in the ground and we take kind of one a week or whatever. Yeah, right through winter into even into kind of mid, mid spring, maybe even late spring. So it’s one of those really odd veg where you can be sowing the seeds for the following year and still eating the seed, the, the veg from the previous year. Absolutely brilliant and tastes fantastic. Love, absolutely love it.

Speaker4:
That’s an interesting one Mick, because I harvested the last of my own few celeriac. Not quite 30 for me this year, but I harvested them this weekend. Kind of in a rush just thinking that they had to come out of the ground. So another lesson learned.

Speaker1:
Not at all. They’ll, they’ll they’ve got that big, big gnarly skin, you know, so they’re really happy in the soil till you need them. And, and actually, unusually for a kind of a root vegetable, you can kind of, um, well, not a root vegetable, but a winter vegetable. You can kind of you can use it for all the sort of stock pot purposes that you’d think of, but it can also be eaten raw like a celeriac rémoulade, just a little bit of mayo and yogurt or whatever. And it’s it’s a brilliant kind of alternative to cabbage for slaws in the winter. I think as well. So yeah, really, really good. And I think it kind of it prompts though your intro there about Noma and like I love the line about it’s stunning the world with its vegetarian menu. You know, because it’s kind of like, um, that’s the kind of stuff that happens, isn’t it, like that, that these, these kind of, um, these really these, these restaurants that are sort of out front leading the food, food trends that they do become trends like, and they, they kind of, um, you know, certain foods then become popular.

Speaker1:
It’s like the power that the likes of Jamie Oliver has or whatever, like he mentioned something on the show and it sells out in Sainsbury’s the next day, you know, that kind of that kind of vibe. And so it speaks, I think, to the power that chefs have. And like, how did foods like avocados and quinoa and sweet potatoes become like, become a thing for us here in Ireland? Probably because chefs made them made them so for us, you know, so, um, restaurants can can create and trends and they can be either good or bad, like, and I think we know with avocados and sweet potatoes, like the kind of the damage they do, um, completely unsustainable on this side of the world. And yet for some reason, we just consider them better than our than our own homegrown veg here. And and think, think about them as super in inverted commas when when they’re probably no more super than any of the other veg we grow, you know.

Speaker4:
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, celeriac is kind of a mad thing. You know, it looks crazy and it’s very, very easy to, to walk past in a supermarket, but as you say grows so well here, you know, it likes the wet ground and, and it’s sort of it’s due it’s time in the sun a little bit and, and you know, for, for myself, you know, it’s become a bit of a staple and not just for my own kind of homemade efforts at the celeriac shawarma. But, you know, just as you said for slaws and just roasting it up and it’s, it’s an incredibly tasty thing that, that probably, you know, needs a bit more PR um, and I suppose I’m wondering, you know, do you have any sort of similar, similar stories? Would you credit any restaurant with changing anything about the way that you eat?

Speaker1:
Well, you’re going to say, you know, this is typical of me to mention grow HQ. But I think for me, a little bit of a revelation was around, around fish and, and I think I never really thought about fish as seasonal, you know, and which, which fish is in season and which isn’t and so on. And JB and our fish supplier, a guy called Tony Kelly, have really kind of educated me on that, on that score. Um, and, you know, starting to think a bit more about when fish is in, in season and when it’s not. And is it caught from, you know, day boats going out or the big trawlers kind of, you know, um with the impact. That they have on on the seabed and so on. And I’ve got really into a fish called Megrim, which is, which is kind of most, you know, most people certainly I hadn’t heard of it. And, and yet it’s a really sustainable all year round fish that’s available in Irish waters. You know, it’s never farmed. And and your fishmonger will probably be delighted. You’ll take it off off his hands because he won’t he won’t be able to sell it otherwise. And so it’s an example, I suppose, of a when a restaurant leads the way on making something like that part of the menu that it can become, you know, it can become the norm or become a trend. And I think that speaks to the to the power of it, you know. Yeah, that’s that’s fascinating.

Speaker4:
I’ve never heard of Megrim myself. So don’t ask me to spell it. But but you know, like what comes to mind for me is, you know, Pollock in Ireland is one of those fish that’s, you know, it’s it’s, you know, all over the Irish waters but not typically kind of seen as a, you know, a good fish to eat. And I was actually going back to the last episode about about Google in the workplace. They’ve introduced a lot of, you know, lesser, lesser eaten fish as well in their canteens. That was part of that, that story too. So, um, and I think fisheries in particular is, is a really interesting area where, you know, purchasing power is going to have a major effect. And, and I think it’s it’s an interesting segway into our first guest today, Paul Newnham, who is a major champion for the role, chefs and restaurants and procurement power and all of those things can play in creating a food system that makes good food for all possible. Can you tell us a bit about him?

Speaker1:
Yeah, he’s he’s another another really interesting guy because he like we’ve we’ve known him for 4 or 5 years because of the Chef’s Manifesto, which he’s going to tell us all about shortly. Um, but he works for um, an organisation called the SDG Advocacy Hub. So we’ve I think most people know about the Sustainable Development Goals and, and, you know, trying to achieve those goals before 2030, the end of 2030. And and so the UN set up the SDG two Advocacy Hub specifically to look at SDG two, which is all around food and and ending ending hunger in fact is the core of it. But it includes sustainable food as well. And and Paul heads up that the Advocacy hub and has just got a fantastic he’s a fantastic sort of system thinker is the way I would I would sort of consider him and I remember having we brought him to, to Waterford for, um, a gathering in recent times and he was on the stage in the Theatre Royal, and he was talking about, you know, the world as a crop rotation, you know, growing different crops in different types of the world and moving it around, you know, on a, on a continent basis kind of thing. So he’s just got this, this I suppose necessarily he’s got this mad, um, kind of global view of the food system. And, and I also like the fact that he’s always speaking to us from various exotic locations around the world. You know, he’s on a beach in Barbados for a zoom call or he’s, you know, um, calling us from somewhere in Africa for, for a meeting or whatever. And so be interesting to find out where he’s calling us from today. So let’s jump in and have a listen to Paul.

Speaker2:
So I’m back in Melbourne in my home town and it’s 30 degrees today. Beautiful blue sky and it’s about 7:00 in the evening. So it’s daylight savings and it’s nice and complete. Opposite to I’m sure what, what you’re experiencing at the moment.

Speaker1:
Completely. I won’t even tell you what it’s like here, but it’s definitely not that. How’s the growing going this year? I know you do. You do a bit yourself at home.

Speaker2:
Yeah. So this year it’s been. It’s been interesting. I started I’ve been traveling a little bit and so I’ve started planting a little later. We also got a puppy and puppies and gardens are challenging. Our puppy particularly likes to dig and we have very sandy soils, so that’s been a bit challenging. I’ve been erecting little fences around the garden beds and trying to keep the puppy from just running full pelt through, you know, the young plants.

Speaker1:
But also in in the background there actually, he’s got to make an occasional guest appearance, I think.

Speaker2:
Is he. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He has he has at this time of day he kind of gets a bit, she gets a bit noisy. But. And then we’ve also had um, yeah, we’ve also got a new, this new veggie pod thing that I was just telling you about that it’s kind of a different growing setup. So we’re, we’re testing different elements this year to try and see how we can go. But you know, as you go into summer, the Australian heat gets pretty hot. So yeah, you got to keep the water up to plants. And with sandy soil it’s it’s it’s challenging.

Speaker1:
So you’ve been campaigning to fight poverty and food insecurity your entire career, Paul. And we’ll get on to the to the work you do at the moment with the UN. But like what what originally motivated you to to choose the sort of activist path in your life?

Speaker2:
Yeah. Look, I was very lucky that I grew up with parents that lived and worked around the world, often with some very vulnerable communities. And so I got to see different parts of life, and I got to appreciate the differences in our world and also be exposed to some of the inequalities. And I think when you start to understand how the world, um, the breadth of experiences in our world of people that do have a kind of born with huge opportunity, all kinds of assets, the ability to have good health care, go to school, have enough food to eat, have, you know, government support to kind of fill the gaps, all of those kinds of things. And then you see some communities which don’t have that, and they they have on top of that conflict to deal with, they have on top of that natural disasters, they have on top of that, other challenges economically, emotionally, physically. Then you really kind of I felt very much there was no other option except to try and really support and engage in making the world a better place.

Speaker1:
And so where did you start? I mean, you worked with World Vision and and others like, how did that all kick off for you?

Speaker2:
Yeah. So I was in school and I ended up doing my first degree was in, in, in studying arts and history and indigenous studies. And then I moved into, um, studying theology. And then I went to do a grad, and I was trying to work out what to do, and I was going to do social work. And I got told, oh, you should check out community development. I didn’t realize it was a thing. And so I went and did a postgrad in that started at World Vision. And World Vision works all around the world and really got a foot in there. Um, in terms of a really great experience of just being able to see and experience so many different elements and then be able to work across. And so started out, you know, working in schools and then moving through that into developing programs and marketing communications and then developing global youth engagement and lots of things that happened as a result. And so it was kind of a bit of a journey through. People often ask, how do you get into that? And it’s it’s there’s no natural way. It’s about being in the right place at the right time somewhat, and then being open to just say yes, you know, when these opportunities come and embracing them. And so that kind of opened up the door and led into the work that we’re doing now.

Speaker1:
So you’re a director now of the UN’s Sdg2 Advocacy Hub. Try saying that with a few few drinks on board. The shorthand Sdg2 is is about zero hunger, which sounds like almost an impossible goal, but it’s about as daunting a challenge, certainly, as as it gets. Um, can you tell us, you know, the work that goes into trying to make that happen?

Speaker2:
Yeah. Look, I mean, it is challenging. And I think, you know, the reality is all of these big numbers, they start with one. And so you’ve got to break them down. And so it’s about what you can do. Um, we’ve shown even just in the, in the Covid vaccine response, how quickly we can change things if we put our mind to it. And I think, you know what? That’s something that I’ve really taken heart from. The challenge is being Covid, conflict, climate change. All of these things are working against us. And so as you have a goal like this, you’re really up against it because the steps you’re making, the progress you’re making is being erased as you’re making it by these kinds of challenges. And so I think, you know, this is this is part of the problem. As the world’s population continues to grow, we’re still seeing the number of hungry people as a total go up, but as a percentage is, is, is is changing, you know, and up until recently we were seeing that decline. It’s only recently turned back up. And you know, that’s because of these these challenges that we face, these grand challenges. And, you know, we talk about those three C’s Covid, conflict and climate. People tend to get disillusioned with these big goals or these goals that seem further away. And so what we have to do is try and make this relevant to people and help them understand the connections.

Speaker2:
And I think that when we think about food, you know, it’s very hard. You know, you enjoy what you eat in the space that you’re in, but you don’t enjoy it as much. If you know somebody else is hungry nearby or somebody’s like, I don’t know, I was in New York and I was sitting in a pizza restaurant and we were eating pizza and enjoying this amazing New York pizza. And there was a guy out the front who was a vet who, you know, an Army vet, and he was out there in the cold. And our young daughter at the time was like, dad, can we go buy him a pizza? Because she was not enjoying the pizza? Because there was this guy standing there, you know, obviously hungry. And so she took him out a piece of pizza and ate it with him. And I remember in that moment, just watching that experience of this young, our young daughter who was like, this is what food’s about. This is about what the issue is about. It’s about kind of seeing each other and connecting. When we don’t see things, when we don’t see climate change, when we don’t see these issues, it’s easy to kind of just forget about them and put them off. But we have to bring them into view. And so that’s some of what we try and do.

