Food System Transformation at Ireland’s Largest Music and Cultural Festival
Electric Picnic is a unique, annual, weekend-long music and arts festival held in Stradbally, County Laois, Ireland. It’s Ireland’s largest gathering of its kind, offering a diverse experience beyond just music to include art, theater, comedy, food, and holistic therapies across over 27 stages and areas. The festival attracts large crowds, well over 80,000 people, and is known for its immersive atmosphere and a commitment to sustainability.
The Global Green is the name of the pop-up ecovillage at the festival where art, activism, creativity and performance converge. Since 2007 Cultivate, the NGO based in Cloughjordan, has coordinated this sustainability area. It is an enormous undertaking, involving hundreds of people and dozens of things – some static, some interactive, some fully programmed for most of the available hours of the day.
For three days and nights a collection of artists, makers, musicians, foodies, poets and activists from over 40 organisations and groups from across Ireland run things. It’s a compact area packed with art, quirky seating, stalls, biodiversity and artivism tents.
Many aspects of doing food differently, from gardening to distribution, and policy to practice, featured in this year’s Global Green. A tranquil garden oasis, coordinated by Community Gardens Ireland, featured vibrant art and a riot of plants, offering an array of creative hands-on activities and conversations on local food with punters. On the edge of the garden, Talamh Beo, Ireland’s agroecological farming organisation, had a tent highlighting agroecology and practical ways to build food sovereignty.
Elements of Change is Global Green’s engagement and music tent offering a dynamic program with cutting edge panel discussions, spoken word, theatre over the three days of the festival. It is here that we (Ollie Moore and Davie Philip from Cultivate) curate a three-day program with a big focus on how we transform our food systems. We are both part of the Feeding Ourselves Community of Practice bringing together local food producers, community initiatives, researchers, and advocates from across the agri-food, land use, and local development sectors.
Additionally, we manage living labs for two Horizon European projects: CODECS, which examines agri-food digitisation with an emphasis on online farmers’ markets, and EU4Advice, which focuses on developing training and support for Short Food Supply Chain Advisors and Local Food Facilitators.
And this is in part why we wanted to bring these ideas and practices to the sustainability part of an 80,000 person festival.
The big discussion on the Saturday afternoon was titled Food System Transformation. A panel facilitated by Davie Philip and included Rupa Marya, the doctor, activist, musician formally based in San Francisco, now Professor of Land, Food and Medicine Trinity College Dublin; Thomas O’Connor from Talamh Beo; Evonne Boland of the Open Food Network and Ollie Moore of CODECS. We discussed the potential of local food economies and innovative approaches to reshape the wider agri-food system — aiming for a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient way to feed ourselves.
The conversation went deep exploring where we are at, where we want to go and offered some insightful approaches on how we might transform the local food economy and support local food producers. This included in particular a focus on the role of large institutions enabling local food economies via better public procurement policies and the need for Short Food Supply.
This session was followed by a screening of the film Farming Is Medicine, that helps us reimagine how a food system rooted in deep care works. The land needs to be regenerated, but on a very deep level with justice at its core. After the screening Ollie Moore held a conversation with Rupa Marya, who features in the film, about decolonising agriculture and community health from rooftop gardens in the US and Bethlehem to hospitals in Ireland and the fields of the West Bank.
Following this, we naturally flowed into a session was held on how La Via Campesina members Talamh Beo (Ireland) and UAWC (Union of Agriculture Work Committees, Palestine) have forged ever deepening connections in recent months and practical ways to support Palestinian farmers, their rights, campaigns and organisations.
Sunday afternoon featured a humorous and powerful play What Are We Eatin’ Anyways? inspired by The Local Green Box, an online farmers’ market in County Cavan. The drama used humor and compelling storytelling to explore the hidden costs of modern food systems, such as packaging, waste, and the disconnect from food origins, while simultaneously highlighting the advantages of choosing local food.
Davie Philip (EU4Advice) hosted The Power of Community, our final discussion in the Elements of Change tent with Maeve Foreman of Mud Island Community Garden, Thomas O’Connor from Talamh Beo, Joanne Butler, OURganic Gardens and Dee Sewell, Carlow County Councils Environmental Awareness Officer. They discussed community gardens, community supported agriculture, food hubs, and the potential of local food facilitators as catalysts for climate resilience and community wellbeing.
The Global Green at Electric Picnic showed how art, film, theatre, and creative dialogue can make complex food system issues accessible. Festivals powerful spaces to cultivate curiosity and inspire change, with effects reaching far beyond the event.
