A growing phenomenon

BLOOM:Your dinner might have travelled 40,000km to your plate, but most of it could have been grown in Ireland. So Grow It Yourself (GIY) and put a chink in the food chain, says MICHAEL KELLY

HOW DO YOU EAT an elephant? One mouthful at a time, so the saying goes. The elephant in question is our food chain – a big, awkward, out-on-its-feet, shaky house of cards, waiting to fall down around us in an ignominious heap.

Just think – every year we import €5 billion worth of food into Ireland while at the same time we export €7 billion. In fact there are some types of vegetables that we import almost exactly as much as we export. Our food chain is no longer about feeding ourselves – it is about trade.

Supermarket shelves are like the UN in microcosm – pick any country in the world and it’s likely to be represented. Broccoli from Kenya: distance from farm to fork is 7,156km. Mangetout from Senegal: 4,365km. Sweetcorn from Mozambique: 8,926km. Carrots from Guatemala: 8,166km. And my hoary old chestnut – Chinese garlic – still gracing our shelves at 30 cent a pop, replete with its 10,135km journey. That’s five staple-diet crops, all of which we can grow in Ireland (in our own back yards, literally), which have undertaken a collective grand odyssey of nearly 40,000km.

Forget the 100-mile diet – by the time our trolley gets to the checkout it’s at 100,000km. Think about the impact these imports have on the economy, on Irish jobs, on our health and environment.

So how do you eat an elephant? One GIYer at a time. The solution to these problems won’t come from lobbying TDs or writing angry letters. It comes from getting people to grow things they can eat. The more they grow, the less reliant they are on the lunacy of the food chain. And the beauty is that we don’t have to get everyone to grow all their own food (for most of us, 100 per cent self-sufficiency isn’t possible). We just need the majority of people to grow some of the food they eat.

When you GIY – let’s say it’s some rocket in a tub or herbs on a windowsill – a light goes on. You start to understand the process of growing food. You understand seasonality. You understand that food can be grown without using chemical interventions (a fellow GIYer told me, “my parents used to eat organic food all the time – they just called it food”).

So when GIYers engage with the food chain, they buy more local, seasonal, fresh, organic produce. GIYers are more patriotic, wiser consumers, which is good news for Irish jobs, for their health and for the health of this little planet that we all share.

How do you eat an elephant? You get a critical mass of people to make a personal commitment to grow something they can eat. At the Bloom garden show this year, we have a GIY zone where we will be doing lots of funky stuff: we have an edible map of Ireland, a seven-metre raised bed in the shape of the old sod, in which we are growing 32 different types of vegetables (one for each county). They are being grown by GIYers from all around Ireland.

We will have an expert stage, where experienced growers will take the mystery out of GIYing and there will be a guided forage through Phoenix Park.

Mainly, we will be showing people how to sow seeds. In the GIY Potting Shed, we will be getting people to stick a seed in a pot of compost that they can then take home. We want them to experience the thrill, a week or two afterwards, of seeing a green seedling poke its head out of the soil. Eventually, fingers and other extremities crossed, the plant will produce some food. The biggest thrill of all will be sitting down for the first time to a meal that is partly home grown. It might just be four peas in the corner of the plate, or it might be the whole meal. It doesn’t really matter. We just want them to feel that thrill, because that’s the start of the GIY journey.

And, finally, here’s the big idea – when they go home from Bloom we want them to show five other people how to do the same thing, so that they get to feel the GIY thrill too.

If we can show 10,000 people at Bloom how to sow a seed (we’ll be busy but, hey, we never get tired of getting people to GIY) and they show five people each, then we will reach 50,000 people. That’s 50,000 people who have disengaged from the food chain if even just a little bit.

For more information see giyireland.com, facebook.com/giyireland