Speaker1:
So it might sort of surprise people to think that the first network that you created to advocate around zero Hunger was, wasn’t, you know, agribusiness executives or ministers for agriculture or whatever. But chefs and we’re very proud here in grow HQ to be part of the Chef’s Manifesto network and certainly to be trying to promote it here in Ireland. But why did you play such an emphasis on the role that chefs can play to address SDG two?

Speaker2:
Yeah. So I mean, I, I really looked at the fact that often when we talk about food, one of the challenges is we don’t we don’t actually engage with food. So we talk about it as nutrients. We talk about it as commodities, things that we grow, but we don’t bring it into a holistic view of what ends up on a plate and how. How we actually everyday people engage with food. And chefs are at this unique position where they are well trusted by people. People listen to what chefs tell them about food, but chefs also connect ingredients. They take ingredients and they turn them into amazing dishes. And so as JB at grow HQ does, you know, he takes ingredients, he looks in the garden and he sees what’s there, and then he transforms that onto the plate into something that you can enjoy. And I think this is really, really critical. It’s how we transform and how we do that. And so chefs have that power. Chefs really have an ability to create things that we love, things that we identify with, things that we celebrate with. And so these dishes then become, you know, familiar. They become important. They become part of culture. And so working with chefs is really key to also get them to think about things like food waste, to think about biodiversity, to think about nutrition. Because if they’ve got that information, they can then also guide people in a way towards other choices.

Speaker1:
So what is the Chef’s manifesto then? I mean, what what what are you trying to achieve with this with this network?

Speaker2:
Yeah. So the Chef’s Manifesto is a network owned by chefs for chefs built around eight thematic areas which are taken from the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, of which they’re the UN Sustainable Development Goals, are like a plan essentially for addressing some of the most challenging issues in the world. And so basically, this is what the Chef’s Manifesto is. It brings together that frame and creates practical actions that chefs can take in their kitchens in ways that they can make choices around what they provide, how they present meals, how they give feed people, how they engage and educate, how they order, how they engage with farmers. All of these elements are built into the manifesto, and it’s essentially a network that connects across borders to share ideas, to learn from one another, and to encourage and advocate others out there in the world to also join in making choices which are better for people and planet.

Speaker1:
So I mean, we’ve seen you mentioned JB, our head chef here, who goes to ridiculous degrees sometimes I think in terms of the the commitment to, to sustainability and zero waste and so on, and like he’ll take things like carrots out of the ground and he’ll obviously use the carrots, but he’ll also like dehydrate the skin and turn it into a powder that he can flavour soups with. And he’ll, he’ll take the, the, the foliage from the carrots and he’ll, you know, dehydrate them and turn them into a powder. You can make like a kind of spirulina type powder from and like just, just insane depths of, of thinking through. And so then, you know, the food we’re serving in the cafe here becomes a conversation about about sustainability with our customers. But you must have, like hundreds of examples of things that inspire you from the Chef’s manifesto network worldwide. But can you give us a couple of examples of things that have really inspired you? And I suppose more importantly, like what what impact does that do those things have realistically?

Speaker2:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, so there’s there’s so many different examples and it’s great to see, you know, as you said, what JB does in terms of just going that extra mile. And I think, you know, it’s it’s making that part of the regular day. You know what I mean? So it’s like saying this is the practice. There’s a lot around biodiversity. So we’ve seen chefs in India that are really working to promote millets as a water resilient and drought tolerant crop. The same in, in, in Africa in different parts of the Sahel. You know, there’s people like chefs like Pierre Thiam who are promoting Fonio and working with smallholder farmers to grow fonio. And Fonio is a millet, which is, you know, very easy to grow, he says. It’s almost like you just throw it and it grows. And yet it’s also uses very little water, and it’s also highly nutritious. And so he’s been creating a market for that. And he’s now got fonio in, you know, available for online order all around the world. He’s got it available in supermarkets in the US. He’s got so he’s built this kind of and he’s a chef. He has a couple of restaurants, but he’s built this market for farmers to really promote this grain as an alternative. And so I think, you know, there’s lots of examples like that where you see this biodiversity promotion looking at seaweed, looking at, you know, other crops that are out there that are better for people and planet, these alternates or these swaps that can be made in dishes.

Speaker2:
Um, I also really love seeing the cooperatives that happen between farmers locally and chefs. And you see this happen, particularly in the pandemic. We’ve seen lots of that where there’s a lot of produce going to waste. A lot of restaurants have really struggled, and farmers have partnered together with chefs and really looked at how do we address and keep these goods getting out there. And so you’ve seen this adaptation happen in the model where where chefs are selling farm produce. They’re looking at what’s available on the day they’re cooking and changing their menus. And so you see this kind of connection in the food system that sometimes they’ve been broken. It’s a kind of reconnect. And so I think some of those kinds of things are also really interesting because as chefs think about this, they’re really looking at that. And then I’d say also, you know, we work with chefs that are at the corporate level and they have big, massive programs. And sometimes you wouldn’t even think they’re chefs. But, you know, we’ve been able to influence some of them to really think differently about the practices, the ingredients that they have in products. And that can make a massive impact that can reach right around the world. And so, you know, there’s there’s all the different levels that are important. And I think this is really critical.

Speaker1:
It’s so interesting that we had a guy called Mars McGeehan on the on the podcast as well, who was the he was the executive chef for Airbnb. And as you say, like just this when when a chef gets sustainability in a role like that, they can influence like literally thousands of people around the world and their families and and another another thread I thought was really interesting that Mars Mars left the sort of, you know, the, the classic sort of restaurant world for family reasons. That seems to be a theme that has jumped out at me from a couple of our podcast interviews. I mean, there’s a whole culture of, you know, macho ness and kind of work 20 hours a day sort of thing with Chefing that needs to change in tandem with the with the sustainability side.

Speaker2:
Yeah. No, absolutely. There’s been there’s been a big, big shift in that space. And I think Covid has meant that many of those kind of structures that were somewhat hidden, I think, or accepted have now people have had to do different things, and they’ve realized how some of those challenges, some of the toxic issues that were in restaurant spaces and they’ve actually moved and or they’ve changed their restaurant model or they’ve thought about addressing them in a different way. And I think that’s that’s really interesting to see how that that those changes are kind of playing out, I guess, and they’re still playing out because things are still kind of rebuilding and re reframing, it’s almost like re re refocusing. And so I think that’s still happening. You’re also seeing a lot of chefs realizing that the the work life balance kind of model of a restaurant, you know, once they realize, hey, I can go and do something else. And I can also have more space and time. It’s shifted the staffing. And that’s that’s meant that, you know, there’s there’s a big shortage of of staff at the moment in the restaurant industry. And people are moving to different jobs. You’re seeing Michelin star chefs going to school canteens and looking at, you know, the challenge of how do you feed people in a different way and what does that look like? And I think that’s really interesting. Jose Andres, who’s runs World Central Kitchen, he talks a lot about, you know, the chefs that have been feeding the few need to think about their responsibility to feed the many. Now that’s brilliant. And you know I really think that’s a really interesting perspective because it is you know, often when we thought about chefs as advocates, people go, oh, but they only feed a small amount, you know, in fine dining. And you go, well, no, not only it depends how you define that, but it’s also they actually have skills on how to construct meals, and they have skills on how to innovate and how to think about ingredients. And this is really important.

Speaker1:
I’m also conscious just it’s like, you know, the clock is running down on this decade of action. And what are the big kind of themes for you in terms of of the work that the Sdg2 Advocacy Hub has to do to, to make zero hunger a reality? Easy, easy one to to close out our chat.

Speaker2:
Yeah, thanks for that mic. Um, it’s obviously the beginning of how do you.

Speaker1:
Fix zero hunger? You’ve got, like, 30s.

Speaker2:
Um, I look, I think I think the reality is we need to see people come together. We need to see people working together in in new ways. I think we need to double down on a few areas that have the ability to cut across. And so looking at, you know, some of the shifts around our food system that we’ve seen even during Covid in terms of digitization, delivery, all these kinds of things that have happened, how do we use some of those, those new moves to really shift the way that we get food out there? Because food is available to feed the whole planet. The challenge is it’s not getting to the people that you know. It’s not getting everywhere. Some people are eating way too much, others are not eating enough. There’s a lot of wastage. And so, you know, it’s a desire issue, to be honest, Mick, you know, if we don’t get the desire right, we’re not going to fix this. But we do have the resources. We know how to grow. In our food. We do have the financial resources in our world, but we’ve actually got to fix some systems and that requires investment. It requires government. And the challenge of of that is, is having then the political will to be able to get it done.

Speaker1:
Paul, thanks a million for for joining us. I hope the growing conditions stay stay good in Melbourne and send us a picture of your your produce there when you’ve got it, when you’ve got it harvested.

Speaker2:
Absolutely. No. Thanks so much for having me. And I’ll send you a photo of of what we get to.

Speaker1:
If the dog doesn’t dig it up first.

Speaker2:
Hopefully not.

Speaker1:
Take care. Thanks a million, Paul. So we’ve become like so familiar with the celebrity chefs. And, you know, they’re always very comfortable entertainers and, you know, very good in that setting. But I think for the majority of chefs that we’ve we’ve gotten to know through the Chefs Manifesto, they’re, you know, they’re not like that at all. In fact, they’re they’re just generally very hardworking, very motivated food people. And, um, you know, they love making people happy. I think at a, at a really kind of fundamental level. And, but they’re also teachers and, um, you know, I don’t think certainly as a head chef, you can’t run a kitchen without teaching other things, other people rather how things need to be done. And I know with our, with JB, um, you know, he does some teaching and, you know, classes here at grow HQ as well as as running the kitchen. And he really he just comes alive as a person when he’s teaching and talking about food and his passion in kind of really comes through, um, when he’s doing that. And I think the other thing that that jumps out for me is it’s remarkable.

Speaker1:
And I mean this I don’t want this to sound sort of snooty, but like some of the chefs we speak to, it’s actually remarkable how little they know about sustainability and about food and seasonality. And and it’s just I think it’s not it’s not a it’s not a flaw. I think it’s just because they’re so busy and they fall into this pattern of purchasing food from, you know, the big, the big sort of wholesalers out there, and that they just don’t necessarily need to think about sustainability and what’s in season at different times of the year. And so I think I think the transformation that happens through being involved with the Chefs manifesto is just it’s a really it’s a really powerful thing. And if they can, you know, at the same time, bring that, bring that passion and bring that teaching to their customers and to their, you know, their the chefs who work for them and so on. Then that’s that’s a really transformative thing in all in all, I think.

Speaker4:
So this would be a great time to talk to a chef. Of course, this is the segment where we talk to a grower. So we’ve had to call on all our luck to find both. And we’re bringing in another member of the family to tell this story. Hello there Toure.

Speaker5:
Hello.

Speaker4:
Can you introduce our next guest, please?

