Joe McNamee: Waterford-based GIY deserves the Nobel Prize

‘Our Farm’ allows the practice do preaching

GIY founder Mick Kelly. Picture: Patrick Browne

For its work in schools alone, Irish-founded, Waterford-based GIY deserves the Nobel Prize.

Not only does it build connections for pupils and teachers with truly healthy, nutritious, and sustainable food, it also can have a profound impact on healthy eating habits.

A British study found 90% of children involved in growing their own food altered eating habits for the better.

Accordingly, I highly recommend GIY founder Mick Kelly and his team’s brand new six-part series, Our Farm: A GIY Story (beginning at 8.30pm on Tuesday, March 3, on RTÉ One).

The GIY HQ in Waterford is mightily impressive, not least for the always delicious food from its on-site restaurant.

However, growing room at this urban space was too limited for a highly ambitious growing project that is the subject of Our Farm.

For five years, I ran my Grub Circus food-themed stage at the All Together Now music festival on Curraghmore Estate in Co Waterford, a fine introduction to the estate itself, including areas off-limits to festival-goers.

That included an ancient, abandoned walled garden, fallen into total dereliction.

Here, the team discovers traces of its incredible horticultural history. Against an old stone wall, a forgotten heritage variety of pear tree is linked to Russian tsars of the 1800s. Grapes are discovered on a few surviving vines in a battered, old hothouse.

Crucially, soil underfoot is dark, rich, and fertile loam.

The tone of the series is light, chirpy, pleasantly entertaining.

Mick Kelly, Richard Mee and Aine Maher

The team, however, is close-knit and so obviously driven by a shared GIY passion that “conflict” comes over as endearingly hammy — ideal for drawing in an audience who would normally steer well clear of deeper, fundamental issues that Our Farm addresses.

In other words, it allows the practice to do the preaching.

Over six episodes, it follows the team facing multiple challenges. That GIY head grower Richard Mee has never encountered a pest so voracious as the thousands of pheasants bred on the estate for shooting is a wry reminder of the incongruity of this lingering vestige of empire in our republic.

On the other hand, vagaries of increasingly unpredictable and destructive weather illustrate that climate change is a global existential challenge to our ability to feed ourselves.

Our Farm provokes other questions: About the 47% of ultra-processed foods in our shopping baskets; about the ability to afford the nutritious, healthy, and sustainable option of local, seasonal, organic food in the face of a cost-of-living crisis; about the horrific destruction of our native horticulture sector.

Most of all, Our Farm asks if it is possible to re-establish short supply chains, from a local grower to a local table.

This is encapsulated in the team’s pursuit of a holy grail of 150 consumers to sign up for a weekly veg box scheme, crucial to the project’s economic viability.

In our modern world, the short food supply chain model has been entirely replaced by a globalised long supply chain version now gravely imperilled.

Recent years have seen serious disruptions: Were it to break down completely, it would lead to global chaos, even in our privileged world that presumes the promise of produce-laden supermarket shelves is forever.

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The challenges are three-fold. The current long food supply chain causes over one third of emissions responsible for climate change, the same climate change affecting growing regions around the world that grows most of our food.

Economic instability is another. “Trump” and “tariffs” speak volumes on that one.

“Geopolitical conflicts” may sound like stuff that happens somewhere else, but the war in Ukraine has affected price and availability of wheat and sunflower oil in Ireland.

What if that conflict led to a war engulfing all of Europe as many now fear?

In a country that now imports 83% of its fresh produce, it is estimated we’d have about three days stock before running out entirely, and previously exporting countries will only be concerned with feeding themselves.

Our Farm won’t save the world, but that’s not the point. GIY was set up as a teaching and learning model, to illustrate alternatives to current failing systems. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the programme.

Ideally, you’ll be inspired, perhaps to seek out a veg box scheme in your own locality. It might even contain pears with noble Russian lineage.

Table talk

Landlover Food is taking over my beloved OHK in Kinsale for a very exclusive evening of dining from chef Aideen White, who spent 20+ years as a chef for celebrity clients including Martha Stewart, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Cindy Crawford. She and host Sheena O’Byrne are bringing their successful Dublin supper club model down south for a five-course tasting menu and welcome cocktail (BYOB) on March 6/7. Tickets €95.

landloverfood.ie

One of the most keenly anticipated openings in years is chef Cúán Greene’s Ómós, sited in a transformed Victorian House outside Abbeyleix into a 40-seat restaurant and guesthouse on 4.2 acres. Greene has all the right names on his CV, including Noma and Geranium, in Copenhagen, as well as a successful spell as head chef at Bastible, so it is sure to be the hottest ticket in town when it opens in July. And the big news today is that bookings open on March 24, so get your place in the digital queue!

omos.co

TODAY’S SPECIAL

Regular readers will be aware that I’m part man, part coffee, regularly featuring superb Irish roasted coffee. No surprise then to find out that these coffee geek has a range of kit with which to brew my daily cups of joe. Chief among them, especially when travelling, is the iconic AeroPress.

A reliable and highly portable delivery system, it draws the best of the French press, espresso and pour-over methods into a simple, efficient brewing system to swiftly deliver fresh flavoursome brews, low on bitterness and grit-free.

The AeroPress Premium (€190), a hand-crafted double-wall glass chamber with precision stainless-steel and aluminium components, is on my birthday list but in the meantime, introduce yourself to the AeroPress Original (€40), and change your coffee game for life, both available from Irish supplier Symmons.

symmons.ie