Can We Afford Cheap Food?

by Kenneth Keavey

During the week I had the privilege of speaking at a food waste event organised by Concern Ireland.

As children my mum instilled in us an ethos of never wasting food (or anything else for that matter), we were rightly or wrongly always encouraged to finish our dinner.  

To this day she finds it very difficult to stay away from our “waste shelf” in the packing shed. This shelf is where all the worthwhile graded out produce is made available to the packing team to take home.

Up until recently and for many, many years, my mum could be found in there sifting through all the waste produce and salvaging anything that was good enough, then filling her car boot and bringing it all over Galway to people who needed it.

Like my dad’s work ethic, my mum’s need to save the food must have been programmed in her genes!  Their generation was not one that could afford to waste food. Food took up a more sizeable percentage of their disposable income and so had a higher value. In our society today the idea that food is valuable has changed, and unfortunately not for the better. 

Food waste is a major global issue. If it was a country, it would be the third biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions!  Food produced on nearly one third of all agricultural land is thrown straight in the bin! 

Here in Ireland, we dump 50% of all the salads we buy and an amazing 25% of all fresh fruit and veg! 

1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted every year! This is an unimaginable amount, here in Ireland the figure is nearly 1 million tonnes, which contributes 3.6 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. 

These figures are staggering and bewildering but unfortunately not at all surprising. The cheap food culture engineered over the last five decades and evangelised by supermarkets has meant that we do not as consumers see value in fresh food. We expect it to be cheap. 

We expect it also to be shiny and picture perfect and uniform. Supermarkets actively discriminate against oddly shaped produce, or vegetables that are under or over spec. Our cabbage, the cabbage that you are getting in your boxes this week in a supermarket system would be graded out because they are too big!  

When I think of the land, and the planning and the work and the energy that is involved in bringing a crop to harvest it makes me feel angry and sad that somebody somewhere might consider that because of what a crop looks like it should be wasted. This is a system that has lost its way. 

Our food system is meandering dangerously close to it’s own undoing and as we stare into an uncertain future where climate change is playing a larger and larger part in our ability to grow food, eliminating food waste needs to be a priority. 

My mum’s relentless energy in making sure we as a business kept food waste to a minimum was one small part in a much bigger chain, but she played and continues to play an important part in at least keeping me on the straight and narrow and she never lets me forget that food is just too valuable to waste.

Needless to say, and as always (and I never get tired of saying it) your support for our business means that the issue of food waste will always be at the top of our agenda.

Thanks

Kenneth 

The True Value of Food

by Liz Child

The traditional model of the family farm is we are told “unsustainable”. The powers that be are insistent that the best way forward for food, is large scale intensification. 

Supermarkets are putting more and more distance between the farmer and the consumer; it is now impossible to understand where our food comes from our how it was produced.

While the conventional system ignores the true cost of food, and is driven by supermarket dictated prices, the sustainable food movement aims to value food fairly, create a connection between growers and consumers and reward those involved in the production fairly according to their input.

This week we were confronted with a task that is less than pleasurable and brings me to a particular bugbear of mine: should we discount our food to sell it? Should we stop supporting other small businesses because the backdrop of cheap food makes it increasingly difficult to pay a fair price to our own farm and to the other farmers that supply us? And the answer, whenever we think about the pressures this puts on our business, is always the same, no it is not the right thing to do.

We have so much good produce now, it is literally bursting out of the ground, and we have hired so many people to cater for an upturn in demand that the end of the summer usually brings, but has not yet materialised, and I am wondering what to do with all the cabbage, broccoli, kale and carrots parsnips and so much more that we have in our fields right now. 

I know this is business and I should just get on with it and you would be right for saying that, and I totally get it. But there is a point in here that drives me a bit crazy: which is the devaluation of food by the supermarket model of selling and the inability for us as a small businesses to compete with retailers that can often sell cheap, imported produce for less than we can produce it for.

This is a fact. To give you a little example we buy cucumbers from a small organic farmer in Mayo, we pay him €1 per cucumber we collect them and the time and energy to get the cucumber to us adds another 20%, so the real cost of this cucumber is €1.20. We sell this cucumber for €1.99, that 80c needs to cover so many different things and so many different people in jobs: from customer service to packing jobs to everything in between (we now employ 45 people). So, when I see large supermarkets selling cucumbers for 49c I just can’t understand how that can be done. 

There is no getting away from the fact that value is so important, but long-term value versus short term gain is the real issue here, fresh local organic produce will always give you better nutritional value, better sustainable value, better value for our localities and communities and better value for our health. 

Of course, balancing a household budget can be very difficult too, and that we are mindful of.  To help with this we have many options to help with this: such as the build your own box that gives excellent value, we also have now the added incentive that if you set up a repeat order you get double reward points for everything you buy. Finally, if you buy a cabbage or a swede from us it can be nearly double the size of those you get in the supermarket for the same price! That is double the food for the same cost! 

But fundamentally your decision to support us is supporting not only your health; it is allowing an idea, a sector, a farm, individual’s livelihoods, biodiversity, the soil, the environment, and other sustainable businesses to flourish. You are sending a message to the powers that be that you believe there is a better way and crucially you are taking positive action for a more sustainable future.

Thank you for your support.

