Foodies Fight Back with Lucinda
Wednesday 20 May 2020
Today I'm talking to four incredibly focused people across the food and hospitality industry who've taken action, grabbing a tough situation by the scruff of the neck.
THE VEGETABLE BOX
"So fillies are your real love," I said to Sean Hussey of Hussey's Farm in St Margaret's.
"No, he laughed, "lettuces are now! All sorts of funny varieties, like Amish Deer Tongue, Flashy Trout Back and Moon Red."
Perhaps not strange names for a man who has had a successful career in the horsey world and the family fruit and veg business.
"I started buying horses for my father and for friends - I mainly bought for Jessica Harrington. We'd some very good ones. Passage Creeper won the Arkle Chase, and for three years we had the winner of the Ladbroke Hurdle, the richest handicap hurdle in Europe at the time. We were very successful, very lucky."
Sean also won the RAI Local Food Hero Award in 2019 for his encouragement of micro producers needing help getting their goods to market. "For years and years in North County Dublin, the fields were filled with cabbage, broccoli, potatoes and so on, but all of a sudden, no one was growing. You were either a super farm or a small artisan producer. I heard about Marita Collier of Drummond House Farm, growing garlic in Termonfeckin. I couldn't believe it. She introduced me to other tiny producers, I took them on, and their sales rocketed."
When the cut-off of the restaurant market happened, Sean and his wife, Jayne, were first out of the traps, delivering amazing vegetable boxes to the general public in the Dublin area. Sean has also taken on other small food producers such as Mooncoin Beetroot, Ard Mhaca shitake mushrooms, and more. A winner alright.
husseysfarm.com
First Published In The Sunday Independent