Growing up in Inishowen we never heard the word Self Sufficiency because it was something we did automatically. Although on reflection it was probably the time were things started to slip. We heated our home with turf, we had a veg garden, we worked on our Uncle's farms gathering spuds, payment was a year's supply of spuds. We bought fish from our local fishmonger who had just received it from fishermen on lough foyle right beside us. We ate fish on Wednesdays and Fridays(the only good thing about a catholic upbringing). My parents gathered seaweed and we would have dulse and Carrigeen Moss. We foraged in the hedgerows for blackberries but for some reason even though surrounded by water we never went fishing!
Within a generation we lost all that in exchange we got "cheap" food and a so called better lifestyle where we didn't have to do backbreaking work to get food we could just pop into a supermarket and it was all there ready to go and at these prices you might aswell get two.
That's how it was sold but I didn't get what was advertised, I got a banal job which is slowly boring me to death, I needed this job though to pay for the groceries we used to grow ourselves, I got an ever expanding waistline from eating the buy one get one free deals.
I now have children of my own, am I going to raise them in the same manner, go out a spend a fortune getting a degree to get a job they don't like to pay for the things they don't need or maybe together we can go on a different route.
It won't be easy and we will have to take baby steps. We have already started on the weight loss and have a reasonable garden and polytunnel. We used to keep pigs and they have a good shed with adjoining paddock that they can come and go as they please,so we can start back up relatively easy but first we will get hens for the first time.
Within a generation we lost all that in exchange we got "cheap" food and a so called better lifestyle where we didn't have to do backbreaking work to get food we could just pop into a supermarket and it was all there ready to go and at these prices you might aswell get two.
That's how it was sold but I didn't get what was advertised, I got a banal job which is slowly boring me to death, I needed this job though to pay for the groceries we used to grow ourselves, I got an ever expanding waistline from eating the buy one get one free deals.
I now have children of my own, am I going to raise them in the same manner, go out a spend a fortune getting a degree to get a job they don't like to pay for the things they don't need or maybe together we can go on a different route.
It won't be easy and we will have to take baby steps. We have already started on the weight loss and have a reasonable garden and polytunnel. We used to keep pigs and they have a good shed with adjoining paddock that they can come and go as they please,so we can start back up relatively easy but first we will get hens for the first time.
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