Staying local and dining in style
Lifestyle - GMIT graduate Devin O’Sullivan brings fine dining to people’s homes, creating meals from foraged, seasonal and locally sourced produce, while delivering a message about how our food choices affect our children’s health, the planet’s health and the health and wellbeing of people in distant, often poor countries. He tells JUDY MURPHY about his innovative business, Feast.
Devin O’ Sullivan studied hotel and catering management at GMIT but pretty soon after graduating, he realised managing hotels wasn’t for him.
From Cooraclare in West Clare, Devin’s passion was for food, particularly Irish food. He also realised the importance of educating people about how our food choices impact our own health and the health of the world at large.
Last year, aged 22, Devin set up his own company, Feast, travelling to schools the length and breadth of Ireland, cooking sustainable, locally sourced fish, game and vegetables from land and sea – sharing his passion for sustainability and his knowledge with youngsters of all ages.
A series of workshops which he ran in schools from September to March, entitled Ár Bia, explored every aspect of the food we eat – and not all of it was pretty.
“A lot of the stuff is provocative,” he says honestly. “I’m not dressing things up and I’m not doing the food pyramid. It’s about telling them the truth about the food we eat and the chemicals you’ll find in things like sliced pan.”
Devin also discussed food-related issues including childhood obesity, the growing hypersensitivity to food and climate change. He talked about the high environmental cost of mass-producing almond milk, which has become so trendy of late, and how our passion for avocados has a devastating affect on the lives of Mexico’s poorest people.
But by treating them as equals and not patronising them, he also got young children to try fish such as oysters that some adults still baulk at. When he informed them that oysters were “the world’s most sustainable food”, their interest was piqued, he explains.
Devin is a young man with a message and a lot of skill, both in food production and preparation. As a youngster in West Clare he worked on his relations’ farms and was also a keen fisherman and hunter.
He tailored the school workshops to suit children of all ages and really enjoyed how receptive they were. But he came to realise that while teaching young people about sustainable food was vital, they weren’t the ones doing the weekly shopping. Parents also needed to learn about how their food choices affected their own children and the children of people in far-distant, often third-world countries.
So, he broadened his remit. Devin had always wanted to set up his own restaurant and although he wasn’t in a position to open a conventional establishment, he decided to offer something different – a moveable feast which would let him spread his message among adults.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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