If we don’t change our ways, the €6 lettuce is coming

Last Saturday, I ordered a toasted cheddar and fried onion sandwich in a small deli at the edge of Boston’s Beacon Hill. As I waited, I perused the contents of a stand-up fridge near the counter. A selection of house pickles, some birds eye chillies. On the middle shelf sat a single, perfect, hydroponically-grown butterhead lettuce encased, like a precious emerald, in a hard plastic shell. It was $6 (€5.40).

Today is Earth Day, and the theme is ‘Invest in Our Planet’. I am in the US researching food systems, and how we can make them more sustainable.

After Boston, I went to Texas, to Houston Food Bank, the county’s largest food bank. Both the scale of the operation and the problems it addresses are awesome: one million people served by the organisation are considered food insecure, meaning they lack consistent access to enough nutritious food to fuel a healthy life.

In addition to donations and general procurement, the food bank buys a portion of its produce from local farms, including Plant It Forward, a charity that fights for food and social justice by empowering refugee farmers, generally from the Congo and Liberia, to grow food on borrowed or rented land, and then preps, sells and distributes it for them, mainly through a box scheme. Ironically, president Liz Valette explains, because they are considered a specialty farm, they are not entitled to the subsidies available to farmers growing monocrops like soy. For now, they are dependent on the kindness of community gardens, but the dream is to buy 100 acres where farmers can have equity in the land, scale up a little and invest.

I can’t help thinking about the parallels between these refugees and their ancestors – who were enslaved and brought to America by colonial settlers - and the sharecroppers I learned about during a recent visit to the National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park. On an acre or less of land expropriated from and then rented back to them, Irish tenant farmers grew potatoes of one variety, which was almost their entire diet, and when blight hit, an Gorta Mór killed or forced to emigrate a quarter of our population.

We need to invest in Irish growers to promote food security and invest in our planet

In his book on our broken food systems, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, US author Mark Bittman writes about the great famine, pointing out that as well as blight, the famine was caused by “exploitive extraction of cash crops overseas, and dominance of monoculture, which saw entire plots of land devoted to a single crop.” The devastation is surely part of our psyche. Yet today consumption patterns in Ireland do not sufficiently value our produce or the farmers that grow it. I am a culprit, eating a lot of rice, beans and imported tinned tomato-based stews. (By the by, at home we purchase a 20kg bag of the best quality Jasmine rice instead of the small 500g bags. It saves around €100, if you have some space to store it. If you are cooking rice, think of the effort of harvesting each grain and the distance it’s travelled; use a measuring scoop to cook just the right amount.)

Our grocery shop has consequences for our food systems both in terms of food sovereignty and sustainability. Teagasc estimates that in 2023 the area of field vegetable production will be down by 7 per cent. This is not just attributable to consumer demand, but we can play our part.

We need to support Irish growers to promote food security and invest in our planet. Even more so when those growers are like Grace, from SeanNua, a no-dig farm in Cavan that promotes food knowledge and regenerative practices. She brings potatoes, leaves, beets and more from the farm to St Anne’s, our local farmers’ market in Dublin, standing in her tent, bearing the wind and rain and the ebbs in business caused by that weather with almost unfathomable tenacity.

Produce like this, or box subscriptions like the ones offered by Plant It Forward and Irish company Green Earth Organics are sometimes accused of being inaccessible, as if that’s a reason not to support them at all. Indeed, with the cost-of-living crisis, there are fewer who have any spare budget to pay for organic vegetables, and in the market for mass consumption, the laws of comparative advantage must still apply. Seeking out Irish produce requires more effort, and especially during the winter it can limit the variety of our diet.

The good news is that potatoes are still relatively cheap, as well as having a much lower carbon footprint than rice, and very nutritious. With this in mind, my Earth Day pledge is to eat more spuds. Whether it’s buying a bag of Maria Flynn’s Ballymakenny Heritage Farm’s Dathúils, or simply choosing Irish potatoes and vegetables in the supermarket, we can support growers by celebrating our roots. Irish producers are leaving the market because they cannot make it work. When this happens, we too will have €6 lettuce, and not just at the farmers’ market.

Angela Ruttledge is public affairs manager at FoodCloud and is in the United States on an Eisenhower Fellowship.