Speaker5:
Yeah. I had a great opportunity to speak to Tom Downes. Who? Yeah. Very neat. There he was a chef, trained as a chef and is now a grower at Irmscher, which is a restaurant in County Kildare. So he’s he’s there as the grow with his partner Stena. And a really interesting story to to hear that transition and very much fuelled by the pandemic has to say he was working. I’m sure I’m sure as a chef before the pandemic hit and obviously lost his job and headed back to Norway with his partner Stena, and he he started just working at an organic farm over there and he just got the bug. He became really interested in regenerative farming and and stayed in contact with Jordan Daly. Bailey, who’s over in Irmscher. And between them they were like, I’m going to come back and and grow. I want to be the grower rather than a chef. And that’s who did. So brave. Just listening to him talking about their determination to to make it work. It really is being, I can only say, chucked in into the frying pan to have that responsibility to, to produce food as technically an amateur grower. And he’s had one season there, him and Stena working hard to to get the growing space into an into a place which produces not only for Irmscher, which is a two Michelin starred restaurant, but also another restaurant on the on the grounds at Cliff at Lyons. So I was I was amazed by him. And it’s his determination and his just passion for growing that has really made it, made it work. So it’s a really interesting conversation that we had. Tom. Hello and welcome.

Speaker6:
Hello.

Speaker5:
So, from working as a chef in the kitchen to now supplying food for the kitchen, can you tell us how that transition happened?

Speaker3:
Yeah, yeah. Once again, thank you for having me. But the transition was a few different reasons, to be honest. I mean, as a chef, I’ve always been very passionate about food and where it comes from and produce. Towards the end of my time at Hampshire, I started we have a beautiful gardens here at the Cliff at Lyons, and we obviously spend a lot of time going around the gardens using produce from there, and I think that’s where the real interest came from, the produce during Covid. Covid was a big thing. I mean, it affected everybody and I was left with no work and no job. So I actually just went and worked on a farm where I basically just worked for free for a couple of months just to get my hands dirty and get busy and be involved with growing and food again. And I think that’s where the real love came from. I really got into interested in how the produce is grown, how it’s cared for, and then, yeah, this fantastic offer came here with Jordan.

Speaker5:
So when did that happen? When were you back in the garden and starting this new role as food grower?

Speaker3:
Yeah. So he reached out to us, and me and Zena moved back in March. So we started the 1st of March here at the Hampshire and the Cliff at Lyons. They hadn’t had anyone growing here for pretty much two years or during the whole of Covid. So the place hadn’t really had much care for. And we spent the first three, three months, I would say, just really trying to focus on getting the place up to standard where we could actually grow, produce and produce a good amount for both the restaurants because to grow vegetables, it’s not as simple as just planting the seed and putting it outside. You have to care for it, and you have to have. When you’re working with a restaurant, you also have to think about quantities and how much you’re going to produce, and how long it takes and how many you can fit in a bed. So we took a lot of time to actually systemize the workplace and come up with spreadsheets where we know how much goes in a bed and how long they’ll be there, and from that we can make plans.

Speaker5:
Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of your growing space at Cliff, what have you currently got there for growing? I know there’s quite a lot of development happening.

Speaker3:
So yeah, the growing space that we have wasn’t huge when we got here. So we have three polytunnels which are around ten metres long, and in those we have four beds in each. And then up the top we also have some raised beds which have a mix of perennials, herbs and stuff which have been there before we got here. And then it was pretty much a blank canvas. So that’s why we really wanted to systemize everything so that we could maximise the produce that we can produce, because it wasn’t a huge growing space that we had. But this year we’ve also been expanding. We had a field down the back of the property which hadn’t been used for anything before. So we took the time during Covid, and I think it’s a beautiful asset to the property where we’ve expanded and we’ve now got another 26 beds, which are ten metres long again there. The plan is then to actually be able to produce a lot more for both restaurants, and some of the things that we struggle to get, we can now grow here on the property, for instance, the blackcurrant leaves. People don’t want to give you blackcurrant leaves because but that’s such a beautiful ingredient that we love amshir as a, as an ingredient to use. So now we’ve planted blackberry blackcurrant bushes that we’ve got and now we can use that. So yeah, we really just came in and we just got our head down. And ten months on now it’s it’s really nice to see how it’s come along. I mean even though it’s winter time, I look forward to seeing how it’ll be in, in the future with everything blossoming. And I think it’s going to look great.

Speaker5:
And in terms of, I know there’s been just a huge amount of success. I’ve been I’m sure I was very lucky. I had a gorgeous meal there. But I’ve also got to ask you, just the challenges. You mentioned previously that nothing had been done to the plot for two years. And, and what was the main challenges that you’ve had around just really getting things started so you could get some good produce from it?

Speaker3:
Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s a tricky one. Like you said, that the hand bin anyone taking care of the place. So the, our first thing was we really wanted to look at soil care. So the first thing that we did was we, we went turned it all to no dig. So we don’t use any tillage machinery. And we basically ordered in tonnes of compost. And that’s how we. Set up all the new beds and the soils are very compact. So we got a broadfork, which is basically like a subsoiler, just to try and get the soil biology really going. And to be honest, you can really see the difference throughout this, even though it’s just been one season. I think as the soil is improving now, you can really see a difference in the quality and also the pest resistance. I feel like now we’re going to good soil biology and you can really see that the the pest problems are starting to reduce a lot. Fantastic. And weed pressure. Weed pressure is a huge one. I mean, nobody likes weeding. And the fact that now we spend very little time weeding is is really great. And especially because it’s just two of us. So we really have to try and maximise our time efficiently. So right now we spend half an hour a week weeding the whole property, which is very little, to be honest.

Speaker5:
That’s incredible. Absolutely incredible. And really looking forward, you’ve mentioned a few things about wanting to, you know, develop. Also. You’ve got the veg there and what else are you looking for? Because I know Jordan in the past has mentioned about trying to really create a small farm I’m sure. Is that still the plan?

Speaker3:
Yeah, that’s still very much the plan. So like you said, we built the new beds down the back. We also planted a berry orchard which has 240 berries. We planted a fruit orchard where we have about 110 different fruit trees. And then we also recently got some piglets. So we have some very cute little guinea pigs. So they’re a slow growing breed. Yeah. And the plan is obviously to rear them. And then they will be used in the restaurants. And then going on from that next year, we are looking to get laying hens where we will have them on pasture and we will rotate them along the pasture and also bees as well. So it’s a lot going on. I mean the.

Speaker5:
Pipeline.

Speaker3:
Yeah, yeah. I think if Jordan had his way he would have had them all this year.

Speaker5:
But yeah 2022 they’ll be there.

Speaker3:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker5:
So really just going on is certainly with its plaudits and you know, a two stars from Michelin people may not expect, I’m sure, to put food advocacy at the centre of its ethos, but it does, in fact, I’m sure is inspired by the idea of the Irish climate and how the climate controls what grows and is harvested. So from your perspective, having worked both in the kitchen and now as a food producer for the restaurant, how are, I’m sure, educating people about food advocacy and really our current broken food system?

Speaker3:
Yeah. That’s great. I mean, even the name of the restaurant, I’m sure means weather. So it’s a huge thing that we all take inspiration from. And I think I think that’s one of the great things, is that you get to a lot of people wouldn’t see, they see it more of a burden that you don’t have this luxury, sunny weather. Whereas for us it’s more of a challenge. And to see what you what you can do, I think, I think it’s really important that people see what great produce can be grown here in Ireland, for instance, figs, like we have a fig tree in the garden. It doesn’t ripen, unfortunately, because we don’t have that beautiful weather. But this as a restaurant, we use the unripe figs, we will pickle, we will preserve them, we will use the leaves to wrap things and steam it. And I think it’s just opening people’s minds. It’s just because it’s not sunny. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use this beautiful produce. For instance, we will use. The plan is also to get some more exotic fruit trees where we have maybe some peaches and things like this. We’re having them on the south facing wall to hopefully try and make them ripen. We don’t know if it will or not, but if they don’t, I mean we will use the unripened plums. The we will use Unripened peaches, and we will use them in a different way that you’d normally see. We can’t use lemons and things like this because they just don’t grow here. So we have to use other ingredients. We use sorrel a lot to try and get that acidity through, or we’ll use unripened, currants and berries and I love it. I think it’s a great challenge that you can’t just go into the fridge and grab a lemon, and there’s your dish. I think it’s really nice.

Speaker5:
Absolutely. And I you know, I know that when you’re there, you’ve got the beds right outside the restaurant. And you know, as a guest, you can you can really see where that food’s coming from. But if you stay over, you can also go in and see the rest of the polytunnels and you’ve got that like link between, you know, what you see on your plate with this amazing tasting menu. That is delivered by the chefs, but you’ve got that immediate vision of where it’s coming from as well. And that’s very much at the heart of what Asia’s about, isn’t it?

Speaker3:
100%, yeah. I think for me, I love it that you can you can walk past the restaurant, you can eat in the restaurant, and then you can walk down and you can see the produce grow and you can see how it grows. I mean, I didn’t know how some of these vegetables grew and seeing the plants and I’m like, oh my God, these are they’re beautiful and actually and understanding how long they take. I mean, when we’re obviously here and people ask us lots of questions. Oh what’s this? How long has it been here? And so many people are amazed on how long something takes to grow, or if that’s the way it actually grows. And and then to go even further and have animals and to actually see that we’re giving them the best care that we can to produce quality food, to then be used in the restaurant. And I think there’s a very big disconnection these days with food, especially when you go to a supermarket. I mean, everything comes in packages and you don’t, you don’t you don’t even think the two things is the same thing these days, which for me is real sad. I think it’s real sad because you see these pigs and they have characters and. I think everybody should understand that this is where their food is coming from.

Speaker5:
And based on your first season as a grower and certainly for two busy and successful restaurants, is what you have learned over these past ten months, and maybe some advice that you would give yourself if you were starting out again. Ooh.

Speaker3:
That’s a tricky one. Um, for me, it’s very easy to get carried away when you obviously go and you look to buy all these beautiful seeds. You see so many fantastic varieties, heirloom varieties and heritage seeds, and you want to buy them all because they look fantastic. And they and they obviously taste great. Um, but don’t get carried away if you’re if you’re obviously going to start off and you start off growing and if you are producing for a restaurant, you need to know your days to maturity, how long things are going to be in the ground, how much yield you’re going to get from a crop. If you don’t know that, then you can’t plan. If you’re supplying restaurants, you need to know that you can supply X amount every week or every other week or. And if you don’t know that, then it’s going to be very challenging to do that.

Speaker5:
So really the advice keep it simple as it sounds like it’s yeah, don’t get too carried away even if you’re.

Speaker3:
Producing right away.

Speaker5:
Keep it. Keep it simple. I have to say just thank you. Thank you for joining us, giving us an insight into what it’s like to be a grower and to just the incredible stuff that you and Stena have done over such a short amount of time and, you know, help, you know, two restaurants really excel. So thank you ever so much. And yeah, hope to speak to you again soon.

Speaker3:
No thank you. Yeah I’m really happy you had me on and I appreciate it.

Speaker1:
That was just a great interview bars, wasn’t it? It’s a place I haven’t got to yet. Have you been to been timeshare?

Speaker4:
I wish, you know, another another wedding anniversary option.

