Buddy the dog is as much part of the joy of my biweekly food pick-up as the freshly picked vegetables. The journey of an Irish grown vegetable to a supermarket shelf is a complicated one. Farmers are required to grow many acres of the same crop. A supermarket buyer strikes the price. The buyer’s bonus and promotion prospects depend on driving the best bargain. Growers say the buyers change frequently. It’s easier to make a tougher deal with someone with whom you have no relationship.
This disconnected hard-nosed system gets us vegetables that can be sold as loss leaders to drive footfall to the middle aisle. Cheapening food means cheapening production, ensuring that chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides will be part of your diet.
Four out of five Americans were found to have traces of weedkiller ingredient glyphosate in their urine in a recent horrifying study. It’s a glaring reminder that we are part of this natural system. The soil is being poisoned. And so are we.
Then there is the slew of food waste at every stage of the process, field to shelf, and containerloads of far-flown food wrapped in single-use plastic with all the associated transport carbon emissions. But what can we do? Despite our best lockdown intentions, few of us have become self-sufficient homesteaders with gardens providing our supplies.
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Buddy’s owner, Stuart Davis, farms the Farfield Farmacy in Mountstuart in north Co Dublin. I signed up for a €351 six-month subscription which gets us a biweekly box of whatever is growing to be picked up from outside a cafe in Smithfield every fortnight. It’s a hugely cheerful experience, from Stuart’s sandpaper handshake to a rub of Buddy’s soft coat. You meet fellow customers who are all supporting a regenerative farm. There are extras we can buy most weeks. Derrybeg Farm kombucha one week or eggs. We have eaten carrots that tasted better than any we’d ever eaten, tomatoes bursting with flavour. There have been oodles of garlic; the cloves are now preserved in olive oil. (You learn about gluts and how to make them good.) I treat Farfield Farmacy produce with reverence. It gives me inspiration to cook and we eat every scrap.
In his latest book, Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, George Monbiot warns us that our global food system is heading for collapse. Watch his New York Times interview to understand his urgent argument. Community-supported agriculture, or CSA, can be a large part of the fix. We need to reconnect relationships. CSAs make farmers and consumers friends again, as we should be. There are a small number of community-supported farms around the country. Check out the CSA Ireland Facebook page to find yours.
Catherine Cleary is cofounder of Pocket Forests
