It was so warm on Monday morning that I had my morning cup of tea in the sun and it was bliss. It has been such a long cold winter, I felt like a cave creature that had just crawled out of the darkness - pasty and squinty-eyed in the bright pure sun. I know [...]

I’ve never gone down the Weight Watchers route. Some of my friends, male and female, say it’s the only thing that works for them; I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other.
However, over the weekend a good friend of mine called over, laden down with Weight Watchers snacks. I was cajoled into [...]

In today’s Pricewatch, Conor Pope has a very useful article on buying Irish products in the supermarkets.
He points out that it’s not always clear if a product has been produced in Ireland. A chicken breast from thousands of miles away can be labeled as Irish because the breadcrumb coating is applied here, while products like [...]

It’s week two of Fairtrade Fortnight, and as well as asking people to choose Fairtrade when they’re shopping, Fairtrade advocates are also lobbying food producers to switch to Fairtrade ingredients.  The theme of Fairtrade Fortnight 2010 is tea, and Oxfam Ireland are asking Irish tea drinkers to lobby the two most popular Irish tea brands [...]

FairTrade Fortnight runs until March 7, and this year’s theme is the Big Swap. Organisers are encouraging people to swap their usual shopping choices for FairTrade products.
I always buy FairTrade whenever I can: bananas and chocolate being one of the staples. It was great to see Cadbury make thier Dairy Milks a FairTrade product, but [...]

One of my favourite things honoured one of my other favourite things recently - TED awarded their yearly prize to food writer, chef and campaigner Jamie Oliver.
I know it’s been the done thing for quite a long time to slag off Jamie Oliver, but I’ve always had affection and respect for him.  He is genuinely [...]

It’s notoriously difficult for producers to get their product onto the supermarket shelves, and it isn’t easy to keep it there. Many supermarkets demand that suppliers pay them for the privilege of being stocked, effectively freezing out smaller producers.
In today’s Irish Times, consumer affairs correspondent Paul Cullen reports that Tesco has been demanding sums of [...]

Panic buyers are surging to the shops in Britain as the snow threatens to entomb us all, write some breathless newspapers in the UK.
Yesterday’s Guardian newspaper reported that shoppers are stocking up on salt, alcohol, soups, and ready meals, while the never-hysterical Daily Hate showed a post-apocalyptic scene of empty supermarket shelves, presumably in an [...]

Reading in The Sunday Times at the weekend that scientists have grown meat in a laboratory for the first time made my stomach churn, but it also fascinated me as it raises a litany of ethical and practical questions.
Dutch scientists used cells from a pig to replicate growth in a petri-dish and this in-vitro meat [...]

The mass swell of shoppers across the border continues, and with Christmas fast approaching, it’s going to turn into a flood.
Today’s Pricewatch questions the difference in prices in major supermarkets operating in the Republic and the north, pointing out that a recent Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) survey showed that a basket of goods in [...]