Speaker1:
Maybe someday, I think. I think it would be an important research trip that we should undertake soon. Now, the name. The name, I’m sure is deadly as well. Meaning whether in Irish, obviously. And I think, um, you know, it’s a very poignant way to capture the role restaurants have to play in teaching us about food. And unfortunately, the reality is that the weather is going to because of climate change, it’s going to wreak havoc on the way we grow food and our ability to grow food in the years to come. And even on a kind of a small scale, we’ve seen that here in grow HQ, um, over the last number of years, we’ve had in the last few weeks, even like potatoes or maincrop potatoes in the ground, which would normally just sit there over the winter and be very happy until you, until you need to get them. But they’ve, they’ve been sprouting in the ground because of the mild weather we had towards the end of November. And so just an example, I suppose, of of how the seasons are just changing right before our eyes, which is, which is incredible. And obviously around the world, it’s I think we’re lucky here in Ireland we’ve, we’ve a relatively benign weather so far, but the natural disasters that are happening around the world are just, um, just so scary to look at. And again, we see chefs responding. And the likes of World Central Kitchen, which was founded by Jose Andrés, um, you know, mobilizing in, in kind of areas of disaster and training others to lead their own community based responses to these kind of events. I think it’s a just another example of the power that that chefs have in feeding us and teaching us and and hopefully a real force for positivity around sustainable food in the future.

Speaker4:
Absolutely. And I think this is a very opportune time to welcome in our head of food, JB, who we’ve spoken about quite a lot throughout this series. And now we can finally hear from the man himself. Jb how’s it going?

Speaker7:
Good good good good. Keeping busy as always. You know. As always.

Speaker4:
Good man. So JB, just an easy question for you to finish off this entire podcast. Okay.

Speaker7:
Yeah, it’s never an easy question.

Speaker4:
But can you tell us, you know, what do you think? You know, from all of your years of experience and all of your insight into the industry? What are the top things that any chef can do to help address some of the major food system issues? You know, whichever ones you think are most most significant. What would you recommend chefs take on?

Speaker7:
One of the the the biggest impact chefs can have in his kitchen is definitely on food waste and gas emission and where he gets his food from and all that. But the top tip I keep giving my team is when they try to avoid food waste, is when they’re prepping veg, when they’re prepping fruits, or when they’re prepping meat is always before to put it in the compost bin. Just if you’re not sure what to do with it, call a senior chef, call me and we’ll look at that and then think like when you peel carrots, what do you do with the carrot peels? Be dehydrate them, crush them and make a nice crust for something like, you know, we could roll the halloumi in it and stuff like that. It’s just lovely. Like, ah, if he’s just a apple peels, you just ferment it to make your own cider vinegar or you make fermented drinks or kombucha. As with any type of fields like veg peels. So it’s always top tip for in the kitchens. Always I try to give, like before you put in the compost bin, look at it stop and wait and think. And if you’re not sure and it’s always good, like to bring to bring your mind into being way more creative again, like, you know, any type of food waste as a chef.

Speaker7:
Like I’m always looking looking at my suppliers. Like, you know, I think his suppliers are a big, big thing. I can try my best in my kitchen, but then if I don’t bring produce sustainable themselves into my kitchen, then. I’m not helping the food system at all. Obviously, you know, so the I’m always looking for as local as possible and as small as possible suppliers, which is kind of obviously helps the, uh, help the local economy, which is always good. But as well, in using small local suppliers, usually they can have more kind of traditional farms where they, they grow different crops or they are reared different, different animals. And, and when they raise animals as well, it’s definitely outdoor reared like they’re not they’re not big factories and stuff like that. So and economically it does work for me as well because those multipliers are not are not expensive anyway. You know so but the so try to to avoid all the big monocropping suppliers like you know so that’s, that’s a big thing for me.

Speaker2:
And are they.

Speaker4:
Easy to find.

Speaker7:
They in Ireland they, they everywhere like you just need to. And if you’re not sure you ask for you ask for your colleagues or you just go on, on, on different websites and you find them very, very quickly like they, they still there, but they are disappearing. Like 70% of the small farmers disappeared in the last ten years. So we need we we need to support them for them to, to be there and to still grow those old little crops. And they so interesting on the plate, you know, because those crops are disappearing. So and as a chef, I want them I want those, those funny crops to be on the plates like a bit of different taste, different textures, different colors, you know.

Speaker4:
Right. So the message is sort of the suppliers are there, but they need support to stay there. So they need to.

Speaker7:
And the chefs are the main supporter that you know for sure. One thing is very important. Even more to try to avoid food waste is when I write my menu, I always try to think to don’t create a lot of work in the kitchen to get into a dish with not we might just not sell our. So when I write my menu, I always try to think the longevity of the food and prepping, you know, so I try to cook more at the last minute like that. It doesn’t go off in the fridge. So it’s very, very important when you’re writing is so, so important in the kitchen to try to to make it balanced. And all the dishes are selling and as well don’t over prep too, don’t over prep because if you over prep within three days, all your food goes in the bin. And that’s a huge food waste. And and mine was raised as well like obviously you know so and my menus when I write my menus as well, I try to avoid as much as possible the meat heavy on gas emission like mostly beef like and try really to avoid as much as possible. If you do try to use a nice local beef, which will taste amazing anyway, you know so. But and to broad your question a little bit more than chefs like menu writing is something very chef thing to do, but menu planning at home is so, so important to try to to to avoid food waste. Always a good tip I have. Like when you do your menu planning, you do your weekly shopping goes in that planning. But always you leave. Always one day blank at home. In my at home is always Wednesday, Fridays or Fridays. We don’t have a menu written. We eat all the leftovers, so we call it Messy Fridays. So you know, we just you and it’s the not leftovers. They we create a new small plates, small plates of all the things we had during the week like, you know, yeah, like a.

Speaker4:
Highlight reel of like all the great food, just all kind of packaged up into one, one little showcase. I love.

Speaker7:
It. That’s it. So that’s really try to. Try to think about food always like, you know. So when you see food before you put it in the bins, what can I do with it? Because like a carrot peeler or squeezed up lemon, that’s still food. Like, you know, I mean, that great trick with squeezed lemons, if you bake them with sugar for about 45 minutes and after you blend them. You have a vegan, it makes a vegan lemon curd, you know, so all those little things. So when you think before you put it in the bin, you actually you make something with it always, you know, and our home is the same thing. Like if you think and and cook, cook at home more you cook healthier. You’ll be and you know exactly where your food comes from as well when you cook. Because if you ordering a takeaway like if you if you buying pre cooked food, you don’t really know where that food comes from. And usually it doesn’t come from a nice place anyway, you know to be honest.

Speaker4:
Yeah absolutely. So I mean I think you know in in summary it’s sort of just think like a chef, you know, at all times, all opportunities. You know, the more that everyone in the world could think like a chef, the better off we’d be. So thanks a million for all that JB. Looking forward to my my Friday night tapas tonight.

Speaker7:
Perfect.

Speaker4:
All right. Take it easy. Take care. Thanks. Bye bye. Thanks so much for listening. You can get involved and find out more at geidai. And to say thanks, you can also get 20% off anything at our online shop by using the discount code GI 20.

Speaker1:
And remember that we are a social enterprise, which means all income that we generate goes back into funding the mission to get the world to grow their own food. And we couldn’t do this podcast without the support of Rethink Ireland and the Community Foundation for Ireland.

Speaker4:
In our final episode of this series, we will look at food done right in care from the hospital, meals that went viral to the veg garden as a home for rehabilitation.

Speaker1:
If you want food done right, grow it yourself. Until next time, happy growing. Please subscribe to Food Done Right, the food sustainability podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including upload many different filetypes, share transcripts, transcribe multiple languages, enterprise-grade admin tools, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.

food-done-right-in-care.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

food-done-right-in-care.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Mick Kelly, and this is food done, right!

Speaker2:
To me. If you’re working in a michelin star, if you’re working for me in a nursing home. The client is still the client. The diner is still the diner. And you give them the best, the very best you can.

Speaker3:
People have had a really rough time. And yesterday, too, you know, and it’s all very serious. They’re going to be doing their rehabilitation or whatever. But there’s the lighter side as well. The camaraderie, having a bit of fun, getting things off their chest while they’re working away. It’s fabulous.

Speaker1:
Growing food completely changed the course of history. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become entirely removed from where our food comes from. But if we grow food, reconnect, and care about our food, we can change the future’s course and increase food sustainability.

Speaker4:
In 2013, public health experts and a nonprofit group in Philadelphia delivered nutritious meals to people with a range of chronic diseases over a one year period. Their health care costs plummeted by $12,000 compared to a control group, while insurance pays for expensive hospital visits. It doesn’t pay for the food that could keep people out of hospital in the first place. It’s one typically dysfunctional example of food done wrong. How’s it going there, Mick?

Speaker1:
How you doing, Baz? Food. Done wrong. Doesn’t sound quite right there.

Speaker4:
I’m afraid it doesn’t sound quite right. But we thought we’d have to mix it up just for this. This this our last episode of this series. And so come here. As an honest, hard working taxpayer, would you support public spending on free meals rather than more beds or better pay for frontline health care workers? Not to put you on the spot or anything, but where would you stand on a contentious policy issue like that?

Speaker1:
Well, I don’t know about the honest, hardworking taxpayer, for one thing, but I certainly would support more public spending on proper food and hospitals. Um, and I think where I’m set up actually here in grow HQ today, and I can actually see the hospital across the road from us. So the biggest, biggest hospital in the south east here, um, over the road from us. And um, obviously it’s I think everybody has a kind of like a hospital food story, really, don’t they? But I unfortunately spent a night in A&E, um, recently. Nothing. Nothing too serious. But, um, I was there for about 24 hours, and I got two meals, both of which were toast, um, you know, standard sliced white pan, um, pat of butter, and, you know, the little chievres jams. Um, and that was about the height of it. And so I think, um, the lack of nutrition and, um, good food that we have in the hospital system is like, it’s just such a serious issue. And it seems to me an obvious thing that if you want to support people to get better, that you have to start with food. And, um, you know, at a time when you really need good, nutritious food, when you’re, when you’re sick, that’s, you know, unfortunately, it’s it’s very rarely available in the hospital system. And so I think it’s a, it’s, it’s as you say, an example of, of food done wrong. Unfortunately.

Speaker4:
Um, and we’ve talked a lot throughout the series about how problems with the food that we eat in all different walks of life, they really reflect our overall culture around food, that it can be quite utilitarian in many ways, and obviously we’re quite detached from its its origins and its quality and, and all of the sort of the broader benefits that that can bring. And I think that really hits home in a hospital setting, just as you said, you know, a lot of white bread and, and jam and, you know, soggy chips and jelly and ice cream. Um, our first guest today is Joyce Timmons, whose you know, work went viral a couple of years ago for being essentially the opposite of that. Can you tell us a bit about her?

Speaker1:
Well, I think it says a lot that that just, you know, a chef doing good food in a hospital went viral, gives you a sense of how unusual it is, unfortunately. And but Joyce is a really interesting lady. She, um, I think I think we’ve had a few examples in the series of chefs that moved into different things, and I think there’s definitely, you know, maybe there’s another series in, in the idea of of why that is. I think chefs kind of, um, in such a, it’s such a high stress, difficult environment to work in and that I think a lot of chefs look for something, you know, look for a complete change and they sidestep into something, you know, arguably much more interesting. So we saw Maurice moving into the, you know, Airbnb and the RFU and, and so on. And, and Joyce is something similar in that she was um, you know, worked in some of the best restaurants in the world. She was she had returned to Ireland then to, to work in Restaurant Patrick Gibo, which I think a lot of people would be familiar with as one of one of our finest restaurants. Um, and then she took the very unusual career move to become the head chef in the Rotunda Hospital. And we’ll pick up the story with Joyce explaining how all that happened and listen to how she transformed the food in that particular hospital in Dublin.

