During the COVID-19 lockdown, Irish consumers spent more time in the kitchen and sourced ingredients with greater care. We bought dining boxes from well-loved restaurants, pre-mixed cocktails and seasonal vegetables from local growers. We started baking banana bread and sourdough from scratch.

Despite the hardship, grief and fear that came with living through a global pandemic, in lockdown many of us were largely living an idealised food life – purchasing local, cooking from scratch, and eating dinners as a family.

Now that we are well and truly back to our busy lives, these ideals have fallen by the wayside. Consumers want to support local, but convenience and price continues to drive food purchases.

The pandemic occurred five years ago, now, but it’s still interesting to look back at that time. Did our consumer behaviour during that period provide clues to where we find ourselves today? Are we craving a closer connection to the food on our plates?

Darina Allen – Ballymaloe Cookery School

Author, chef and co-founder of Ballymaloe Cookery School, Darina Allen, believes so. In 2023, she launched Ballymaloe’s Organic Farm School, featuring a variety of short courses covering everything from Herbs and Herbalism (€105 for a half day) to a week-long introduction to Practical Homesteading (€2,035).

Homesteading, or the practise of self-sufficiency and subsistence farming, has become popular not just in Ireland but in countries like the United States and Australia. These new Ballymaloe courses have proven popular, often requiring waiting lists. So far, students have travelled from 11 different countries to learn from Darina and her team of educators.

“I could see a growing interest among the students [at the cookery school], and then when the word ‘retirement’ came up, I thought this is the perfect opportunity to start a new project,” she says, laughing.

“The homesteading movement is a global thing – there seems to be a deep craving to re-learn forgotten skills. People are realising this is our one and only life. They’re buying a bit of land and want to learn how to grow vegetables, keep a few chickens, keep a house cow. They want to know how to save seeds and keep bees. Because we’re a biodiverse working farm, they have the opportunity to see a hands-on approach.

“We were hoping [the organic farm school] would be a success,” she continues. “We never did a launch or anything formal, we just got a few courses developed and up on the website and off we went. I had no idea of the overwhelming response we would get.

“We’re still building the curriculum and keep adding on to it, offering afternoon courses, day courses, a week and a six-week course. And people are coming from all over the world. There is an absolute hunger for this kind of knowledge.”

Darina feels that growing concerns around our food system have also added to this craving to connect with the foods on our plates.

“The Government needs to wake up and see what’s happening,” she says. “The wealth of the nation depends on the health of the nation, and that depends on the food we eat. It’s not beyond reach to get the best brains working on this, to get the message out that our food must be our medicine.

“Cheap food is a myth; it’s a disaster,” she adds. “It’s vital we connect up the dots and get practical cooking and basic horticulture classes into the national curriculum. Students need to know how to sow seeds and grow – we are failing in our duty of care to our schools.”

See <>ballymaloecookeryschool.ie.

Enda McEvoy, Claire Davey and Fergal Anderson – Hinterland

It’s a wonderfully romantic idea to strip down our lives to the very basics: keep chickens, make cheese, grow apples. But is this craving for connection rooted in another element of Western society – privilege? To do these things requires time, skill and – in many cases – disposable income.

In Co Galway, Claire Davey (former food producer and small business owner), Enda McEvoy (chef, formerly of Loam and Éan) and Fergal Anderson (organic farmer) have joined forces to address inequality in local food systems. They founded Hinterland, a social enterprise where they are creating the blueprint for a more inclusive food community.

“We initially got together because we were thinking of developing a product using ingredients from Fergal’s farm,” Claire recalls. “Then, we thought, why do we want to put another product out into a broken system? Enda was saying, how is it I can go into the cold room in my restaurant and there’s the finest locally grown vegetables there, but that’s not accessible to everybody?”

The trio are looking at food systems in and around Galway city and finding ways to connect urban and rural communities, farmers and every-day consumers, community groups and charity organisations. They recently launched a food system mapping project at the University of Galway as part of SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) week. They say the map will be an ongoing process as the food system evolves and they hope it will support planning, policy and education around building local food resilience.

“What we’d like to do is start the discussion around food systems in Galway,” Claire says. “What it is, what’s going wrong, where is food accessible or inaccessible and how we can make it more accessible? And then bring people together through a food assembly. Ideally, we’d like a food commons in Galway; a physical space. We are in 2025, we’re five years out from 2030 and our deadline for the SDGs. Things need to start happening.”

In addition to this work, Hinterland hopes to develop a mobile food shop which will travel a regular route and connect local food with low-access or marginalised communities. Ultimately, Claire says we need to “meet people where they’re at” to make tangible changes to local food systems. This model wouldn’t just benefit the community – it would also benefit small producers, with a new route to market.

“It’s about creating more spaces that are accessible,” Claire explains. “When you look at food, not through supply and demand, but who’s included and excluded and how people get to participate, you start to see the system differently. The more we label and commodify food, the more exclusive it becomes. That’s not sustainable. We have to start making changes and we have to do it now.”

See hinterlandwest.ie.

Janet Power – Gorse Farm

Alternative farming network Talamh Beo is planning to launch a producer directory list to highlight the positive impact local growers and producers have within Irish communities.

Janet Power is an organic grower in Co Wexford. She operates Gorse Farm and supplies salad greens to her local SuperValu throughout the year. During the summer months, she focuses on farm gate sales.

She works within Talamh Beo’s Operational Group and believes one way to satisfy that consumer yearning for connection is to support the small producers in our own backyards.

“It’s central to the whole thing, to understand the value of what local food producers are doing,” she says. “We’re trying to highlight this and create awareness. We’re all working in pockets around the country, but we are stronger together as a sector.”

In addition to creating the producer directory for increased awareness, the network is calling on the Government to create a basic income for local food producers. The data generated from this directory will aid future initiatives and hopefully influence policy.

“The work we’re doing [with the database] is central to that value we bring as producers,” Janet says. “No one really knows how many we have, where we are and what we’re doing. This is foundational work to represent who we are – especially when we’re talking about policy and our needs. The database will have benefits and implications beyond [our current] project, but this is our starting point.”

After several years of operating with little to no outside funding, Talamh Beo have received funding from the Irish Environmental Network and are working in partnership with Cultivate and Feasta through their Strengthening Local Food Economies project.

Janet understands consumers’ current economic struggles but doesn’t believe the cost of food should go down. Instead, other costs of living should be reduced and we should respect small producers and the food on our plates.

“I’m a producer and we’re at a disadvantage against imported and mass-produced food – that has to be recognised,” she says. “No one producing food for their community is making millions.

“A lot of the time, the focus is on food, and the expectation is that food needs to be cheap. This skews the perception of the consumer and makes locally produced food look expensive.

“We’re providing nutrition and adding to food security – this is an important distinction. You can get cheap food, but it is going to come at some other cost.”

To learn more, visit talamhbeo.ie/projects/local-food-economies.

It’s not just anecdotal evidence that indicates consumers are longing for a deeper connection with food. Bord Bia research tells us this craving to connect is driving consumer behaviour.

“Wider forces like the climate crisis and economic uncertainty are encouraging a turn to existentialism,” the introduction to their “Purposeful Lives” research reads (bordbia.ie). “A time of ‘post-truth’ also means no one can be quite sure about what is true and who to trust. Additionally, notions of the self are fragmenting, as people negotiate what it means to exist IRL [in real life] in a digitally mediated world. As a result, people are searching for a greater sense of meaning, and hoping their consumer lives can provide them with some much-needed purpose.”