Cork is set to honour its sustainable food heroes as an inner city community unveiled an ambitious regeneration plan which includes growing their own food.

A giant vegetable chilli made from food grown in community gardens across Cork city will be rustled up this weekend as part of a special food festival.

An inaugural awards scheme in Cork has recognised three city and county companies and organisations whose food production strengthens communities and make the local economy and ecological systems more resilient.

Food news with Joe McNamee.

Betimes, The Menu is inclined to think there are more food awards than actual foodstuffs, so great has their proliferation become in recent years, but The Irish Food Writers’ Guild Community Food Awards remain exceptional and above criticism in his eyes. 

For a spell, the gastronomic reputation of the lovely seaside town of Kinsale appeared to be succumbing to a certain flabbiness of practice but recent years has seen the arrival of some sharp new operators raising standards across the board. 

It takes a special kind of cookbook to earn a mention in The Menu and The Farmette Cookbook: Recipes & Adventures from My Life on an Irish Farm (Roost Books), by Imen McDonnell, is certainly such a tome. 

Cork has long been a centre of education, with some of the finest schools and third-level institutions in the country. 

A video project recently completed by ’Journalism with New Media’ students from the Cork Institute of Technology provides an interesting insight into the views of Ireland's next generation on a range of issues relating to both contemporary and past Irish society.

* John and Helen Fox will host a garden party at ‘Glencairn,’ Underwood, Rochestown, today from 11am to 5pm and local band, Ré Nua, will provide music from 3-5pm.

The song says ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’ but students at a suburban school have been showing that brothers can grow vegetables for just about anyone.

A crack team sliced and diced their way through a mountain of spuds and veggies yesterday to help feed a city today.

So many of our human weaknesses crystalise around food — what we imagine it to be and how much of it we imagine we need to eat.

Over 5,000 free curries will be dished out in Cork to highlight how much food is still wasted, writes Joe McNamee

While vegetarian curry may not be the most traditional of native nosh, The Menu shall nonetheless join the anticipated 5,000 diners on Cork’s Grand Parade at Feed The City (March 15), one strand of the city’s St Patrick’s Festival weekend.(www.corkstpatricksfestival.ie)

Just because it is a wonky shape or isn’t the ‘right’ size doesn’t mean a vegetable isn’t edible.