Speaker2:
My first job, really, before I went in to Minchin’s, Dorrinton was in the Conrad Hotel and I was working in the pastry section in the Conrad Hotel. And then I got an opportunity to do a stage in la marmora. And so I went over and I worked for the weekend, and then they offered me a job, if you can call it a job. And as in pay, it was very little of it. Um, but yeah, I worked there for about a year and a year and four months and, and I was in the pastry kitchen under Benoit Blanc. And so I’m very much a homebird and I wanted to come home. And so I just said to Mr. Blanc, I said, I’m leaving, I’m going home. And he said, well, where is your next? Where are you going next? What’s your next restaurant? And I said, well, I’ve applied for Patrick Guibert, but I haven’t heard back. So this was, I was chatting to him like walking through the courtyard, just thought, no more of it. And I say, an hour and a half later I got a call in the kitchen to speak to me and it was Patrick on the phone. Same as a job here for whenever you want to. And. Starch or whatever, so I left. Within the month I was working in Gibeaux and I.

Speaker2:
Brilliant opportunity and great team. I was only really in vivo for a short time. But my friend was the head pastry chef in the Marion Hotel and and more or less came out of the back door of Gibeaux at the smoking hot and went straight in the back door to the Marion Hotel, where I stayed for two years, two and a half years or so. My friend left as the pastry chef, and then I became Paul Kelly’s sous chef as he was the pastry chef there. It was a brilliant learning opportunity, really was. There was loads going on, lots of things going on. And I settled in straight away into the Marion Hotel. The exec sous chef, a guy called Aldrin Lucy, who was there under Ed Cooney, he was going to start his own hotel, like being the exec chef in a hotel in Killarney and he asked me what I come down as his pastry chef. So I had no ties. So I said, yeah, sure went down. And in about two years later, I was pregnant with Lily and I came back to Dublin. I was working in a restaurant called Espresso Bar. Doesn’t sound very fancy, and I always said it was all the celebrities, the Irish celebrities, Eddie Rockets. So they all came in to us and I went in there as a chef.

Speaker2:
I ended up finishing then as head chef, well, nearly manager of the whole place. And but it was a busy place and that experience was great. But Lily was at an age that I wanted to be more flexible and that got more flexible, more stable, should I say so I was looking for a 9 to 5 role. So when I seen the role for the rotunda, I applied for it. My sister had two babies before me and it was only around. It wasn’t far from a restaurant I was working in and she’d say, Will you please just bring me up something to eat? Please bring me up whatever. And I fed her her breakfast, lunch, dinner. And that was it. And the food. I remember being in this hospital, and it wasn’t even in the rotunda. The rotunda didn’t even have that smell before I went in. I didn’t change that. But this was in a different hospital. And you know, that smell of hospital food? That’s what I smelled like. Orange cabbage. If cabbage can get burnt. But that’s what it smelled like. You just, you know that the cabbage was there for ages and was traveling around everywhere. And and then when I had my child, I was like, okay, Lisa, get the food up to me quick.

Speaker2:
And so that was it. So like part of the role for the rotunda was I wanted something Monday to Friday, but I also wanted to see is it possible to make a change because you’ll be hearing these different celebrity chefs and going in and saying, oh, they can do this, and they can do that in hospital food. But nothing really changed, like anywhere. So I just went in and I went in and I just did my job, if that makes sense. I just went in and worked the way I always worked as a chef. The first role for me there was to get all the dry stores totally emptied because there was a lot of tinned tinned sauces, jars, all of that. And the reason for that was that there was no consistency with the food. There was even powdered soups in it. And so my first thing was obviously to use them up. I wasn’t going to throw them out, but I wanted to empty the stores and fill the fridge. That was my first task and simplify the kitchen as much as I could, because I walked in with my chef hat on and I was like, um, use our just killing yourselves with this. They had menus everywhere. They had a menu for the private, for public, for wards, for the canteen. Were the.

Speaker1:
Rotunda. Thinking when they hired you, were they thinking, we need to transform this system, or were they just looking for a head chef?

Speaker2:
Or there was a new manager there called Huyshe and he wasn’t. Think this was his more or less first time in hospitals as well. He was there about two years before I came, and he wanted to make big changes, and he had made some changes of bringing that. You served the food at the ward level at different pantries, but he wanted to take it up a step more and then. Like his vision was to change the food and fairness, and that was where I came in. And so for me, I simplified, totally simplified everything. And I wasn’t given a budget to work off in in the rotunda. But I was thinking, I’ll have to do stocktake. I’ll have to do this. But none of that was mentioned. But as a chef, you know your budgets. You know what you have to spend, you know how to spend, you know where you’re going to have expensive meals, cheap meals and how to line them up that your budget is right. And so we went back like literally we went back to basics and the basics. And I have to say, the team really wanted it as well. And that was what made it easy for me. They really wanted to make this change one.

Speaker1:
One of the one of the things that jumps out for me is like, did you have I mean, I suppose at a time when you’re in hospital, you’re you’re probably most at need of nutritious, delicious food and, well, you know, depending on how unwell you have, I suppose it depends. But like, did you have a sort of did you have a kind of a determination? I suppose that that diet could play a role in kind of health and wellness, or was it more about sort of taking what you knew from the restaurant world and applying it to a hospital situation, or a bit of both, maybe.

Speaker2:
Well, it was probably a bit of both. The thing is, I didn’t really have sick people in the rotunda, you know, really. And I had. Mommy’s coming in, having babies and leaving their hole. If they had other babies and families at home and used to home cook food and good good, like at the start, I used to see dads bringing in like McDonald’s or bringing in a chopped salad, and I’d be like, I’d be in the height of it looking at them when I was saying, like, seriously, you don’t need that here. And but my I just wanted them to be looking at the food and tasting the food, and they’re going to have that time for their meal on their own. Okay. Hopefully the baby’s asleep or fed and in bed and everything else, but I just wanted that time to be special. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Their snacks in between to be special. Whatever they wanted they could have. Like they were very old kind of mommy salads. You know, the tomato, the cucumber, that kind of thing. So we introduced more composite salads. So we’d have a couscous, or we’d have a barley salad and rice salad. But these were cheap. They’re full of flavor and healthy. And I would think better than any chopped salad. But, you know, that came very easy and very quickly because they weren’t sick. And like we got fantastic. Like the guys were brilliant. They wanted to do it and they were enjoying doing it. But what they were getting back, they were getting back lots of feedback and we were getting emails back and we were getting, um, they have a customer care kind of survey thing. And the feedback that catering were getting was amazing. Like, the food is amazing. Like the staff are great, you know. So that just made them want to do it more and do it really well. And you were getting feedback from the dining room from the staff dining room also. So they were you know, it was a good boost for them.

Speaker1:
And it also went outside the walls of the hospital of course, as well, because a video, a video went viral of a meal being being served. And the broadcaster, Louise Mcsharry tweeted something about, you know, if I, if I got this at a food stall at Electric Picnic, I’d be I’d be delighted kind of thing. Like why? Why did it? There was another brilliant quote. Um, someone said, I’ll be missing the whole chicken burrito for dinner tonight because I’m going home. I’m absolutely gutted. I think that’s brilliant. Like, why do you think, gosh, why did it get so much attention? Is it just because it was it was such I think it.

Speaker2:
Was because it was totally different to what hospital food was like. We were dealing with young women. Okay? We had Gynae Ward as well for older women, but the majority was young women having babies. And like they were getting pulled pork burritos, they were getting fish tacos, you know, they were getting on trend. They were getting stuff that was on trend. And for me is important that that’s the food. So I think that they weren’t getting a roast and, you know, grounded in whatever gravy or drowned in cabbage water, you know, that was there was love put into it. It was garnished correctly. It was our Thai curry, I would like to think is something that you could order from a Thai restaurant or a takeaway, you know, it was garnished. It had pickled cucumbers. I had coriander, chillies, spring onions all garnished on it. The rice was cooked with lemongrass, so there was a lot of work that went into each dish and that like it was for me. It was worth it and the team loved it and they’re still doing it. So to me, that’s fantastic. Two years.

Speaker1:
I think that what you said about it should be like you wanted it to be the food, to be the highlight of the day. I think when you’re in hospital, it is actually the highlight of the day because it’s so bloody boring. You’re, you know, the rest of the day you’re just lying there waiting. So it is that that’s just a brilliant approach. One of the things like we did a panel discussion at bloom years ago where we talked about this issue and like the standard sort of, I think, response about why, why is hospital food so bad is like people talk about central procurement and, you know, it’s outsourced companies who don’t care and all this kind of stuff. But that wasn’t your experience and fairness. Sure, it wasn’t.

Speaker2:
Most hospitals, and even if they’re catered out, if a catering company are in there, they’re they’re more than likely buying for Palace or or you know, there’s a group, there’s they’re all listed, you know, so they’re getting the same chicken in. They’re getting the same beef in, they’re getting the same everything in Lamin. But it’s what you do with it. You don’t just throw into a pot and hope for the best. Like, we marinated everything. We marinated our chicken, we marinated their beef. Everything for the next day was marinated. We’d never cooked. It was just marinated. And then it went from there. Everything. We went through kilos and kilos of onions because they were going into sauces, you know, it was good stuff. Herbs. We always had fresh herbs and dried herbs, but they were good as well. Um, but yeah, it was just, it was bringing the food to another level and, and presenting it and plating it up at a, in a different way that it was garnished and everything like poppadoms everything. Prawn crackers, whatever.

Speaker1:
So you moved on from from the rotunda or in in marymount? Now I think. Is that. Yeah.

Speaker2:
So I went from young women to really old women and men. So it’s an age of care and and was totally new to that. Um, and like, I never dealt with, um, what’s called itsy levels. So their levels of food that a resident can eat without choking. So level four is the food is pureed. So when people think of aged care, they always think, oh, a lot of them are on pure food. So and a lot of them are on pure food. But that just um, when I was looking at it, um, you know, the team I have, they’re absolutely brilliant. Um, but they didn’t know any better at that time. But now, like, they are, they’re fantastic. Like, they puree up, um, a lasagna, but they pure it up in different levels. And, you know, they puree the lasagna, the pureed the Bolognese, they puree the tomato sauce, and then they build it back up into a lasagna. So it’s all about that. The resident is not feeling any way left out from everybody else that is eating irregular lasagna. You know. So that’s really important. The dining having dignity while they’re eating is just that’s my main concern that whatever they want, if we can do it, we can do it. That it’s not there can be restricted with their swallow. But so far it’s really good. And sometimes they go on. If they’re underweight they would go on a supplement. And that kind of happens with dysphasia. So if they’re not eating you know they’re going to lose weight obviously. So our job is to make sure that the food is fortified and that it looks really nice and it smells amazing, so that when they are being assisted with feeding, that they’re smelling the food and they’re tasting the food. And it’s quite a tiring process. And for someone suffering with dysphagia to eat a meal. So kind of put in pockets of sweets and pockets of Sarah like to kind of act like a sorbet nearly for them to eat. So it kind of gives them a little lift and be able to continue on with the meal.

