Irish Restaurant Awards, Best sustainable practice
Our Food Philosophy runs through everything we do at Honestly Farm Kitchen and underpins all our food choices. It’s based on four promises we made to ourselves from the start….
Know Where It Comes From
All fresh meats cooked in the Farm Kitchen are certified organic or freerange, Irish and fully traceable back to their organic farm of origin. Most are produced on Drumanilra Organic Farm. We personally visit organic farms we work with, to ensure that they are farmed to our own high standards.
All salads and fresh vegetables used in the Farm Kitchen and sold in the Farm Shop are organic, and either grown in our own polytunnels or sourced from other organic growers.
We bake our own breads and sweet things and bring in others from local speciality bakers.
Our packaged meats, including charcuterie, salamis and black and white pudding may not always be organic but will always be produced from animals that have been kept in a high welfare environment.
We support small scale and local wherever possible. We believe locally produced food is often healthier and tastier than products that have traveled long distances. We also believe that supporting local economy helps strengthen the community we live in.
Know What’s In It
We make most food served in the Farm Kitchen from scratch. This includes our hand-made organic burgers, sausages, dry cure rashers and hams, soups, salad dressings, salads, sandwiches and pancakes.
We always avoid junk ingredients, artificial colourings, flavours and preservatives.
Don’t Waste It
We manage the Farm Kitchen carefully to keep food waste to a minimum. Any waste we do have is composted.
At the farm, we make our own compost for the polytunnels and market garden, using animal manures, straw bedding and trimmings from the garden.
All packaging we use in the shop is either recyclable or compostable. Our take-away coffee cups, lids, burger wraps, napkins and sugar sachets are made from plant-based compostable material.
Keep Our Carbon Footprint Low
We choose local, Irish products because they taste great, because we believe in supporting our local economy, and because of the reduced carbon footprint involved in the transport of local goods.
We choose grass-fed as opposed to intensively farmed and grain-fed animals, not just because they are healthier for us. Intensive farming of soy, corn and wheat used in grain feeds is a carbon-hungry process. Also, scientists now think that because of something called “carbon sequestration”, the ability of well-managed grassland to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, grazing cattle on pastures and restoring grasslands could play a vital role in slowing the global warming process.