Save Money and the Environment with Zero Waste Ireland Educational, welcoming and well-organized, Zero Waste Ireland’s festival was well worth the trip

The frontier is the people who aren’t getting up on a Saturday morning to learn how they can save money and the environment, the ones who feign allergies to patchouli and yoga, the ones who aren’t using reusable and don’t care.

Zero Waste Ireland hosted a welcoming, educational festival in the St. Andrew’s Resource Center on Pearse Street on 23 June. While the festival offered children’s activities, a repair cafe and hatha yoga, I stayed in my lane and attended the foodie classes which explored foraging, canning, pickling/fermenting, and a heartfelt look at using up the ‘endy bits’ by an experienced cook and mother.

“Frugal Foraged Feasts” was an animated introduction to foraging wild and garden-escaped plants wherever they spring up. Presenters Molly Aylesbury and Mies Stam met while studying science, horticulture and botany at UCD and have since founded Bare Necessities, selling unpackaged food staples and hygiene products, and Wildflower Walks Ireland, taking people beyond the classroom or guidebook to actually identify local plants in situ.

Foraging is more than entertaining, plastic-free food, they point out; it can be a non-chemical way to control invasive species like Japanese knotweed (which has “a taste reminiscent of a lemony rhubarb”). Stam and Aylesbury advise starting small, with a reasonable amount of easy-to-identify plants and a realistic plan to eat them — elderflower cordial is easy to make and delicious, unless you don’t drink cordial. Foraging for greens and flowers is less risky than mushroom hunting: for example, the entire cruciferous Brassicaceae family is edible (with the exception of hedge mustard) so even an inexperienced forager can be adequately confident in their identification. More likely and more dangerous is carelessly mistaking the delicious cow parsley (a.k.a. wild chervil) with the assassinative hemlock.

They shared samples of elderflower cordial (heavy on the lemon) and two pestos: a nutty, garlicky vegan pesto of dandelion leaves, and a nettle pesto with a creamy and subtle herbaceousness. While I have foraged in the past, for wild garlic, rosehips and berries, I hadn’t realized common hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium, not giant hogweed) was edible. The pasta we sampled had substituted hogweed stalk for asparagus: slightly crunchy with a celery-like texture and a bright greenness, hogweed was an unexpected delight. The soft-set Japanese rose gelée was the best of the lot, with a clear flavor like excellent Turkish delight.

The workshop on canning, “You Can Can!” taught by Simple, No Waste Life‘s Timi Nicholson, focused on beginner-friendly methods for preserving high-acid foods like jams, cordials and tomato sauces. While it’s easy to spend a lot of money on equipment and jars, Nicholson stressed that the point was to reduce waste. With tips on reusing jars and sources for inexpensive ingredients, Nicholson was an enthusiastic mentor. Her own pantry includes an impressive array of homemade preserves, including elderflower cordial, sour cherries and peaches in syrup, apricot jam, pickled vegetables, pizza sauce, ratatouille, and Hungarian lesco and ajvar. “It’s not rocket science,” Nicholson assured us.

Zdenka Priehodova (Coming to Zero) shared her passion for pickles and ferments. Both are a great way to preserve food and create more interesting meals, but while pickles need three basic ingredients (vinegar, salt and sugar), lacto-fermented veggies only need one (salt). “I think pickles are great, because I’m Eastern European,” Priehodova joked while sharing quick-pickled cucumbers, a salty-sweet mix of cucumber, onion and spices with a gentle sourness. She demonstrated a red onion pickle, bruised in a brine with coriander and fennel seed, and then sauerkraut. It’s surprisingly simple: just finely-shredded cabbage, massaged thoroughly with salt, and packed into a jar to ferment in its own brine.

I’ve tried kombucha but hadn’t before tasted its cousin, kefir, another ferment based on a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. Kefir ‘grains’ look like white rice or pieces of cauliflower and are traditionally used to double-ferment milk to a tangy, yogurt-like drink, but can thrive in other liquids as well. Priehodova shared a couple batches of her water kefir. The first, a pale yellow apple-ginger kefir was lemony but sweet, with the heat of fresh ginger but none of the sharpness; the second, a strawberry second ferment, was gently fizzy and tinged pinky-orange, with a true strawberry flavor.

“Eat everything” was the bold motto of “The Endy Bit” workshop. Anne Hession shared her story of her freezer dying to the strains of guitar folk music filtering up from the courtyard below. The loss of what seemed like months worth of food spurred her to resolve to stop throwing out useful food and evaluate the process of food consumption within her home. Her advice was twofold: make sure that the food you’re buying makes sense for the way your family eats, and don’t let food get to the ‘gone off’ stage. Ultimately, it is the people eating your food who determine what gets wasted, Hession pointed out, so flavor is as important as safety.

She shared a smorgasbord of delicious dishes made with ‘endy bits,’ including carrot-top pesto; a rich condiment of chopped roasted tomato, green olives and capers just called “umami”; cheesy scones and soup; and a versatile ginger-scallion sauce (check out the recipe on The Endy Bit’s Facebook). Trying and adapting is more important than perfection, she emphasized — custards curdle and cakes fall — but the goal is always a empty plate.

The ground floor of St. Andrew’s Resource Centre held an array of vendors and goods, spilling out from the meeting hall into the sunny paved courtyard: bulk pulses and spices, hemp jumpers, wildcrafted smudge sticks, alpine strawberry seedlings, organic shampoo bars and bottles of Dr. Bronner’s, lentil soup and chicken tikka masala. I bought reusable metal straws and cleaning brushes to add to my travelling utensil kit. In a way, that encapsulates my oblique criticism of the event. Not that the Zero Waste Festival wasn’t fun, educational, welcoming and well-organized, but that the people who most need the zero waste message — the ones for whom it could make the biggest impact — aren’t the people attending the Zero Waste Festival. The people attending are dutifully lugging their KeepCup and their reusable water bottle from talk to talk. They’re learning how to darn their socks and make their own pickles. They already know why hemp is good and BPA is bad. They’re already on the zero waste wagon. The frontier is the people who aren’t getting up on a Saturday morning to learn how they can save money and the environment, the ones who feign allergies to patchouli and yoga, the ones who aren’t using reusable and don’t care. Maybe I’m impatient: I like the crunchy, hippie trappings of a well-appointed co-op, but I want everybody to get on board — the sooner, the better.

I’ll be waiting for the stragglers with a jar of sauerkraut.

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