Speaker1:
It sounds like the common thread for me, I think is just as you said, like bringing the the kind of putting the patient, I suppose, or the, the customer back at the center of the experience.

Speaker2:
And to me, if you’re working in a michelin star, if you’re working for me in a nursing home, the client is still the client. The diner is still the diner. And you give them the best, the very best you can, but not like using basic ingredients. I’m not looking for not talking about fancy food, fancy ingredients. There’s no need for it.

Speaker1:
Yeah. So how do we I mean, presumably given how much sort of publicity and recognition you so you so rightly received Joyce. Like what has the HSC kind of taken taken notice of it. Like what? How do you think your approach could become the norm?

Speaker2:
I’ve always said I spoke to oh, I can’t remember his name now. Um, and he is head of quality in the HSC. I can’t remember his name. And he rang me. He emailed me, could I sit down, have a chat? And it was true Covid and to discuss what I did in the rotunda and how can we go about it across the board, across the HSC? I did an hour long conversation with him, and I think that you have to get consistencies, and I keep saying, I think all the HSC hospitals should be like a McDonald’s. Nothing changes wherever McDonald’s you go to, it’s the same. And that’s the way it should be in all in all, hospitals doesn’t have to be HSC, but in all hospitals. So if you’re going in, you’re having a chicken curry with rice, you’re having the same chicken curry and rice. And it’s the best chicken curry and rice. And it’s across all the board. Everyone has that same curry. So everybody is on the same menu cycle the same. It’s costed. It’s allergen. It’s everything. So you have you just go to whatever your computer. You pick out your recipes. It’s there. It’s allergens, it’s costed, it’s calories, everything. It’s there.

Speaker1:
Presumably you’d still want within that for the chef in each of the local hospital situations to have autonomy over where to source the ingredients and things like that.

Speaker2:
A lot of the procurement in hospitals have the same list of suppliers, like nearly across, so you are going to be getting them in. You are going to be getting the same ingredients in. And that way hospitals can’t really they can’t really change from that. You know, they have to use these suppliers unless they get listed and all of that, as long as they are reputable, reputable, you know, it all has to be the same. That’s listed by. Procurement in the HSC. I think the hard thing that I find, because I go around to different hospitals now doing pure joy and training people on Dysphasia and I just feel that the chefs are tired and I don’t think they get the the right encouragement from management in not even catering in the whole hospital management. And I think, I think catering are a very integral part of the hospital as a whole. I wouldn’t say it’s food as medicine. I’m not saying food is, but it definitely helps in the recovery.

Speaker1:
But can you imagine? Can you imagine how demoralizing it must? Well, I’m sure you can imagine because you’ve worked in these, but how demoralizing it must be to work every day in a kitchen environment where the common consensus is the food is absolutely dreadful, like it must be just soul destroying as well for for those chefs.

Speaker2:
But it’s also in their power as well to change that.

Speaker1:
Yeah. True.

Speaker2:
True. You know, it really is. I don’t think it’s about budgets. I really don’t think it’s about budgets. I just think that it’s a mindset of some chefs and well, that’s the way we’ve always done it. That’s what you hear. You hear that a lot. We’ve always done it that way. Change it. Don’t be bored in your job anymore. Change it. You know, we could all just I just couldn’t plod along doing the same thing every day. I’d have to challenge myself in some way.

Speaker1:
So, Joyce, am I right in thinking that there either are there is already, or plans to bring in an orchard and a veg garden into marymount. Into the care centre?

Speaker2:
Yeah, we have, we have orchards, we have plums and peaches, apples, pears, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, all of that. And then we have a small garden with edible flowers up on one of the balconies. And then I have two beehives and we got, I got 35 jars of honey from our beehives, and this was their first year. So we were very proud.

Speaker1:
Can, can you imagine like a hospital system where all the food is cooked the way you’re the way you’re talking about what you did with the rotunda and merriment and even even a couple of little veg patches and things around the place would just be such a transformative experience for patients, wouldn’t it?

Speaker2:
Oh, brilliant. And our guys, our residents love it. Like they come up and they take care of all the herb gardens because some of them with dementia would try and put something in their mouth. So it has to be edible. It has to be safe and edible. So they’re in raised beds. So they come up and they would do they pick some and then they come down with the activity stuff, and then they come down and drop the stuff down to me. They come in with bunches of rhubarb, the honey as well, like honey, like we don’t put the honey in for cooking. We just keep it for residents if they are not feeling well or they sore throats and think it’s mind over matter sometimes, well, it’s their money, so it’s brilliant. So we’re hoping for a double a double batch of honey now next year.

Speaker1:
That is absolutely amazing Joyce. It’s such an inspiring story and it gives us all a sense, I think, of what’s possible that it doesn’t have to be, you know, crap food and our hospital system. We can be nourishing people as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Joyce. And thank you.

Speaker2:
So much for having.

Speaker1:
Me. Thanks a million. Saba’s listening to to Joyce describe her work, I was struck by a thought about, you know, just how powerful a meal can be for someone when when they’re in care and when you’re in a kind of a vulnerable situation. I loved I loved that that line she had about, um, you know, people, people kind of tweeting about that. They were going to, you know, they were being checked out that afternoon. They were going to miss whatever was on for for supper that night, you know, just that there were so looking forward to that food. And when you’re limited in how freely you can move and you’re cut off from family and friends and or you’re feeling, you know, weak or vulnerable or down in one way or another, and then a meal can arrive and it can either, you know, make even worse, or it can pick up your spirits and, and be a reminder of all the home comforts that you’re missing out on. So I think and I think anybody who’s spent any amount of time in hospital as well just knows, because it’s so boring. Like the meals are such an important part of the of the day. And so I think we kind of like the psychological impact of a proper meal is something that we take for granted. And and, you know, we’re behind on connecting the dots between nutrition and health. But I think we’re also not fully there in terms of connecting the dots between psychological and physical health.

Speaker4:
So again, I think this is where the gyres perspective really stands out, because growing food is an exercise in mental well-being before anything else, you know, hopefully you grow successfully and you get to that point where you have an abundance of, of good food and, and the physical well-being that comes with that. But even if growing doesn’t go to plan the time spent outdoors in nature using your hands, it’s all time really, really well spent. So we’ve got to back behind the microphone to talk to another pioneering wire tour. Can you tell us a little bit about Rachel Gerrard?

Speaker5:
Absolutely. So Rachel is a horticultural therapist at the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dublin and really interesting person to chat to. So in fact, she didn’t start out as a horticultural therapist. She spent 20 years as a senior legal executive, very deskbound job and then, you know, went into horticulture and really found out about the therapy side of horticulture during her training. And so during her chat, I found out what she does with patients at the rehabilitation hospital. And it was so insightful, just looking at ways that being outdoors has such a positive rehabilitation benefit, not only cognitively and physically, but also the emotional and social side of rehabilitation. So she was an interesting person to chat to. She’s so warm and I can see that her patients would absolutely warm to her as well as I did. So I hope you enjoy this chat because I certainly enjoyed chatting to her. Rachel. Hello and welcome.

Speaker3:
Hello.

Speaker5:
So I’m delighted that you can join us just to talk about horticulture and how food growing and can play a role in patient rehabilitation, and to also chat about your role as a horticultural therapist. But first, and that’s quite a transition from a predominantly deskbound legal executive to what I imagine is a predominantly outdoor working environment as a horticultural therapist. And can you tell us a bit about what motivated that career change?

Speaker3:
Well, I was always, always interested in the garden, and my parents are, um, my mother would be was always out in the garden and my father grows vegetables and whatever. So there was always a background, let’s say, to gardening. But yeah, I worked in the office for years. I loved it, it was great, but I was thinking of a change as it was. So I took a bit of time and it was great, actually. Have to say, I really enjoyed having the space and the time to have a think. I went off on the Camino for a couple of weeks as well. Just you know what? Great. All you to do is get up in the morning, go for a walk. It was fabulous. And and then when I came back, I thought, right, okay, it’s coming. It was July. Say and think, right, okay. It’s time to go back. I want to do I want to go back to college. So as luck would have it, I applied to the Botanic Gardens and got it. I went for the the certificate, which was only for the year. Right. So I said, well, well let’s just see how it is now. I’ve all I was really keen. I was, I was absolutely thrilled when, um, you know, when it was accepted and found I absolutely loved it.

Speaker3:
You know, I went in and within a couple of weeks I was like, oh my God, this is exactly what I want to be doing. And then sure got the degree. That was great. And I thought, right, I’ll finish it off. And I went to Blanchardstown to do the the fourth year. So it became an honours degree then. And I’d say as to backtrack on how I became a horticultural therapist. Um, in the final year in the Botanic Gardens, one of my electives was to do a social and therapeutic horticulture, and I’ve really enjoyed that. And, uh, and then the following year they had they ran a module as well in Blanchardstown similarly, and we did lots of workshops. We worked with um, level three learners and every Friday we’d, you know, we’d do something else. We had a various different projects that we would run. And it was I was absolutely fascinated by it. So really that started to, you know, what would you say? Like the penny kind of dropped there, I suppose this was actually something that I’d be really interested in doing and that it was, you know, definitely worth exploring. And yeah.

Speaker5:
It is a branch of horticulture that isn’t so well known. We hear very much about garden design, following, doing a horticulture degree or maybe going into being a commercial grower. And but I mean, it is slowly starting to become more widely known. Was it really through the degree that it opened your eyes to? This could be a career. This is where I could take this horticulture.

Speaker3:
Yeah, well it was well, I did my, um, I did my final year project on it as well. And that was how the role of horticulture in rehabilitation. But I had it from the rehabilitation of people who were, um, you know, coming off drink and drugs, basically. And, um, and so I would work down in there’s a residential centre in north County Dublin that would went down and I worked there with the horticulturalist and, you know, it was you could see it was growing as it was. I mean, it was it started out, you know, mainly growing food with a few chickens and ducks. But then by the like at the end of it, they had like two alpacas and like pigs and goats and everything that was, you know, but but you could really see it had a very, um, positive effect on the residents. And really it could mean, um, because it gave them responsibility. They’d have to get up in the morning and look after the water, the plants, for starters, then look after the, you know, the animals. And being out in the garden in the fresh air actually got them, you know, to step away from that. And they could just be, just be, you know, instead of having to be and just, you know, be focused on a task. And still they could be processing what they had just been talking about today in group session or whatever, but they would be able to just have a bit of quiet time to tip away and be with their own thoughts. Um, and the course is not just on her own. I mean, there was a lot of camaraderie as well. Like, you’d actually have to learn to work together and get on, you know, get on with the job at hand.

Speaker5:
And was it from working with those organisations with within Dublin that then led you to your your current role within the National Rehabilitation Hospital? Yeah, it is a facility that provides the rehabilitation to patients who have acquired physical or cognitive disabilities, and mainly as a result of illnesses or injuries or accidents. Can you just briefly describe what you do with patients and maybe some of the results that you see? I know it’s it’s a broad church there you do. You do an awful lot with these patients and maybe start with who you work with other than the patients within the hospital. Right.

