A growing awareness to grow, cook and eat

Karen O’Donohoe and Michael Kelly tell Ciara McDonnell what to expect from series two of Grow, Cook, Eat.

For Karen O’Donohoe, it started with rocket. Like so many of us, she was doing her weekly shopping, mindlessly flinging bags of rocket into the trolley in an effort to be as she puts it, the really good middle-class mammy.

“I’d take these bags home and either eat it all of it in one go, or inevitably leave one of the bags to go to sludge at the bottom of the fridge. When I actually ate proper home-grown rocket, which is full-on and so peppery and delicious, I realised what it should actually taste like.”

I’m chatting with Karen, who is head of community development for GIY Ireland, and Michael Kelly, its founder, ahead of series two of Grow, Cook, Eat, airing on RTÉ 1 every Wednesday until April 24.

Like last year, the show will feature one hero vegetable each week, and take viewers on a journey from seed to harvest to a delicious dish we can make at home.

“We were very particular about how we wanted it to be presented,” explains Michael.

We wanted it to be a cooking show as opposed to a gardening show, because I had that sense that people are genuinely interested in food.

Teaming up with chef Katie Sanderson, Grow, Cook, Eat seeks to ground us with knowledge that families can take on in daily lives.

Children responded extremely well to season one, say the experts, and this year they hope to capture their imagination once more, says Michael. “We were at Bloom last year and loads of kids came up to myself and Karen to say that they had been watching it and it’s just fantastic. We have a kids book coming out later in the year hopefully because it’s a brilliant time to catch them — they are so enthusiastic and infectious about it.”

Karen hopes that the series will give us a sense of empowerment when it comes to making food choices. “It’s really about normalising food growing and for people to realise that it’s not an elitist activity; it’s not boring,” she says.

“It doesn’t take a lot of space or know how — everybody can give it a go. This is all underpinned by the message that if you grow your own food and become increasingly aware around the impact your food and therefore other choices have on our world as well as on our health, you suddenly start to realise that you have more power than you think.”

The duo focus on several issues affecting Irish consumers and producers throughout the series, one of which is limiting plastic consumption. The team visited three supermarkets, two Irish nationwide chains and one local greengrocer.

At each store they purchased nine of the most popular vegetables found in Irish trolleys. The difference in packaging was astounding, says Karen.

“That was a really sobering day. In two of the baskets you could barely see the vegetables through the plastic packaging, whereas in the third basket, which came from a local greengrocer market, you could see, smell, and touch the veg. There is simply no comparison.”

O’Donohoe hopes to shock viewers into making more informed food choices when it comes to so-called bargain vegetables, and to try to be aware of the other costs involved. “It comes down to the point that until people really wake up to food and their responsibility around food, you just think at the till that you are saving money.

"You don’t think about how much it is costing you personally to dispose of the waste, never mind the unseen costs to people and the planet round the packaging in the first instance."

Chef Katie Sanderson will be cooking with seasonal Irish vegetables throughout the programme, hoping to entice us to try new treatments of Irish produce instead of falling back on trendy alternatives.

“One of the vegetables we look at are French beans, which I normally wouldn’t eat them if you paid me,” laughs Karen.

Katie challenged me to give it a go, and instead of smashed avocado, she did something even tastier with French beans. I think it’s great to be inspired, it’s great to have positive role models around food, but at the same time, we have to stop thinking about ourselves in terms of the food that we eat.

"I love avocados — they’re great, but actually it would be really hypocritical of me to be still buying them and eating them because I know the impact it is having globally.”

For Michael, the message this year is more political. “I met a lady yesterday who said that she grew all seven veg last year for the first time and this year we want people to do the same thing, follow the story and grow along with it. I think it’s slightly more political, if that’s not too strong a word, this year.”

He visits some of Ireland’s biggest vegetable growers to talk about the impact of cut-price supermarket vegetables on their business, and the landscape he encountered was one in dire straits.

“I visited Paul Brophy who is one of the biggest broccoli producers in the State, to talk about the challenges that the commercial food growers have in terms of competing with cheaper foreign imports”, he explains. “They are finding it near impossible to compete with the imports coming in, and this is having a detrimental impact on the industry.”

This is rooted in the core ethos of the team behind Grow, Cook, Eat. “We’ve always promoted food growing as an activity which helps people to get a better understanding of food,” he points out. “The impact we try to have as an organisation is to help people grow some food, and then that armed with the extra knowledge of growing, you are a better and wiser consumer who makes different choices around the veg that you buy and eat — that’s where the good stuff happens, I think.”

Karen and Michael want to give us back our confidence when it comes to our food choice. “When you think about it, we have kind of been indoctrinated in terms of our taste buds and our food values and we are being dictated to around food,” says Karen.

“We need to challenge that and know that we deserve much better. In order to do that, we have to be proactive about changing about how much we value food.”

Michael agrees. “We want to change people’s minds about the amazing veg that we grow on our doorstep. I’d be very worried that the way we currently consume food will result in putting most of our growers out of business. We’ll end up with no Irish veg on the shelves at all, and that would be very sad indeed.”

Grow, Cook, Eat Series 2 is on RTÉ One on Wednesdays, 8.30pm.