The implicit question being posed by Kaethe was also, do you fancy a healthy and unique day out this coming weekend, where your physical work out is rewarded by a bag of spuds for the Christmas table AND a good story to tell while you’re eating them, one that involves you helping to save the future of Irish agriculture?

Kaethe is one of founders and drivers of  SPUDS, which was launched in 2012 “as a proactive response to the decision to trial genetically-modified (GM) blight-resistant potatoes in Ireland”.

SPUDS believes in “the power of the individual to effect change” and that “the most important subjects of the future will be water quality, soil fertility and nutrition.” Their aim is “to prove that Ireland will generate higher levels of innovation and employment by concentrating our research energy on the development of a food system that promotes lean production, enhanced nutrition and environmental health.”

That all sounds quite serious but they’ve been approaching their mission with a great sense of fun and imagination, as these rather brilliant demonstrations of the potential appeal of the wonkiest of potatoes proves:

Some of the results of their SPUDS Character Workshop, where SPUDS.ie asked people to get up close and personal with the kind of wonky-shaped spuds which are typically rejected: you can see more on Flickr.com/groups/spudscharacters2012

Having gotten people’s attention, SPUDS.ie went on to produce some award-winning ‘Crisps with a Conscience’, the sale of which aimed to bring people’s attention to the kinds of perfectly good potatoes which never reach their potential as a delicious crisp because somebody somewhere decides that us consumers won’t want to eat them. There is a second limited edition of these story-telling crisps in the planning, and that’s where you potentially come in. 

On December 8th, potato farmer John Swaby-Miller will be digging, picking, washing and preparing an acre of naturally blight-resistant Sarpo Axona potatoes, which will be sold in 5kg bags for Christmas to raise funds this next round of SPUDS.ie. And he and Kaethe need volunteers to help. 

The deal? Don some warm clothes and rain proofs and a pair of gardening gloves, and join them in Co. Wicklow for an invigorating day in the field with John and his piglets. Good company and a hardy potato lunch will be provided in a local pub. The designated meeting place is the parking lot of the Tap Pub, Kilbride, Co Wicklow, 45 minutes from Dublin on the N11: click here for the map.

The reward? “A warm feeling in your soul and your very own bag of the best SPUDS in Ireland for your Christmas Feast!”

If you’re interested, just drop Kaethe a line at research[AT]spuds.ie or give her a call on 087 2444185  by Wednesday December 4th so that they can put your name in the pot. And if you can’t make it, you could pop along to Dublin’s Block T POP UP Christmas Market in Smithfield where they will be selling their Christmas SPUDS from December 13th.

Keep an eye on Facebook for their event updates or see SPUDS.ie and their flyer below for more information. 

It’s Galway calling. I’ve been trying to ignore it for days, even weeks, but it won’t stop at me.

The city that’s really a village (in the same way that Dublin’s really a town) is throwing another party this weekend you see. And like all great parties – something this village-city knows a thing or two about – the best action is going to be in the kitchen.

They’re calling this party a food festival, or ‘Galway Food Festival’ to be precise, but of course a party is a party by any other name. Especially when you’ve the likes of Mr Whippy Soundsystem whipping up a soundtrack for the Feast on a Street in Crane Square on Easter Monday afternoon (with roast pig-on-a-spit from Kai & Cava, and a potato-carrying competition to boot). And Maeve Higgins laying on the lunchtime comedy on Saturday and Sunday in The Kings Head. And a whole bevy of great Galway restaurants taking part in the food trail over the weekend.

It’s not all fun and games though. Like any decent party, there’ll be some good meaty arguments for everyone to pick over for weeks to come, such as Saturday’s GM Debate, hosted by Seamus Sheridan (he of the cheesemonger’s fame and Green Party persuasion) at 1pm in the appropriately name Green Room in Galway City Museum.

And it’s not all city-based either, with several food tours taking place over the weekend – including a trip out to the wilds of Connemara to visit the lovely Graham and Saoirse Roberts at Connemara Smoke House and see where the likes of locally caught tuna is transformed into their hot-smoked delicacy.

No self-respecting party (or food festival for that matter) would be complete without a bit of showing off, and there’ll be lots of that in the form of cookery demos, including one of Cooking With Seaweed (Sat, 12pm) with Martin O’ Donnell from West Restaurant at The Twelve in Bearna. Martin picks his own seaweed on Bearna strand, and he cooks a mean mackerel too, so double kudos to him.

Of course, there’ll be a drink or two taken, and even a class in how to taste a glass of wine, should you feel you need a refresher in the matter (Aniar Restaurant, 2pm, Sunday with Febvre Wines) as well as loads of other opportunities to blag some free tasters of fine wine over the weekend. Just have a gander at the full weekend’s listings here to seek out your best time to strike.

But really, it’s not the dancing or the laughing or the detours or the rows or the drinks that draw us to a great party. It’s the chance to meet people: to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. It’s the fact that you don’t know what conversation you’ll stumble upon or who you’ll bump into or what memory you’ll take away with you.

And that’s what makes the draw to Galway so darn hard to ignore right now. Besides the many Meet the Producers sessions peppered throughout the weekend, including one with the dynamic Allen brothers behind the award-winning Castlemine Farm (see my post about their pork which picked up an Irish Food Writers’ Guild Award recently), I know there’s going to be a bunch of the best people gathering in on Galway over the next couple of days.

I’d love to just jump in a car and take the two-hour drive across from Dublin and go see who I might meet at what’s shaping up to be a brilliant Easter weekend.

Regrettably, I’m otherwise engaged. Well okay, when I say regrettably, I’ll be in Paris, so all things considered, non, je ne regrette rien.

But if I wasn’t otherwise engaged, I’d damn sure be answering the call of Galway. What’s your excuse?

