‘We’ve become ive on food... it is killing us’

In 2023, Darina Allen launched the Ballymaloe Organic Farm School at the age of 75, referring to it as her new “start-up”.

The desire to keep sharing knowledge and skills is what sustains her momentum.

Through this new farm school, there is the opportunity to keep rai her gospel of good food through the sharing of knowledge, wisdom, skills and experience, in a way that blends the theoretical with the practical.

Ballymaloe House, restaurant and cookery school are all part of an estate that has been a working farm since the mid-1830s. Ivan and Myrtle Allen took over Kinoith in 1932 and subsequently Ballymaloe House and farm, 4km away, in 1947.

In 1988, the 100-acre farm transitioned to fully organic, and ever since, the crusade for slow food, organic growing, traditional food skills and producing one’s own food has been magnified.

Before food gets into the teaching kitchens of the cookery school, much of the fresh produce – fruits, vegetables, eggs, poultry, dairy, pork and beef – is sourced from the farm that wraps around the estate.

Increasingly, students were asking questions about where this food was coming from; how it was produced, how to plant a seed, the soil and composting. Darina realised that, before cooking with good food, it’s important to learn how to produce it – and well.

Into this bubbling cauldron of ideas entered Karen O’Donohue. Best known to many for her work on RTÉs Grow, Cook, Eat, which she co-produced and presented, Karen has been involved with food, farming, growing, food activism, and “the critical importance of good food” for decades.

Her role in Ballymaloe Organic Farm School is one of many hats, including devising the course programme which runs year-round, and calling in expert tutors in subject areas as wide-ranging as seed-saving and tree planting, to keeping bees, hens and pigs, to foraging and herbal medicine for humans and animals, for half-day and day-long courses.

There are also the flagship courses, such as the six-week Sustainable Food Programme, and the week-long Practical Homesteading course, which the school can’t run enough of, such is the demand from a new wave of homesteaders (smallholders) in the US and across the world.

While the school taps into the zeitgeist for people wanting – needing – to get back to the soil and reclaiming a feeling of control over the food we eat, there is a less bucolic aspect that’s fuelling the urgency to share knowledge with as many as possible.

The farm school’s mission is set against the backdrop of an increasingly industrialised food system that is impacting the health of people, animals, and the environment.

This is what gets Karen up in the morning and fuels her through busy days at the farm school.

Asking why Ballymaloe Organic Farm School needs to exist seems like a good place to start, and I quickly realise it’s the only question that needs to be asked.

“I had always come at food from the community perspective,” says Karen. “Yet now I understand how, until such time as the stewards and farmers of the land and the producers of our food are unequivocally recognised as one of the most critical components of a healthy, active and resilient society, then we are at nothing. And that’s before we even touch on climate impact.”

I realise this is not going to be some twee conversation about aspirations of pastoral living.

Karen is not asking politely for people to act – she is demanding it, and the school is there to those looking to make radical change.

“Look at our supermarket trollies now; look at the absence of independent shops in our communities from which we can have actual freedom of choice. Look at the devastation of small producers; look at the gross inequalities when it comes to investment in resources around organic food and short supply chains versus the millions of euro made by the corporate food industry.”

In this regard, Karen is pointing the finger at the food environment that most of us interact with every day. For children, the targeting and creation of unhealthy food environments is even more direct and obvious.

“What is that food environment telling us about the produce we have available to us? It’s not choice. What we have is this deeply layered obesogenic food environment.”

In other words, asking what kinds of foods we are surrounded with and engage with in our daily lives, from ments on buses and bus stops to the chicane of sugary treat foods that must be navigated to get to a till.

It extends to certain child-targeted marketing strategies, particularly the positioning of High Fat, Salt and Sugar (HFSS) products that greet children at eye level designed to trigger ‘pester power’ so parents give in and buy – even when it’s against their own better judgement.

“We need to acknowledge that we are where we are and we can’t reset the food industry,” says Karen.

“We need to work with what we have within the system, but to do better. Mass produced food, with its huge network of retailers up and down the country and all their resources and investment, must have an equivalent level of resources and investment made available for the alternative.

“Instead of small independent food businesses being stifled and squeezed out, we must work out a way where large and small can sit alongside each other.

“It can’t be one versus the other because all that does is it pits us against each other, and we end up putting all our time and energy into a fight that we’re never going to win. Words are not going to fix this; action is what’s needed.

“So, the solution has to be in making sure that from the bottom up people are consistently educated, informed and ed to make good food choices.”

This is why the farm school needs to exist.

“We’re constantly asking where can we make the biggest contribution? We needed to be clear on who we can work with to be able to give people what they need to make better food choices, and the very best chance for learning new skills, new knowledge, changing behaviours, and being inspired to make a difference.

“I firmly believe everybody can do something,” says Karen.

“Every day, people make decisions around food, from a policy level to what to have for dinner. If the noble purpose of our food system was about feeding people with healthy and regeneratively produced food, we’d be grand. But instead, it’s all about money,” she claims.

To aid that mission of reaching as many people as possible, the farm school has partnered with the National Organic Training Skillnet and the Rural Food Skillnet, who offer valuable by way of subsidising course fees, often by up to 30%.

“For me, when I look at the climate and biodiversity crisis, the urgency is more to do with our children. They are the next generation of everything, but they are getting sicker and sicker - for several reasons, but the food that’s given to them and is available to them has a big part to play.

“A child growing up in Ireland today is increasingly unlikely to have access to good, healthy, nutritious food,” she said.

“The food choices they are presented with when they walk out onto a street of a town, village or city in Ireland just beggars belief. It is nothing but ultra-processed, plastic-wrapped and nutrient-deficient food-like things. That’s what meets our young people every time they walk into a shop; that’s the education our children are getting around food. The abnormal has become normal.

“Isn’t it bonkers to think that, in 2025, children will leave school knowing how to do a cartwheel and play the tin whistle, but they won’t be able to feed themselves? There is a time and place for exercise and cultural activities, but without good food, what are we at?”

The burden of food education, however, cannot be laid fully at the classroom door. The government, families and communities, food manufacturers and retailers all must step up and take a share in the responsibility. But it must begin with us.

There’s a ivity that has crept into our engagement with food, Karen argues.

Between tightened household budgets, less time to prepare meals from scratch, and the endless distraction of screens, it’s impossible to “give a crap about food when you’re watching Love Island. How can you stop and think, what am I eating? Where did it come from? Who produced it? How much did it cost? We’re completely ive around our food.”

“Ireland is about to become the most obese country in Europe, and with all the facts around chronic illnesses in children, at no point did any key stakeholder turn around and think: Maybe we should put good food into the heart of a school community. They didn’t take the opportunity to build the gold standard - not in the hope a dedicated teacher or parent group would bolt it on, but rather to say, let’s start with that and build out.

“Look at the big picture: Our children are our human capital. If we don’t have healthy from the inside out, resilient, empathetic, engaged, communicative, creative people coming up the ranks - who is going to run the world?

“Until such time as we have that type of investment in our people, with an approach that s consistent access to all the things that make us healthy and well where we live, learn, work and play, then we’re at nothing. But I can guarantee you, there are children all over Ireland who today don’t have access to what they need to be healthy, and, in my opinion, that is unacceptable,” Karen said.

“We must use our citizen power to create change, because we are way more powerful than we think. We’ve become unbelievably ive, and that’s killing us and it’s killing our kids. So, if learning about food and having actual autonomy through very basic but life-critical food skills help me and us all to take back control, then so be it.”

See www.ballymaloecookeryschool.ie/farm-school