Go on, grow your own

A Public Meeting on How to Grow Your Own Food will be held on Tuesday 31st March 2009, 8pm at Cultivate, 15-19 Essex St West, Temple Bar in Dublin. Speakers will include: Trevor Sargent TD, Minister for Food, Seamus Sheridan - Sheridans Cheese Mongers, Suzie Cahn - Community Gardens, Malcom Noonan - Local Allotments. For more information check out the Culivate Centre website. There will also be a screening of the film Deconstructing Dinner. Get along!

Lasagna and chips

Restaurant owners in the south have reacted angrily to the news that Bord Bia is to scrap its long-standing Guaranteed Irish Feile Bia initiative in favour of a 'Just Ask!' campaign. Feile Bia was a quality assurance initiative whereby customers were guaranteed that participating restaurants used Irish produce. It is to be replaced with a €200,000 'Just Ask!' campaign which aims to encourage diners to enquire about the origin of the food they are served. I am not that familiar with the Feile Bia initiative but it appears similar to the Taste of Ulster initiative up north, which I know a little about. While the Taste of Ulster initiative no doubt promotes local ingredients I am not exactly sure what it does to promote local and innovative cuisine. The couple of Taste of Ulster endorsed restaurants that I have eaten in while probably serving up locally sourced food have not impressed me at all in terms of local or tradition meals with menus that pander to overseas dishes especially the ubiquitous chicken goujons. Having said that, I have just had the most brilliant night of food and wine in the cellar at Fallon and Byrne in Dublin, and not a bloody goujon in sight. Quite possibly the best eating experience I have had in the city.

The Irish Moiled

The Irish Moiled is a breed of cattle that comes from Nortnern Ireland and in the 1980s the population had fallen dramatically to about 20 cows. Thankfully the breed has been revived through the efforts of the the Irish Moiled Cattle Society formed in 1926 to develop and improve the breed. In 1982 the Society itself was revived with the encouragement of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Since then the breed has enjoyed valuable research and guidance from both the Trust and the Genetics Department of Liverpool University and the Society now has a well established DNA testing programme to ensure validity of pedigrees and the integrity of this important gene pool. In 2008 a breed conservation strategy was launched and it is hoped that this strategy will help maintain the genetic base of the breed.

A taste of Dublin

While the rest of Europe was developing a food culture, we in Ireland were coming to terms with famine and the impact of that has clung to us for hundred's of years. But slowly things are changing and a recent opportunity to particpate on the Dublin Tasting Trail was a an eye-opener to the growing diversity and quality of local food available in this city, much of it off the beaten track. The time spent in Sheridan's Cheesemongers was especially memorable as were the Coolea and Ardrahan cheeses. Most interesting of all though was an opportunity to learn about Myrtle Allen who was a tireless campaigner for Irish food, years before it was fashionable to talk about local food nevermind in Irleand but anywhere.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men?

Nine easily available management planning guides, all aimed at UK protected sites (SSSI, Natura 2000, Ramsar, etc.), have been compared in a recent study in the Journal for Nature Conservation . Basic formats recommended by these guides were similar, so that plans based on them should look superficially alike. In contrast, definitions of key terms (vision, objective, and constraint or factor) often varied significantly between guides, even though there is a great deal of collaboration between publishing organisations. Additional guidance and rules for objectives only increased differences between guides, and created differences even where definitions were similar. The bottom line? The variable nature of management planning guidance raises concerns about the consistency of plan preparation.

Hare today, gone tomorrow - part 2

The strange case of the Ulster Wildlife Trust ignoring the available data and the plight of the Irish hare. I wonder who their stakeholders are?

Supermarkets, food and the poor

A new Center for Global Development working paper, by non-resident fellow Peter Timmer places the supermarket debate in the broader evolution of food policy analysis, which is a framework for integrating household, market, macro, and trade issues as they affect hunger and poverty. Increasingly, supermarkets provide the institutional linkages across these issues. Timmer draws from many perspectives to assess the effect the supermarket revolution may have on poverty alleviation. Read more here.