Archive News
Creating an appetite for changing the way we eat
Date Published: {J}
It takes bravery and determination to set up a company in times when people are scared of spending money and banks are no longer throwing loans at fledgling enterprises.
But some people are taking the leap and it seems when it comes to quality food and exotic food, there is a market out there.
In the case of Hilary Foley, who set up Ireland’s Raw Kitchen last year, her career in raw food came about by accident.
She came to Galway about 20 years ago and studied engineering. However, following a car crash she moved away from that career and started working in the financial services, eventually becoming self-employed as a broker. But she started suffering from digestive problems.
“I got very ill and I started looking into improving my health. It was all digestive issues. The doctors had given me medication but nobody was treating the food aspect, so I started looking into improving my health by trying different foods,” she says.
“I travelled to Thailand and learned about raw food. I didn’t plan to get into it, but there was nobody doing it in Ireland. I had to get the products for myself and I was paying shipping costs. And then I also wanted to educate people.”
Given that the Raw Kitchen sells products such as chia seeds and all forms of unprocessed cacao, acai berry powder, gogi berries, baobab powder beetroot powder, sea spaghetti, mangosteen powder and a whole lot more, she seems to be doing well on the education front.
Several of these products fall under the term ‘superfoods’, which is used to describe foods that appear to offer additional health benefits beyond simple nutrition. People with a suspicious mind might think that this labelling is a way of adding value to products so you can charge customers more for them.
But Hilary doesn’t agree.
“It can be quite a loose term. It can be anything from broccoli to blueberries to chia seeds,” she says. “[In Ireland] we have an abundance of what we call weeds and nettles that have a lot more nutrients than a lot of the food we eat. You don’t necessarily have to go out and spend a lot of money. It’s about having cop on.”
And she adds that the Raw Kitchen’s products are high-end – with many of them being organic – and are not overpriced.
Her own health has improved beyond compare since she changed her eating habits. At present, her diet is made up of 80 per cent raw food and 20 per cent cooked; the cool, damp Irish climate doesn’t lend itself to a complete raw food diet, she says.
She blends raw vegetables to make soup, includes lots of
healthy seeds and powders in her diet and has plenty of treats. “While these might be healthy, they are still fattening,” she says with a laugh. Even her dogs are involved. They eat carrots and beetroots as treats, with their main diet consisting of brown rice and chicken nuts.
“Both have really health coats and are full of energy,” she says.
The idea for Ireland’s Raw Kitchen was born late last year and the website went live around May of this year, which has been very good for business.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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