Taste the Nation: My Goodness is changing the game for vegan food in Cork City
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While the use of gut-friendly, fermented foodstuffs like kimchi and their famous ‘notcho’ cheeze’ offerings have helped place them as a firm favourite in Cork’s vegan and vegetarian communities, a busy Covid-19 period saw Cork food company My Goodness tee up for a post-crisis hike in business.
Not only has the return of tourist trade to their flagship English Market stall kept them going, but the rise of casual diners who might class themselves as ‘vegan-curious’ has definitely taken the crew by surprise across their regular locations, says co-founder Virginia O’Gara.
“It seemed like things changed overnight once the restrictions were lifted. Even though it's not back to normal, it seemed like it was kind-of an awkward normal. Everyone's out on the streets, everyone's excited to be around people again. It's almost like we're learning to do things again, which is kind-of fun. And it's my hope that we learn how to do things even better this time around.
“(Customers) are so enthusiastic about food, it seems like maybe over lockdown that a lot more people got into food, making their own food, and a lot of people got into healthy foods, specifically. So that naturally brought a lot of people into the recent food trend of fermentation. So, more people are learning about kombucha, more people are learning about kefir, more people are interested in kimchi, than ever before.
“So, that's been a really nice thing to be able to talk to the general public about, microbes and fermentation, without them looking at you like you have three heads (laughs). We have grandmas coming in and asking us for the 'kimichi' (laughs). 'So here's the kimchi', because they saw Lily Higgins write about it, or Dearbhla Reynolds up north had an Instagram story about it.
“It's really a positive thing to be able to chat with more of the general public about healthy food and healthy vegan food. It seems like since lockdown, almost everyone has at least one vegan in the family, so they know they can come to us and get advice or, pick up some notcho' cheeze and take it home and do a little Tex-Mex dinner for the family. It's been busy, busier than ever.”
But all in all, My Goodness’ small crew of staff, from cooking at their kitchen on Cork’s Marina, to serving up at their various regular haunts, have been kept busy not only with supplying quick and healthy meals, but by keeping the whole chain of supply as local as possible - with an emphasis on reuse of resources, minimising waste and adding their presence to a growing local push towards circular economy.
“One nice thing for us during lockdown was to meet all the local farmers who had been supplying restaurants with their goods. When the restaurants closed down, they were a bit nervous about what they were going to do financially. So we opened up a Cork-grown vegetables section of the English market stall, and we've been able to just kind-of elaborate, and grow with that. What we try to do is work our menu around the seasons, and what our local farmers can grow.
“During lockdown, we also started growing a lot of small plants and plant starts for people who were in lockdown in their own homes, to be able to bring food, and the joy of growing food, to their own place. So we were growing things for people who didn't have gardens, just to grow on their windowsill. We researched varieties that didn't need a lot of sunlight, didn't need a lot of soil, and didn't need a lot of space to be able to grow.
“It was a really lovely way to connect with our community, people we didn't know, and people who are, y'know, seasoned gardeners, and people who had never tried growing before in their life, and just needed a little bit of encouragement and some nice varieties that they knew they could work with easily. Meeting all those people during lockdown, now they're still back, now that everything's opened up again, and they brought their friends.”
The Covid-19 crisis has of course exacted its toll on Cork’s local food scene, and vegan options have sadly been no exception, and staples like 143V and VeganKO, which would have specialised in portion-heavy comfort fare and quick ‘n’ dirty fast food respectively, have both called it a day, challenged by the current conditions.
My Goodness’ recently-added menu options, a vegan Mac ‘n’ Cheeze with a selection of sides including a mushroom-based ‘chicken leg’, and the delightfully-monikered Curry in a Hurry, fill that gap admirably, if proving to be a diversion from typically rootsier fare.
O’Gara talks about striking that balance with their offerings - and how it circles back to necessity and ethics.
“When I finally got Covid, I was in my own house, so it didn't really affect me too badly, luckily. I really wanted to eat, and I was just creating new dishes. One of the things I want to do this year is to grow mushrooms. We always want to keep things hyperlocal, and what's beautiful about My Goodness, and, I think, part of the reason why we have stayed going for eight years, is because we are so diverse in what we offer, and what we do. We have a very strong handmade, homemade, local and sustainable ethic, behind all of our menu items, and everything that we create.