Speaker3:
Well, it’s it’s part of the you know, it’s an interdisciplinary team, as they say. So there are like physios and speech and language therapists. They do, you know, there’s all sorts. But I’m, I’m mainly involved with the occupational therapy department. So occupational therapy is basically, you know, using everyday things to try and rehabilitate the person. And you know, let them realise that they can actually do everyday things. And one of which is horticulture.

Speaker5:
And they come out with you into the garden. So there’s a, there’s a garden actually on the grounds. And is it a large space. Is it. It’s quite a.

Speaker3:
Large space actually. It’s on a slope as well. So you know, challenging that. So there’s, which is challenging. Yeah, exactly. But also very good for practising you know. So um, so okay I’ll describe what would come out into the garden. You come out into a patio area which is nice and flat and are raised beds. So there are raised beds along each side and two large circular raised beds, which would be, say, nearly up to say waist height or whatever. So, um, so patients can come out, they can work from their chair. And then when there’s say some who are practising walking and standing, they can work at that height and there’s no real need to be bending, you know, they can stretch and reach. And then there’s the tool shed. And we have mainly hand tools there. Um, two lovely lawnmowers which always cause great sport, especially amongst the young.

Speaker5:
Because these aren’t just normal lawnmowers, the kind of modern day lawnmowers. We’re talking kind of old school lawnmowers, aren’t they?

Speaker3:
Cool cylindrical pushers. Exactly.

Speaker5:
And so is that for a purpose? Is that, you know, to have that because it can be used for physical strength and stamina?

Speaker3:
You’d be surprised. What is involved in pushing a lawn mower. Like, you know, you have to have your balance. You’re pushing. Then, you know, if you’re getting into higher levels, it’s like, you know, maybe cutting lines in the lawn. You know, you’re trying to make it all like very neat and tidy. Um, but it is, it involves like physical and physical exercise as well. For them. It’s actually and it’s a have to say, it’s a great vehicle for, um, you know, getting some of the younger patients going because they’d be like, what’s the story I’m used to a ride on or whatever, you know? And uh, but I’d say, look it, lads, you know, you’re the engine. So off you go. And, um, and.

Speaker5:
Then there’s a bit of a bit of competitive spark comes there.

Speaker3:
Luckily we have two, so you can get, you know, it’s amazing how you can get two individuals put up, set up against each other and say, right, who can cut the fat, who you know, want you to cut that area now? And they’d be flying around before they even realise it. You know, they have it done and it’s great. Yeah. Um, and then everything.

Speaker5:
So all the tools there are really thought about in terms of they’re not just a tool to work within the garden, they’re how can that tool actually help with rehabilitation? Because there’s obviously the cognitive side of things as well. It’s not just about physical strength and balance. And how does the cognitive elements come into some of the tasks that some of the patients might do with you?

Speaker3:
Mm. Well, um, we grow a lot of our, our food and flowers from seed. So even it’s good for fine and, and gross motor skills when you’re trying to, um, like, pick up seeds. And of course, they’re all different sizes. You have everything from like, a pea to, you know, down to like carrot seed or whatever, which is like titchy. And, um, so it’s to the point of like having to literally work out how. To pick up the seed, how to scatter it, how to place it out. You know, seen before that putting the compost into the tray or into the six pack or whatever you’re using at the time, and mixing the compost, breaking it up, all that, I mean, literally from start to finish, let’s say, okay, even scooping up the compost, putting it out, mixing it up, maybe with perlite or vermiculite or whatever and spreading it on the tray, flattening it out, you know, sprinkling out your seeds, covering them over, tapping them down, watering them. I mean, it’s and of course, when you think of it, each thing is a it’s a sequence of events. So it helps with focusing sequencing in the cognitive sense. And then as I say, physically trying to like pick up things and move them around and flatten them out and what have you.

Speaker5:
And something that we, many of us, would just take for granted is just going out there and, you know, sowing some seeds. And when you break it down like you’ve just done there, it is quite mind boggling just how much goes into, you know, planting a single tray of seeds. How much thinking has to go into it. And as you say, the sequencing of events that go into there. And I certainly know I’d much rather be outside doing it with seeds than maybe in a, in a hospital room doing it with, I don’t know, wooden beads or whichever way that we think about rehabilitation and and transferring it to the, to the garden and to those everyday tasks just brings a different dimension to some tough rehabilitation that many of these patients are going through.

Speaker3:
And sometimes it has to be hand over hand, you know, and because they may not have quite the strength or whatever. So you work with them. And yeah, I mean each each patient is different and whatever. But but I suppose the good thing, as you just said about just putting beads in different things, at least you know, when they come back the following week, maybe not the following week, but the week after, maybe there will be signs of life. And, you know, they’re like, oh, look at that and saying, yeah, look, they’re coming up already. And you know, so they’re, they’re it’s um.

Speaker5:
It’s a reflection of progress, isn’t it? It’s kind of progress in their rehab and progress in the growing, which is just wonderful.

Speaker3:
They’re invested in it, you see. They, you know, they they put in some effort and they can see results.

Speaker5:
I’m quite interest because I know a lot of patients will be in the lnWr for its long term care. They’re not it’s not a couple of weeks. It’s it’s often many weeks. And circumstances for them being in there is you know it’s it’s it’s very sad. It’s not it’s not planned. So what I ask you is many of the people who come to you, do they have an interest in gardening already or is it a real mixed bag? Some have latent interest or a background and how to some potentially maybe react to being given gardening?

Speaker3:
Yeah, it’s a total mixed bag. You have everything from wait, let’s show you pictures of my garden at home and and then often like we well some some are farmers. You know there are farming accidents could be coming off the tractor or a, you know, crushed by an animal or something. You know, there’s all different things falling through a roof. Um. Then, you know, so they may have an interest and then they can get quite upset because they can’t do what they used to be able to do and say, well, look, it this is you’re doing, you know, let’s have a go and see where it takes us. And often they’re quite impressed. Like the my given had initially gone I would have done that in five minutes. And that’s taken me the full hour or whatever. But say, well what you did it, you know. So absolutely now it’s not a panacea either. I mean, sometimes people can get upset because it brings it out in them. They their limitations, but say, well, look, okay, let’s work with what you have, you know, and what we can do.

Speaker5:
And you saying and it’s something that really struck me was about really it’s about the chatting to them. It’s the socialising, it’s the camaraderie. So even if when they get discharged, never touch a seed or a trowel in again the benefit of that social interaction, because rehabilitation can be quite a lonely thing, especially if walking up and down hospital corridors. And whereas going out into the garden, sitting, chatting to you, chatting to other people.

Speaker3:
Yeah, there is a bit. And also you see it’s not really it’s very, it’s, it’s not quite the clinical environment. You know, they’re there, it’s there is that sort of sense of being out behind the back of the bike shed a bit going on. So they, they, you know there’s a bit like of the gossip that goes rebel gang little sometimes you can have a bit of like a wait. Like I’m not even listening. I’m going out today, you know? But there is a bit of it. It does foster camaraderie between the patients. Yeah. And I suppose you see there used to be in the old, the old style was where they were all in the ward. Now they have their own room, but there are areas that they can, you know, meet and chat and whatever. But the garden is one of them and absolutely. And of course, now with, with all this, the Covid thing and whatever, being outside is perfect. And then, um, uh, you know, they can be socially distanced, yapping away and yeah, it’s great. So they work, by the way. Yeah.

Speaker5:
When, when they work, if there’s too much talking, not so much seed sowing. Lawn mowing gets done. So it sounds like there is a lot of food growing, a lot of other growing as well, I understand. But is some of the the produce that is grown? I understand there’s some tomatoes in the polytunnel. Are they used by the patients as part of their therapy as well like absolutely. Team.

Speaker3:
Yeah, absolutely. Well like say the tomatoes and cucumbers are used even if it’s just in a sandwich. You know, there’s an occupational therapy, um, kitchen. So where the patients cook their own food and, you know, whatever they’re doing and or baking, they, we do the rhubarb or the gooseberries, raspberries we have, like, they all go in, they are all used, um, and and some go actually, do we send them down to the canteen as well? Um, so, uh, and like the tomatoes and what have you used in the salads? I’ve been speaking to the chef and he’s really keen now to increase, uh, the food coming from the garden and putting it into the actual, you know, into the staff and the patients menus. So. Yeah. And because he was like, you know, definitely. And I said to him, well, I tell you what, what is it that you want? We’ll try and grow it. And then I’ll tell you what, what we, what we grow a lot of and use it, you know. So so yeah.

Speaker5:
That’s that’s brilliant. So really great.

Speaker3:
Link. Yeah. Between the kitchen and the and like this is the actual canteen kitchen as well as the um occupational therapy kitchens where the. So this is.

Speaker5:
Serving serving the staff and visitors as, as so really if we’re talking about food miles, that’s going to be like nothing. That’s literally from, from your garden, from your garden to the canteen. Yes. That’s fantastic. That’s great. Yeah. You got you got the full grow cooking experience happening at the hospital.

Speaker2:
From outside.

Speaker3:
The door.

Speaker5:
That’s brilliant. But it’s just really great to get that new thinking, you know, not only from from you working with patients, but hearing the chef, seeing that as an opportunity is that you’re growing stuff out there. Let’s let’s bring it back into the hospital. And so really from, from my point of view, I it’s time for me to get my little personal bit in here because I am myself an outpatient at the NRA. So I have a familiarity of going through through rehab. And I know I’m also a food grower amateur though it may be. And I know that over the last year for me is that without realizing it, going out into the garden and doing a little bit of, you know, weeding or sowing has been fantastic for my emotional well-being. And what I’d love to do is get just from your experience of working with with patients in rehab, is what advice would you perhaps give to anyone who is maybe keen to start growing, or perhaps would like to get back to growing following an illness or an injury? But perhaps they’re dealing with some physical or cognitive challenges, and whether you’ve got some some top tips that maybe you, you use with with your patients.

Speaker3:
Yeah. Well. I think the first thing is just set your mind to it and just say, right, let’s go. Let’s let’s go out there now and see what we can do. Um, you can get adaptive tools where say, if your, your, your wrists are not as strong as they were, but you can actually have it where there’s the tool could be velcroed on or clipped on. So you have the strength of your arm for things like weeding or whatever. Um, long handled tools mean they don’t even have to be specifically, you know, adapted, but long handled things. And you can literally you can a bit of Velcro or clipped around. It would really be of assistance, I think, as well, if you just go out and look at what your space is like, um, if the beds are all low down, absolutely get raised beds. It makes life a lot easier even for like even for me. I’m thinking in the future I don’t want to be down necessarily on my hands and knees. I think I’d rather be open a nice level where I could. Nice height that I can work from in comfort. Um, a little bit of changing around. You may not need all that grass, you know you may not need. And also manicured gardens are gone out of fashion so you could actually.

Speaker5:
Weeds are good.

Speaker3:
Weeds are good. We like dandelions are our friends, you know. Yeah. So you could just say, right, you know what? I’m going to let that go and turn it into a wild meadow or whatever, um, area and leave part of the garden to go a bit wild, and then you only have to cut it once a year, like it’d be. Grant. Absolutely.

