Podcast Appearances
they have the security that they need that allows them to innovate other ideas.
There are some amazing, like Food Cloud are doing fantastic work in this space with, you know, gleaning projects where they go out and sort of harvest leftover produce in fields that's kind of lost through grading processes and actually get it into charities and so on.
So there's plenty of innovation there.
I think it's just a case of all of us kind of
pulling together and doing that bit to make sure this amazing food doesn't get wasted.
Yeah, so GIY, we're a non-profit social enterprise, started back in 2008 and we're basically trying to reconnect people to real food.
I think the food system's broken.
I think that we've become really, really disconnected from our food and I think we can see the impact of that in our health and in the health of the planet.
Yeah, well, exactly that.
Unfortunately, I mean, I think our kind of food security is sort of an illusion.
You know, our former Taoiseach, Clare Bradcur, used to say that we could feed 50 million people and that'd be grand if all they want to do is eat beef and dairy, because that's basically what we're doing.
Yeah, exactly.
90% of what we produce as a nation goes out of the country.
And we import pretty much everything else.
So if you think about it, all of, like if you think about the average plate, I suppose the meat might be Irish, but pretty much everything else is going to be imported typically.
Around 85% of our veg and fruit.
Most of our grains are, you know, the wheat for our breads.
Everything else pretty much is imported.
And when it comes to veg and fruit, as you said, in the 1990s, we had about 600 commercial veg growers.
We're down to just over 70 now.