You might think it’s because I’ve been busy off living my life, not giving you a second thought. But quite the contrary. It’s not me I’ve been thinking about, it’s you. Or to be more precise, your food.

Yes, the future of your food has been quite the recurring theme in my offline life of late.

What got me thinking about you in the first place was the excellent exhibition in Dublin’s Science Gallery which runs until April 5th, titled EDIBLE and offering a taste of the future. It’s well worth checking out, though be sure to hang about and get chatting to the mediators who can help you tease out the backstories behind the eclectic and often interactive exhibits. Favourites include insect powder 3D-printed into edible intricacies, and an orchestra of fermentation vats cooking up some fruit-based hooch and making a racket while they’re at it. There’s also regular feeding times and curated dinners, and lots of questions raised about how the choices made today will affect the food of tomorrow.

Which brings me back to you. And your food. We (being the team behind For Food’s Sake) took it upon ourselves to ask you ‘What Will Your Future Taste Like?‘ at last Thursday’s FFS event in the Science Gallery.

The answer included flavours as diverse as devilish smoked Bloody Marys and wholesomely moreish kelp crackers dipped in sprouted hummus with cumin and coriander. We had wonderful dried biltong from Caveman Super Snacks, inspired by South Africa and made in Wicklow. And we had the most incredible raw milk and butter from Ballymore Farm, so new to the market that the labels weren’t yet back from the printers.

There was lots of activity, with Oisin Davis demonstrating the wonders of spherification and molecular mixology (he made a fancy cosmo), Ed Hick showing us how to skin a wild rabbit and Shaun Hanna of The Oarsman demonstrating some creative uses for dehydration in the kitchen.

And, as anyone familiar with previous For Food’s Sake events would expect, there was lots of talk, mostly about food. We talked about the rise of interest in growing your own veg, and other ways you can get more involved in the production of the food you eat, including through GIY Ireland (Grow It Yourself, with 150 local groups throughout the country), OOOBY initiatives (Out Of Our Own Backyard groups, such as the one in Newbridge) and CSA schemes (Community Supported Agriculture, such as the one in Cloughjordan).

We talked CIY too, or Cook It Yourself, exploring different ways you could think about how you cook your food, including choosing not to cook it at all, as preferred by advocates of ‘raw food’ such as Natasha of Natasha’s Living Foods (she of the incredible kelp crackers and glowing skin). Or how you could use a hair-dryer in a wooden box combined with a sieveful of star anise and a blow torch to table-smoke some lamb carpaccio, before serving it on a skewer wrapped with rosemary-flavoured candyfloss, as Tom Lynn of the Sett Food Club did at their most recent supper club night in Dublin’s Supafast building. Or whether you might be tempted to try out some of the textural techniques pioneered by chefs such Ferran Adria, and dabbled with by chefs such as Shaun Hanna.

We looked back to the future when butcher Ed Hick shared his passion for foraging, in our FIY session on Finding It Yourself. And then we strapped ourselves in with bio-hacker Cathal Garvey as our captain and guide, and fast forwarded ourselves into a brave new MIY (Make It Yourself) world where bio-technology might be taken out of the hands of powerful multinationals for whom patenting living things is a matter of logic, and returned to the people to use in a myriad of mind-bending ways.

Well, as you can imagine, that was a lot to prepare never mind to digest, so after Thursday I took a few days break from thinking all about you and your future food. I knew you’d understand.

Anyway, I bounced back and this morning was back on the subject as part of my regular TV3 ‘Food for Thought’ slot on The Morning Show with Sybil and Martin. You can have a watch of it here if you like (18 minutes in). We chat about how you can centrifuge foods to make things like peas taste even sweeter, not by adding anything but by extracting something. And we talk about eating insects, and whether you might like to. We discuss the £200,000 test-tube burger, and whether you’ll get a chance to taste it anytime soon. And finally we talk about the current debate over bringing calorie counting onto all Irish menus.

If you haven’t heard, the FSAI have been welcoming submissions from people on the topic – and today is your last chance to have your say. You may well think it’s a great idea. In the US and Australia, it is already mandatory for all large fast food companies to inform customers of the calorie content of menu items. The FSAI argue that there is evidence that access to this information is effective in curbing the public’s calorie intake. You can read their press release here.

But others have concerns. Imagine if everytime you wanted to cook dinner for your family or friends, you had to provide them with an accurate breakdown of calorie content. It might stop you picking something delicious looking up at your local market, because although you can gaurantee it is fresh and seasonal, you may have no way of testing its calorie content.

For many food outlets who like to have flexibility in their menus, whether they be small cafes or fine-dining restaurants, mandatory testing would present serious challenges. Under any new legislation, they clearly need to be treated differently to large-scale food outlets such as fast food chains where all the food is streamlined and pre-prepared and easy to measure. If not, we could effectively be discouraging food outlets away from transforming fresh, natural ingredients into fresh, natural food, and encouraging them to buy in pre-processed but more easily measured food.

There are other issues too, including the narrowly reductive nature of defining food by its calorie content regardless of its broader nutritional benefits, the environment from which it came, the care with which it was prepared or indeed the appetite with which we approach it. A healthy relationship with food does not necessarily begin with a fixation on calories, as many survivors of eating disorders know only too well.

Anyway, I’ve probably done more than enough talking on the matter at this stage. If you want to have your own say, leave a comment here on the blog – or even better, leave a comment at the FSAI website today, while you still can.

After all, it’s your future, and your food.

It seems to me that this is too important an issue to have major policy shifts taking place in the days before a general election.

If you’d like more information, see the full press release here: http://www.afri.ie/food-is-our-future

and the recent Irish Times coverage of the u-turn here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0209/1224289345459.html

Watch this space for more relating to having a more informed and open debate on this important issue.