Speaker5:
And I suppose also it’s thinking about the if you’re wanting to grow food is is manageable food. So perhaps you know you’ve got those, you know things like brassicas or sweetcorn which are take up huge spaces and get quite tall is to think about the plants or the veg, which can grow just pop to mind was, you know, dwarf French beans that can be done in containers. Absolutely. Think containers.

Speaker3:
Are great. It’s you can it’s it’s amazing how you know, you can just use what’s around you like mean old bins, catering tubs and things like that. All of these things can be used, put up on a nice, uh, on a shelf. You can grow amazing. You know, it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to have your 40 acres. You can you can grow quite a lot in a quite a small space. Um, it’s not that square foot gardening is. You do that, you know? So. Yeah.

Speaker5:
Okay. Gardening, container gardening. This is.

Speaker3:
It. Exactly. And grow like, you know, as you say, brassicas can be very big in the space. Great. But you know, but but grow things you like. Yes. You like to eat because there’s no point of growing something. You go, oh, I’d never eat that. So think about what’s in your diet, what do you like to eat and what you what you would like to eat? Um, and you’re going to have it that one year you’ll have a something would work really well. And something for some reason, the following year doesn’t work at all. But you’re, you know, it’s all part of the it’s all part of the tapestry, you know.

Speaker5:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, I certainly know just chatting to you here, just I can imagine just what great stuff you do with the patients that come to you and the fun that you have. And there’s no denying I’m sure there’s some, some challenging moments I can I can certainly appreciate that. But there is a there’s a lightness and fun just you’re.

Speaker3:
Right in saying though, that’s the thing you see. It’s it’s it is rehabilitative. But also you just said it there. There’s fun. I mean, you have to think, you know, if people have had a really rough time and you’re just trying to inject a bit of fun back into their life. And yes, they’re there too, you know, and it’s all very serious. They’re going to be doing their rehabilitation or whatever. But there’s the lighter side as well, where, you know, as I say, the camaraderie, having a bit of fun, getting things off their chest while they’re working away and like, you know, enjoying the fresh air and, and the as I say, when they’re invested in it and they see that, you know, there’s that little tiny seedling and it’s growing and it’s a pea plant. There we go. It’s going to produce the it’s going to produce peas. It’s, you know, it’s it’s fabulous.

Speaker5:
And it is taking you said it then back at you there. Is that just being outside as well. And you forget, you know historically so much of rehabilitation within a hospital setting is indoors. It’s it’s in that clinical setting. And it’s wonderful to hear that we’re moving forward and having these opportunities to do similar rehabilitation but within the outdoors. Thank you for joining us, Rachel. I just thoroughly enjoyed our chat and just providing this insight into, you know, not just gardening but food growing and what a role. It can play in rehabilitation. So thank you and we will be checking in. I might see you when I’m up at the National Rehab. Absolutely. Yeah. Great. I’ll give you the grand tour. Yeah. Thank you so, so much. And we will be in touch.

Speaker3:
Good luck now. Bye bye. Bye bye.

Speaker1:
That was a deadly interview, buzz, and I was lucky enough to to visit that garden a couple of years ago in the in the rehab hospital in Dun Laoghaire. And it’s a, it’s a, it’s an absolutely shining example, I think of of preventative medicine and and growing being used as a form of, of therapy in hospital settings and of course in we’ve seen it through the work we did with horticulture therapy over the years in different settings like prisons and, um, various other other settings where it can have a similar kind of therapeutic effect. Um, so I think listening to Rachel, I think you could kind of make the argument that that food growing holds kind of stronger potential than, than the food itself, you know, if that makes sense. Like from a, from a preventative perspective, um, you’re talking about a skill to help you really understand food and get the food empathy. We speak about a lot, and you’re also kind of creating a more active and outdoor lifestyle. But then as a therapy itself, and I mean, I think, I think we use the expression a lot of getting out of your head and into your hands. And I think that’s that’s what happens. Like, I notice sometimes when I start a job, say, weeding around leeks or something, and you’re kind of there with the, with the hoe or with a hand trowel or whatever, and you can hear your mind kind of churning and saying, you know, this is crap.

Speaker1:
I don’t like this doing this. There’s so much to do. Why did you let the weeds get so bad? And then eventually, if you if you persist with it with like mindfully doing it and the mind starts to quieten down and just shut up, which is what you wanted to do, and and you get space and you find, oh, geez, I’ve been doing this for ten minutes and I haven’t had a single thought. And, you know, it just gives you that gap of, of of no mind, which is like such a break. You know, from the incessant kind of churn in your head and, and then you head back up to the house and you’re kind of, you’re feeling calm and relaxed and that’s, that’s why it’s so therapeutic, you know, on top of the fresh air and the all of the other things. So I think it takes me back a bit to, to that first episode where we looked at food done right at home. And, you know, that idea that the more that people grow and connect with food as part of, of everything we do, you know, make a part of your everyday life. And hopefully the more we’ll stay out of the hospital system altogether. And and if and if we do fall sick, we get back, get better quicker. And hopefully if we do have to go into hospital, that the food will be a bit better than it currently is.

Speaker4:
Yeah, absolutely. I think I think weeding must be the perfect metaphor for healing. You know, you’re talking about all this stress and chaos building up all around you. And then by the time you’re done, it’s it’s, you know, calm personified. So definitely something something to bear in mind. So to we all need a little bit of therapy in our lives. What tips do you have for anyone who wants to kind of take on some of those, those lessons to, you know, to make a difference in their daily life?

Speaker5:
Absolutely. And, you know, listening to to Rachel and what she does with her patients certainly opens my eyes to to what I can do, what we can all do. I’m a huge proponent of outdoor therapy and have been for for many, many years. I found a massive benefit myself just to a lot of emotional well-being. And it’s actually in the last few years I’ve been very interested in this idea of forest bathing, which was an a concept that came about in the late 80s in Japan. So if you want to get technical, it’s known as shinrin yoku over in Japan. Nice. And it’s got loads of scientific research behind it. It’s had a lot of attention in the Western media in the last couple of years. And and it’s a really, really simple concept. But more than anything, what I, what I love about it is it’s actually standard preventative medical care in Japan is to head into the forest and get reap the benefits of it. So it’s not so much just hugging trees. You don’t just go in and hug a tree, but what you’re doing is you’re using your five senses. It’s it’s an incredibly simple concept. You’re using your your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste and just the sounds that you hear around you. So when I first found out about it, I did give it a go. I will be honest, I didn’t have the the wild forests of Japan to go to.

Speaker5:
In truth, it was a small pine forest in North West England that I went to and it had added squirrels, which probably help. Very nice. But I was a little bit skeptical about how this was going to going to work. But there is something about being amongst trees that really is a very calming effect on you, whether you’re just going for a walk in the trees. And and I came, I came away from it and realized that I could bring that into into all of my life, whether it’s a walk along the coast, whether it’s heading out into my garden and and what do you hear outside in, in nature, you’ve got the sounds of the birds. And I know I find that incredibly calming sound, especially over the summer months. And you’ve got, you know, the feel. You can you can head in, you can feel the leaves, you can feel the soil. We want to get our hands dirty and feel that soil. And you’ve got the smells around you. Nature smells all sorts of smells out there at different times of the years. And and then you’ve just got that, you know, the, the, the vision, just the view outside. You’re looking out at the sea, you’re looking at the, the coastline. That can be an incredibly calming thing. And but probably something that links more to food growing is the taste you can look at. Food Sustainability.

Speaker5:
I know growing my own food and getting a chance to taste it certainly makes me feel good. But even if you’re out in the September months and you’re foraging and you’ve got the blackberries out there and you’re, you know, sneaking a few tastes of them, the birds love them. We love them too. And so all of that from a from a feeling point of view. But there’s science behind it as well. And I think that’s what really made me get very attached to it, is that it’s not just me standing here saying, yes, go out and hug a tree. It makes you feel good. And there’s been a huge amount of scientific research. That means that a lot of these things that you do can calm your nervous system. So your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the relaxing side of things, and the reason that the forest is such a huge part of it is actually there’s a there’s a smell that trees can emit, and it’s that smell that can reduce the, the cortisol levels, our stress response in your body. So I certainly know that if I go outside it makes me feel better. I’ve got personal experience about it, and I certainly know going out and, you know, picking a strawberry, standing there and eating it, the taste certainly makes me feel a lot better. And I’m so proud that I’ve grown it myself as well.

Speaker4:
Nice tour. I’m more relaxed just listening to you describe it and a little bit hungry as well. And thank you so much. No problem. And that’s a wrap we’ve gone on as far a journey as we could manage over the six episodes in the series, trying to figure out how food can be done right throughout different phases of life. Make anything stand out for you. Any deeply complex problems solved? Food Sustainability.

Speaker1:
Um, so much stands out for me as I think. I think in fairness, it’s been a rollicking ride through, like, you know, all of the different, um, touch points for food in all aspects of our lives, really. So I don’t think you could, as you say, it’s ambitious. Kind of a plan for six episodes of a podcast. Um, I think like the common kind of thread for me, um, was the question of like, how big a priority food is in different aspects of our lives. I think often times it gets relegated to something sort of secondary or, you know, transactional or something. We just don’t really care about all that much. And it’s like just the sort of mindless activity, particularly when it comes to food at work or in care settings or in the school system or whatever. Um, and I think, I think that’s the, the point here, I guess, is that we’re going to need to care a much, much more. Um, and I think, you know, we’ve tried to be very positive throughout this as, as you should be, I think. But I think you have to sort of be honest as well and say that what what we’ve done, I guess, is shine a light on some corners of the food system where the where the system is pretty crap, all in all.

Speaker1:
And, you know, I think I think, um, one of the standout moments for me is Roger, Roger Doran’s point about the subversive plot, you know, and like, I think we we need we don’t we don’t have to be part of a system that we know to be crap. We can make a different choice and do something different and and stand out a bit and be proud to stand out a bit and do something ourselves, which is good for, for for our own health and for the health of the planet and develop that, that food, empathy and food empathy is a kind of it’s a soft enough kind of a phrase. So I think, I think there’s something, something really valuable in what, what the sort of approach that Roger talks about, because I think food growing is subversive and it is a taking an action that’s that’s deeply kind of transformational. And hopefully we’ve encouraged lots of people to to care more deeply about what we eat and, and get their own subversive plot going in time as well. Food Sustainability.

Speaker4:
Exactly. So if you want food done right, grow it yourself and try to reclaim some of that power, you know, back from from other forces. So thank you all so much for listening to this first foray into podcasting for us. And we we do hope you enjoyed it. We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for future series. You can get in touch by email at hi@giy.ie Or message us on any of our social channels.

Speaker1:
And don’t forget, you can shop for all your growing needs on Giy.ie, including our brand new range of subscriptions, which we’re really, really proud of. To make sure you get just what you need to sow and grow at the various times of the year. And don’t forget, we are a social enterprise, which means that all surpluses that we make are reinvested into our mission to help people grow their own food at home, in schools, in workplaces, and in the community. And I want to say a big thanks again to rethink and the Community Foundation for Ireland, without whom we could not have made this podcast, and hopefully we’ll be back for another series very soon. Until next time, happy growing.

Speaker4:
Thanks, Mick. It’s been a pleasure. Please subscribe to Food Done Right, the food sustainability podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including secure transcription and file storage, world-class support, powerful integrations and APIs, generate automated summaries powered by AI, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.