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Where did Eat the Streets emerge from? Eat the St
reets celebrates Dublin’s food history as the vegetable heartland, engaging children, their grandparents and families in growing, cooking, creating and discovering the food around them. I have been working very closely with Sabrina Dekker who is one of Dublin City Council’s Climate Action Coordinators. As Sabrina says, “When you live in a city, it is relatively easy to go to the shops to buy food. We are removed from the production of food; we may not see and experience the challenges of farming. Yet, we have a responsibility to take action, but how do we take action to eat a planetary diet while supporting farmers?” Sabrina has done lots of work in this area looking at what a just transition would mean, also examining how we use land and how the changes we make to land are having impacts on food security and food supply. Dublin City Council approached me to bring a food and food education perspective to the conversation, and to make connections with the local Dublin food community in which I have been imbedded for a number of years. With Eat the Streets we want to look at food before it gets to your kitchen, looking at farming practices and city growing projects. We also want to explore what to do with that food when it arrives in your kitchen, creating meals that include locally grown vegetables and how to use the leftovers once you have finished cooking. Basically, we want to instil some fun and joy into growing and cooking with the hope of disseminating a sustainable ethos as we go. We will be hosting cook-alongs and many of our workshops will also be online, but there will be some activities to do on your local streets and neighbourhoods; walking tours, cycle tours, garden projects as well as a street mapping workshop. What is the aim of the festival? What would you like to see people taking away from it? The aim of Eat the Streets is to focus on maximizing the use of our food and learning and sharing new skills – growing, cooking, creating and discovering. We want to look at the food on our plates in a sustainable way but not have a didactic conversation. We hope to give people a sense that you can make small changes and these can be tasty changes, they do not need to be punitive. I know many people do not have space to make a huge dent in the food they buy by growing their own, but having even a small connection to how food is produced can go a long way, simply growing some of your own herbs and vegetables can be rewarding. Many people found growing a solace during lockdown. Eat the Streets also aims to connect people with the vegetable history of Dublin. The city has very rich hinterland, much of it now built upon, but traces of the history are still visible in street names. School children have been collecting recipes from their Grandparents or elderly relatives and sending them in to us. This, too, is helping to build a picture of Dublin’s food history. Urban and regenerative farming are prominent on your programme - do you see our behavioural change towards food and food processes being borne out of choice or necessity? I think both. It is becoming more obvious that we need to make a change and I would hope those changes are done by choice. Education is key with future generations but so too is making the alternative palatable. Eat the Streets wants interview Michelle Darmody Eat the Streets photo: Fergal Phillips to celebrate businesses and food initiatives all over the city that are creating change, like The Grow Dome Project, for example, or Mud Island Community Garden. Tell us about someone of the programme who fascinates you and who might not be on our regular radar? Carolyn Steel participating in an After Dinner Chat with Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire at 6pm on June 17 will be really interesting. I really enjoyed Carolyn’s TED talk and her insightful way she mapped out the formation of a city like London. Máirtín will bring the Dublin perspective to her knowledge. The youth panel on June 14 will also be interesting. We need to learn from the next generation. Also, the opening night we have the Lord Mayor Hazel Chu cooking alongside Ellie Kisyombe – they will be cooking and chatting about what it is like to have a different perspective on food in Dublin. I am really looking forward to learning Chu’s family recipe for dumplings. You entered the world of academia in recent years. Can you tell us about that? I am passionate about food education and looking at it creatively. I have had the great opportunity to return to University and do a PhD. I find it frustrating that we teach language with which to communicate, maths with which to problem solve, yet we do not teach the very crucial skills associated with making food. Children growing up today need, not just the skills to cook, but the skills to navigate a very complicated food system. We are not providing them with this in Irish schools at the moment. I feel strongly that this needs to change but we need to make these changes with care and in a way that teachers are happy with. They already have a very overloaded workday. We need to look at ways to embed food education into the curriculum that are manageable and realistic, but this doesn’t mean we cannot be ambitious. Food education is not a panacea, but it can be part of a long-term strategy that, if done correctly, will be a valuable component in helping to address some of the current dietrelated health issues as well as the environmental issues facing the next generation. Research has shown that equipping children to have an interest and enjoyment in food at an early age can provide them with the vital skills and motivation needed to stay healthy and I am hoping to continue this research. There is talk from time to time about tackling school food and encouraging healthy eating among our children. Where is that at these days? Within our complicated food system, education is one cog that can be used to create change. It is by no means the only one, wider issues need to be addressed such as access to wholefoods and the prevalence of advertising, but, if we move our thinking about how we educate, it may be the start of building a different, more exciting, more creative food future for our children. At Eat the Streets we hope to begin a conversation and plant a seed in young people to look at food in a sustainable, holistic way. Children can log into Eat the Streets website and watch instructional videos that will help them improve their cooking skills. Our chefs have made short clips teaching how to chop safely, how to season your food properly or sauté. The building blocks to making a generation of proficient cooks. So, join Eat the Streets and let’s put down roots for a tastier tomorrow. Eat the Streets runs from June 11-20 eatthestreets.ie #EatTheStreets (An extended version of this interview is on our website.) 54