Earlier this summer, I wrote about freeganism, where people salvage perfectly good food from being sent to landfill. It’s usually a sandwich or a carrot that was on the shelves just moments earlier, but was then deemed unfit for sale.
In today’s Irish Times, Conor Pope has an interesting piece on Mark Boyle, a Donegal man [...]

I have friends who very rarely, if ever, pay for their food. Instead, they go foraging through the skips and bins of Dublin city, picking up the mountains of perfectly good discarded food. It’s easy to sneer - ugh, eating from the bin? - but the food is usually well packaged or wrapped up; they don’t [...]

Recently, I sent my partner on a course at Ballymaloe Cookery School, as a birthday gift. The course was called ‘How to Keep Chickens in your Garden’. Result? We now have three baby hens pottering around our back garden, soon to be producing lovely eggs for our family. Darina Allan has plenty of courses like this, like [...]

One of Ireland’s first gourmet burger chains will shortly be going out of business.  Real Gourmet Burger had large shops in Dun Laoghaire and Ballsbridge in Dublin, and it’s a shame to see yet another Irish business close down.  The gourmet burger model has often been debated here, with many people being violently against the [...]

I love what AA Gill said in last Sunday’s Sunday Times Style magazine: “Just buy food raw, on the bone, with a head, with slime, with eyes, with fur, with mud, blood and paws. Buy it with roots and scales and spines and pips and shells.” (You can read the full article here). Cook from [...]

The other day I came home from work and looked in the fridge. I had nothing to eat. NOTHING. And my pay cheque is not due for another week. I was really hungry. After sitting on the sofa for a full ten-minute huff, I went back to the fridge and looked again. There must be [...]

News just came in via @lunchblock on Twitter that Carluccio’s have closed their Dublin branch.  I thought their meal deal (€12 for a starter, pasta and a coffee) was one of the best around, although people left mixed reports here previously on their service.  The notice in their window suggests that high rents were the [...]

There was a really interesting piece in the Irish Times on Tuesday about a study carried out on Irish consumers by Price Waterhouse Coopers.  According to their findings, Irish people are devastated by guilt over their profligate spending during the boom, and consumer confidence may never recover.  Apparently it will be akin to having grown [...]

I tuned into the Pat Kenny show yesterday to hear the AMAZING I Draw Slow being interviewed. Okay, okay, I’m shamelessly plugging my husband’s band, but there was also a segment about how this will be the most frugal Christmas for many. As a result, people are hitting the €2 shops for the first time, [...]

Christmas work do’s are a funny affair. Depending on who you end up sitting beside at dinner, they can either go really well or just be brutally boring. In either case I always looked forward to them - free meal after all.
Then of course, there’s always someone who gets too drunk. I remember one year, [...]