Grow, cook, eat your own food says the man behind the Grow It Yourself movement

It all started with a bulb of garlic. Michael Kelly, the man who would go on to set up the Grow It Yourself (GIY) movement, had his Road to Damascus moment in a supermarket a little more than a decade ago when he noticed that the garlic on the shelf had come all the way from China.

It wasn’t so much the 8,000-plus air kilometres that made him stop him to think, but the label that read: “Fresh from China”.

“It just made no sense whatsoever,” he tells Feelgood.

“It really opened my eyes to what was going on in the food sector. Why were we importing something from more than 5,000 miles [8,000km ] away when it can be grown perfectly easily here?”

He started to grow his own garlic. “I put it in upside down. I had no clue” — but that started him on a journey that, last month, led to the opening of Grow HQ, a €1.45m national food education centre in Waterford city.

The journey however, is far from over. In the next five years, Michael Kelly hopes to involve more than 250,000 people at the new GIY centre.

He hopes the centre, with its cookery school, cafe, farm-shop and food gardens, will help people to reconnect with food in a meaningful way.

“We are living in an age when we are completely obsessed with food, yet we have never been more disconnected from it,” he says. “We have lost ‘food empathy’, that deep appreciation and connection with the food we eat,” he says.

His garlic-bulb moment all those years ago prompted him to question where his food was coming from.

“The more I did, the more I appreciated the seasonality of things. I started to put food and a deep understanding of food at the centre of my life,” he says.

At the time, he and his wife Eilish were working professionals with a relatively healthy diet, but when they started to eat what was in season, they noticed a significant improvement to their health.

The reasons were obvious; if you are eating seasonal food, you are eating it at its freshest and most nutritious. If you are growing it yourself, it is also likely to be organic and pesticide-free.

“Even if you are growing only 5% to 10% of your food, you are thinking differently about the other 90% of it and you are probably eating more fruit and veg,” says Kelly.

Though the GIY founder is quick to dispel the myth that you have to have green fingers to grow your own.

“I did not have green fingers. I was one of those people who was likely to kill house plants,” he says.

When he went looking for courses to learn the basics, he discovered there were few to fit the bill so, in September 2008, he established the first GIY group.

The idea spread gradually and a year later Grow It Yourself had turned into a full-time voluntary organisation.

Along the way, he left his IT job and moved to Waterford from Dublin, intent on changing the pace of his life and reaching out to others willing to join him.

“We needed a base, a centre where people could learn to grow and cook their own food and to ‘start a new conversation’ about food,” he says.

In November 2013, Taoiseach Enda Kenny helped to launch a fundraising campaign and, since then, GIY has raised €1.45m through a mixture of reaching out to business partners in the private sector, loan finance, crowdfunding, philanthropic donations and government grants.

Waterford City Council provided a three-acre site and the doors at Grow HQ opened last month, generating 16 jobs.

Over the next year, it will offer a range of courses for adults and children, including the signature ‘Grow, Cook, Eat’ day, but Michael encourages people not to postpone their ‘grow it yourself’ project until next year.

“Start now by eating seasonal food. You are missing a trick if you are not eating with the seasons.” And when you do get into the garden, don’t worry about making mistakes.

“Start small. Give yourself a chance to let your experience catch up with your enthusiasm.”

Grow HQ is open daily from 8am to 5pm. See: www.growhq.org