Earth – all you can eat

If you consider yourself a Premier League Organic Foodie then you will have already pencilled in next Friday, 22 April into your recycled Green Party diary. You won't of course have used a charcoal pencil with which to mark the world wide "Earth Dinner" promoted by the American Organic Consumers' Association – that would inadvertently contribute to further removal of sections of the rainforest.

According to the website of this worthy environmental association, "The Earth Dinner is a way for family and friends to come together to appreciate the remarkable role food plays in our lives, in our family's histories and on our planet." Each guest is asked to bring a dish to share with the other lentil lovers and to talk about its origins.

Obviously turning up with a Big Mac would not be a good idea. Tracing the origins of the greasy hamburger back to the dung-drenched cattle squeezed in their thousands into dusty bare feedlots would have the more committed guest choking on their organic turnip (with Rocket sauce).

Mindful of the fact that the majority of people haven't the slightest idea where their food comes from – and many care less – the highly inventive consumers' association has produced a pack of cards entitled 'The Earth Dinner Creativity Cards.' A guaranteed recipe for a fun meal, these 50 highly tasteful cards contain questions designed to stimulate the gastronomical knowledge of even a confused gatecrasher who doesn't know the difference between a badly made compost heap and a macrobiotic meal.

Questions on the cards vary from "How long does it take a hen to lay an egg ?" to "Who invented the fork?". Guests with fingers worn out by too many visits to McDonalds can only hope they don't draw this latter card.

By far the most intriguing foodie card asks the question "If your favourite food could win an Oscar, what would be its acceptance speech?" Obviously any Irish guest picking this card would have to choose the potato. And apart from explaining the function of the tuber in soaking up gallons of alcohol from the bellies of Irish stomachs and the cultural importance of fish and chips, colcannon and coddle in our fight for freedom, mention would have to be made of the Famine. No Oscar acceptance speech on behalf of the potato could avoid delivering a tear-stained monologue on the plant's failure to blossom in Ireland in 1845 and subsequent years, thus altering the course of Irish history and sending hundreds of thousands of Irishman across the sea to America, where their offspring later emerged to bore the ass off their hosts at Earth Day Dinners.

david storey

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