Food Matters Podcast

The major global tech companies have created their own food culture over the last decade, characterised as excessive and wasteful at times, but trail-blazing elsewhere. IRFU’s Performance Chef Maurice McGeehan explains more, before detailing the food needs of very different professionals – Irish rugby players. Tim Holmes then takes us behind the scenes of the veg garden tended by the team that bring us Guinness.

Northern Europe is generally a good place to look for how the world should function sustainably. In Holland, Geert van der Veer‘s organisation Herenboeren enables groups of 200 people to co-invest in a farm and take control of the food supply in their area.

School closures during lockdown revealed the dependency so many children have on school meals. Serial food entrepreneur, writer and researcher Michelle Darmody explains how it also highlighted the poor quality of these meals and the lack of emphasis on food literacy in our education system.

One former Obama campaigner turned Irish resident, Erin Fornoff explains how growing food can be done anywhere, including the roof of her houseboat.

When Conor Spacey was working in his first kitchen he was shocked at the amount of perfectly good food being thrown away. He convinced his boss to let him save it, cook it, and use it to feed all of his colleagues. It was a small change that made a big difference to the kitchen’s sustainability and its bottom line. Ever since, Conor has dedicated his career to fighting food waste and creating a fairer food system.

When Ciara O’hartghaile returned home to Co Antrim, after a year living in New Zealand, she and her husband had a clear mission: to build a community around love of good food, in their home town of Ballycastle.

Brian McCarthy founded innovative urban farming project Cork Rooftop Farm during the first Covid lockdown in March 2020. Situated on a rooftop in Cork city centre, the farm started off as a personal project to grow fruit and vegetables. But Brian started to see the potential for something much bigger and, today, Cork Rooftop Farm is a thriving business and a poster child for how urban farming can play a major role in addressing food security, sustainability, and community health.

Darryl Gadzekpo and Ella Phillips are on a mission to get kids growing, cooking, and eating more plant-powered food. Having previously worked in the arts, Darryl and Ella have brought all of that creativity into what they do today: growing interesting veg in their urban garden, running cookery workshops and pop-up dining experiences, and packing as much flavour as possible into vegan dishes.

Did you know that Ireland is very well-suited for growing apples, but despite that, we import over 95% of the apples we eat? Irish apples can sometimes be difficult to buy, but when you do find them, there’s a good chance they were grown by Con Traas. Con has 40,000 apple trees on ‘The Apple Farm’ in Co Tipperary and he sells the fruit directly from his on-site farm shop and also produces apple juice, cider, crisps, vinegar, jams and jellies.

In 2004, David and Stephen Flynn, aka The Happy Pear, opened a small fruit and veg shop in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, with a dream of helping people eat more veg. Now, two decades later, The Happy Pear is one of the best-known and loved brands in Ireland, and has scaled into a highly successful business comprising over 80 products, online courses, best-selling books, a coffee roastery, a farm and more.

So is it possible that digging your garden is a total waste of your time? According to our guest on this episode, it may be time to put down that shovel and spend those precious hours doing something way more productive.

Lynsay Orton always had a passion for growing rare and exotic fruit and veg until unexpected family circumstances turned that passion into a very niche and successful business. Operating out of just six polytunnels on Ross Hazel Farm, Lynsay grows over 1500 plants exclusively for chefs that cook for some of the world’s biggest companies.