Kenneth

PS: Set up a repeat order (you can add extras to it whenever you need them) and collect DOUBLE POINTS on our new VIPeas loyalty scheme. This is a great way to save up for money off your big Christmas shop. Have a look at our website here for all the options. You can get a set box or pick and choose exactly what you need. We sell sustainable groceries too!

Simple, Real Food

by Kenneth Keavey

Yesterday my daughter Ella went down the fields and harvested a big bunch of kale she wanted to make kale crisps. I was impressed, who am I to stand in the way of a child who wants to voluntarily eat kale, I thought to myself!

Mostly though it is the other way around, often getting our kids to eat more vegetables can be a struggle, why is this? Why isn’t eating an apple, (or indeed kale crisps) instead of a chocolate bar easier? Why is doing the right thing sometimes so difficult? 

Why is our food system not better, healthier, kinder to us and our planet. How did we get ourselves into this crazy retail race to the bottom and how come it is so hard to value and want to eat real food? 

Both questions are linked. I did a stent in a major pharmaceutical company in the US as a research scientist. A friend of mine at the time worked in the food division, occasionally she would bring cookies to lunch for us to try that had been engineered in her lab to within an inch of their lives. Texture, flavour, taste, and crumbliness had all been optimised in the lab to allow just the right amount of sugar fat and salt to hit our taste buds in the right way at the right time to make them irresistible.  

Many of the processed foods including health bars and vitamin drinks that line supermarket shelves are about as healthy as eating spoonful’s of sugar, generally they contain high amounts of processed apple juice or conventional cereal and sugar substitutes. They rely on wonderfully creative science and marketing to make us believe how good for us they are, and of course they taste amazing.

We are sold the idea of free choice, but the reality is that nearly all of the big brands on our shelves are made by 10 giant multinational conglomerates. An industry built on cheap commodity products wrapped and packaged and sold as healthy, driven by profit, derived from a complex unsustainable food chain produces most of our food and it is damaging our health and destroying the planet.

So how is this system fair? How is it that these processed products have taken centre stage and are often seen by us the consumer as a prized food that can be sold for maximum profit? This is the carefully constructed reality we have been fed, it is not our fault it is just the way it.

It is simple, cheap commodity ingredients are processed and packaged to be sold as healthy alternatives to real food, that achieve maximum profit for manufactures and retailers. 

Deciphering what is good for our health and the planet is next to impossible these days. But it doesn’t have to be so complicated. 

There is one extremely straightforward step any one of us can take right now to revolutionise our food choices, the principle is simple: 

“EAT MORE FRESH ORGANIC PRODUCE”

We cannot eat too many vegetables and vegetables in all their guises are good for us. That’s pretty simple right?

So, choosing fresh organic locally grown food and working more fruit and veg into our daily routine is a magnificent way to improve how we feel and our long-term health, not to mention the benefits for the planet. 

So, Ella, go for it, all the kale in the world is yours!

Kenneth

Get a box of real, simple organic food delivered to your door anywhere in Ireland or Northern Ireland here.

Let’s Plant Some Trees

by Kenneth Keavey

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago the next best time is now”

I realised it was 2004 when we planted our first trees, three thousand in total in that year. Those trees are now not too far off the 20-year mark. This realisation was scary, time flies.

I have been thinking about trees over the past few days. We promised that we would plant a tree for every Christmas box ordered.

In total we had 700 Christmas boxes out of about 1500 orders, and we aim to plant over 1000 trees as a result.

In trying to figure out the best trees to plant, we decided we wanted something native, that supports biodiversity but does not block out too much light as we will have to plant crops close to these trees, and we settled predominately on the hawthorn.

It is such a wonderful native Irish tree, its colours through the year are magnificent from the amazing white blossom in May to the beautiful red of the leaves in autumn. The hawthorns as also a haven for biodiversity.  We will plant 1000 hawthorn interspersed with oak, mountain ash, birch and Scots pine.

Hawthorn is also considered a magical tree and forms a significant part of our rural heritage here in Ireland, being heavily associated with Faery rings.

In choosing the hawthorn we wanted to re-establish a natural hedge along our boundary walls to replace fifty fully grown hawthorn threes that were cut down by one of our neighbours some years back. These trees could have been over 100 years old; I was saddened and angry by this but unfortunately cutting trees and clearing ground is a story that plays out up and down our country.

Trees are amazing plants, not only do they provide nearly all the oxygen we breath, under the ground they form a symbiotic relationship with a vast network of fungi called mycelium. The tree provides the fungi with food and the fungi provide the tree with nutrients. This relationship demonstrates the interconnectivity of all living things. It is in short, a miracle of nature.

It is a missed opportunity that the powers that be, the system, the rules and regulations do not put tree planting at the very heart of land management. It seems like such a simple step, one that costs very little, takes very little energy, and yields for generations to come.

If we focused a small amount of the investment allocated to such technological advances as carbon capture to planting trees, taking care of our soil and protecting some of the ancient forests left on our planet then we would have a chance at reversing the damage mankind has done to our only home.

Our 5th Pledge for the Planet is to take another step towards being a carbon neutral business, but we plant these trees primarily because we can and because it is the right thing to do.

We will plant 1000 trees in the next month or so and you can join us on Instagram stories to follow our progress.

Our 5th Pledge for the Planet

It is only through your support that we can do things like this, you make this tree planting possible.

Thank you


Kenneth