Who Is Floris Wagemakers?

"Well, based on his email to us and his website, it looks like he's some guy named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland from Holland a while ago and started up his own organic, self-sustaining falafel stand to make a living," I told my Mom when my travel partners and I first got our invitation to WWOOF in Ireland.

"So you're going to be making falafel with a Dutch man named Wagemakers? This doesn't sound like it'll be a very 'Irish' experience..." my Mom responded, skeptically.

"Ach, nah! Flo? He's about as Irish as they come! A real nationalist, he is!" countered a friend of Floris a few weeks later, after I had related the skepticism which my Mom, not to mention quite a few others, had expressed when I told them what I was planning to do in Ireland. To be honest, I myself was not really sure what to expect initially. I'd seen his WWOOF profile and his website (thegourmetoffensive.com) and had communicated with him by email once, when he invited us to come down and stay with him as helpers. All I really knew about him was, well, just what I told my Mom in the first paragraph of this article. And of course, as is usually the case, once we got here, things became a lot clearer and a bit more interesting as well. So who is this guy anyway, other than Galway's premier falafel baron who decided to take in three American kids he didn't know to work in his garden for two months?

For starters, Floris Wagemakers's name isn't pronounced the way you think. Supposedly, the Dutch people, of whom Floris is natively a member, never had last names until that idealistic tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte, came through and decided that surnames were the way of the future, and so Flo's ancestors decided that since they were wagon makers by trade, than wagon makers they would be henceforth called. Hence, Wagemakers - pronounced not like makers of wages, but more similarly to the old Philadelphia department store Wanamakers.

Flo (who's out of town right now so he'll have to forgive me for any factual inaccuracies) moved to Ireland around 1998 hoping to start a new life for himself. He'd had some professional kitchen experience and knew how to make falafel and after a few years of one thing or another, he decided to fill in the falafel niche that was sorely empty in this part of Western Ireland with his very own organic falafel cart. That's how The Gourmet Offensive began operating on weekends in the Galway market.

There were a few stipulations that were very important to Flo upon opening his business. The first was that he would do this on the weekends so that he would be able to grow produce in his garden during the rest of the week. This served a few functions. One of them, as is advertised on the front of his cart, was that he could grow as much of his own produce as possible, creating a more personal connection from himself to his food to his customers. While this is mostly limited to greens that go into the salads that fill his pita sandwiches, his garden is full of other goodies, which I've been helping to farm since arriving here and which often find themselves on Flo's dinner table as well. More importantly to the garden, though, was the fact that Flo has been growing most of his whole life (growing produce, that is; not growing physically, although he is quite tall).

This ties into the other stipulation of his business. Everything is organic, produced not by the machines of modern warfare in the fight of agri-business versus nature; or the genetic manipulations of the likes of Monsanto, who strive to make tomatoes that will last in the fridge for ages at the expense of flavor and diversity. No no, Flo insists that mankind must narrow the divide between themselves and the food they grow. It's one thing for people not to grow their own food; there has always been a divide between the agrarian sectors of society and the rest of those who benefit. But in the Western world, there is a disturbing lack of interest in quality produce, and an abundance of ignorance of what it is we are actually eating. What the hell is in a commercial hot dog anyway? And how can anyone expect to be able to manipulate a plant to grow all year round or be shipped across oceans without suffering in taste and nutrition? Flo firmly believes that people maintaining a closer connection to their food, and the natural world at large, is the key to improving lives, enriching souls, and getting our society that much closer back to where he says, and I agree, it should be.

Of course, these aren't easy ideas to put into practical action. Most people appear perfectly content to eat the same half-dozen or so varieties of apple, narrow-mindedly selected for mass distribution from among literally thousands of varieties that once covered our planet, despite the fact that this means that in a world of supply and demand, all our other choices will most likely soon become extinct. The pitfall of this is not only the lack of aesthetic options, but also the creation of a monoculture, the worst possible outcome for the natural world. The Irish potato famine, for example, occurred because there was primarily one variety of potato farmed throughout the country, and when the blight came along, there were no resistant strains of the plant. The result was that all the potatoes died and the people starved, and there is no reason to think this can't happen again, despite, or because of, all the efforts to create produce that can resist disease. (There is also a lot of science that assures us that the more disease-resistant strains of produce we create, the stronger the diseases will become until - worst case scenario - we can no longer overpower Mother Nature's adaptive abilities and have a planet full of super-blights flying around destroying all our food.)

Even closer to home, reaching a mutually-respectful relationship with agriculture is a complicated issue. During dinner one night, Flo was serving a lamb stew. His 7-year-old son, Idris, asked at one point, "Flo, is this from a real lamb?" Flo offhandedly answered, "Sure it is. Like it?"

Idris's face instantly sank and tears began to well up in his eyes, as he underwent one of those epiphanies that many poor children find at some point in their youth, like when they realize the Tooth Fairy is really just a sneaky parent with some pocket change. "But I don't want to eat a lamb!" he cried.

"Aww, Jaysus! You're not eating it now?? But you always ask me for meat!" Flo and I have had a couple conversations about meat, and the idea that peoples' perceptions towards it would change if they themselves were a more active part of the "foodification" of animals. In Mali, I regularly found myself becoming personally acquainted with livestock who I would later watch go through the whole process from bloody death, cleaning, and finally to being turned into supper which the whole family would voraciously consume, knowing how much effort they put into raising this animal and keeping it happy until it was time for it to serve its purpose. As I said before, it's been ages in Western culture since agrarianism was universal, and there have always been people who did the "dirty work" of food for the other branches of society, but in today's world, where there is such a wide disconnect between us and something as basic as our food, the idea of having the casual carnivorous American businessman kill his own cow to supply his 16 ounce steak sounds...well, it might be interesting to see how that turns out.

I guess what it all comes down to is prioritizing. Flo has been doing a lot of that. He spends a good amount of time thinking and talking about the problems the world is facing: political unrest, human rights and freedoms, and the rest of the issues that plague humanity on a daily basis. But he also realizes that very few people can effectively take on more than a few of these problems, and even those who do have made little headway in the grand scheme of things. The best approach to making effective change is to choose your battles. Flo's is food. He's not a vegetarian, or an all-organic, all-the-time crusader like some folks I know, but he has his agenda, and he's taken it to the front lines. You can see him there every weekend, making falafel sandwiches with pride and determination, and selling them to all walks of life who pass through the Galway marketplace. Whether they share his agenda or just want to fill their tummies, be they young or old, tourist or local, from every denomination of humanity that comes through, Flo will sell them healthy, humanity-centered food that everyone agrees tastes damn good. The way I see it, every falafel ball sold is more ammunition spent, and every patron is another soldier enlisted in The Gourmet Offensive.