“So my friend Wayne and I really are interested in mushrooms, and we wanted to start growing our own, because food sovereignty is something that as a nation, as such a small country, we really need to pay more attention to - especially after Brexit, and especially because of lockdown and Covid, and now because of the Ukraine war and the very predictable shortage of petrol and the rising costs of delivery. We've been hit pretty hard with all these things.
“Brexit makes everything three times more expensive. Just our deliveries - like, we get all our bottles in from Germany, for instance, and the cost of delivery has quadrupled. So, one of the ways that we try to create all of our menu items is through; one, growing things ourselves; two, using a product that we have to import or buy from somebody else, and cycling it through our system as many times as possible.
“What we wanted to do is create something that we can make here in the kitchen, and then bring to the English Market and we wanted to be able to grow mushrooms. We needed an excuse to do that, so we made the mushroom chicken leg, which goes with a kimchi mac 'n' cheeze - we're making all of our cheeze out of local potatoes and carrots.
“It gives us this beautiful kind of smokey, savoury, tangy background note, with all of the delicious cheeze that we can make here. So yeah, it is comfort food, it is filling that gap that maybe some of the fast-food vegan places had beforehand. But it is done in a very uniquely My Goodness kind of way, in that it's hyperlocal, really healthy for you, but just happens to taste good, and just happens to be vegan.”
With a focus on sustainable production, low environmental impacts and relationships with local producers and growers, My Goodness is, at its heart, a largely DIY affair.
That same emphasis on radical departures in the norm for food production also extends to its mission statement, stemming from its roots in local counter-culture and radical politics, and seeking to establish and grow a new model for food businesses in Cork and beyond.
Whether it’s supplying online exercise courses and lectures during lockdown, the facilitation of the Rebel Reads bookshop and community space on its Marina production premises, or their central involvement in the Cork Urban Soil Project, O’Gara is keenly aware of the importance and realities of maintaining those punk-rock ethics.
“A lot of us who work here are, y'know, I would say probably all of us are anti-capitalist. Most of us would be anarchists, or anarcho-syndicalists, and that is how we designed this business. We were trying to make it a collective when we started, but that was eight years ago, and there weren't enough people around that necessarily wanted to commit to what that means. It usually means you work to create something that can exist as an avid anti-capitalist business within a capitalist system. It's difficult.
“We believe that good food should be a right, not a privilege. So how do you make that equation balance between paying your farmers what the food is worth, paying everyone who works with you a living wage, and not overcharging your customers? It's hard. What it means is just working a lot, and trying our best to create new weird things that people can enjoy. So, sustainability and politics go hand-in-hand.
“We're not a collective yet, I look forward to being a worker-owned, worker-run collective one day, whenever enough people are interested in it, who want to give that kind of time. But 'til then, it's like, okay, f**k it. If we have to be wage slaves in this society, you might as well try to create a business as sound as possible.
“That involves horizontalism, where people know that this workplace is somewhere where you can feel valued, you can feel respected. Even if you've just started, you might have a great idea on how to make a system work better - that's always good. And we believe that those who are doing the jobs know best. And we also believe that there's always room for improvement and that all of us are here to learn constantly, every day.”
My Goodness is a company marked and definable by lofty ambition, seeking not only to illustrate how food production and supply can change with the wider urgency of the times, but adapt to changing local circumstances as well, from customer tastes and demand, to providing stable, well-paid employment for all involved - aiming this year to become a living-wage business and help employees fight the cost-of-living crisis.
And although the future is a promise to no-one, there’s comfort to take in the spirit and output of the likes of My Goodness, and the bleeding-edge role they’ve taken in what food and drink will look like as the world changes around us.
“What I love to do is to look at the thought of interdependency being the heart of sustainability. I'm an American, you know, we're obsessed with independence. And the whole, like, route of capitalism is based on competition and not cooperation. But what I'd like to really focus on is how it's through cooperation that we become stronger as a species. I want to take that understanding of that philosophy, and see how far we can push it.
“Especially during lockdown, we found that when we were forced to be independent, we were forced to isolate and be on our own, people really started to wilt, and it was only through the power of community that people could survive and be happy, and I think it made us really appreciate that more. So I want to focus on that, and look at how My Goodness can join up with other community groups, or create other groups and grow.”
- Visit My Goodness at its regular locations at the English Market and various farmer’s markets in Cork, and keep an eye out for once-off offerings at this summer’s music festivals. For more information, check out https://www.mygoodnessfood.com/.