Podcast Appearances
you know, partly some of it is down to climate conditions where, you know, where food gets wasted in the field effectively because of a climate event.
So, for example, in January and February this year, extremely wet conditions made that, you know, very difficult for carrot growers, for example, to get into the fields and get the carrots out of the ground.
But there's definitely, I think, a huge, retailers and consumers have a huge responsibility here
retailers sort of, you know, with very, very specific specs and very narrow specs around what they'll accept and what they won't.
And I hear from growers all the time, the kind of horror stories about cabbages that might be like,
you know, five mil too big or too small being rejected and so on.
So I think a very narrow definition of what the retailers expect.
And obviously then consumers sort of having this expectation that the veg should be perfect and should be, you know, uniform size doesn't sort of, it's a bit of a vicious circle then with the retailers sort of trying to satisfy that demand.
It's a massive problem and it's sort of...
know it's it's it's in it's a food waste issue it's the nutrient loss issue but it's also a kind of a moral issue i think where you've got you know huge problems with food poverty here and and globally obviously people that don't have enough to eat and then we have this you know incredible produce that's been lost um i i think the the you know the problems that we have are that
It's symptomatic, I think, of a bigger problem in the sector where we've got very few growers left, commercial veg growers left in Ireland and a sector that's not, I don't think it's respected as much as it should be and valued as strategically important by government.
And as a result, veg growers don't get the sort of single farm payments that other sectors of the farming economy get.
And so there isn't the money there, I think, to invest.
I think veg growers are sort of focused on survival at the moment instead of investing maybe in the innovation that might take this produce and process it into other ways and find other markets for it.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think it is a new thing.
I think we've become so disconnected from our food in general that we, you know, we just don't, we're not involved in the production of it anymore the way we would.
I mean, your granny, like everybody's granny, will probably grew a few veg in the garden and you, you know, the vagaries of it and that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't and it's not always perfect.
It's rarely perfect, in fact.
And, you know, the veg I grow with my own limited skills at home in the garden, you're sort of, you know, you'd have,