Flynn David - The Happy Pear: recipes and stories from the first ten years

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CONTENTS

Im Dave (right) and Im Steve (left), and in this book we hope to inspire you to eat more veg. That is it, plain and simple. We have been eating this way for more than a decade now and have never looked back. We want to share with you our passion for creating really tasty, simple food that is good for your health and pocket.

If you are a meat-eater you may be wondering if this book is only for vegetarians, an inner circle book for the converted. Not at all! The whole thrust of this book is to inspire you to eat more fruit, veg and wholefoods, and to make more meals based around these. After all, no one is going to argue with the most basic of advice: to EAT MORE VEG! Its best for us and it does the planet the least harm. But we certainly havent written our book with the intention of turning anyone into a veggie.

In some ways, we were the least likely people you could have imagined becoming champions of plant-based eating. So if we can be all about our veg then anybody can be!

Growing up we ate a totally standard Irish diet of whatever was put in front of us. We loved barbecues, which were essentially meat fests. There was an instinctive sense that real men eat meat, and as teenagers, particularly teenagers who played rugby and did weights, it was all about meat and we ate it by the truckload!

During college we were full-on jocks: we played rugby, chased girls and drank like fish and hadnt a care in the world other than stumbling through exams. Our dreams were all about money, flash cars and lots of beautiful women, as this is what society was telling us was living the dream. We wanted to be millionaires by the time we were thirty, have a private island by forty and private planes by fifty!

After college we werent sure what to do: we always knew we were going to work together and work for ourselves. We never really had any plan of ever getting a real job. It was 2001, Ireland was booming economically and our generation didnt worry too much about being able to make money. While we were thinking about our next move, we decided to run the Dublin City Marathon. About a month before after abusing ourselves with drink and partying while inter-railing around Europe we decided we needed to do a detox (not as fashionable then as it is now). We did some research on Dads computer and decided to eat porridge for break-fast, swap white bread for brown, cut out processed foods and, most importantly, stop drinking! Though we didnt know it then, this first detox was the start of our personal food revolution.

After all our training and detoxing we did the marathon no prob. It was the end of October and we were feeling good and enjoying the extra money in our pocket from not drinking, so we decided to keep it up till Christmas. Just before Christmas we met all our old school friends to go on the lash. The pints were passed around and we took our first gulp. But something had changed. The drink tasted bad and, more important, drinking alcohol didnt feel quite right, though we werent sure why. We went home sober with our tails between our legs but feeling good that we had done what felt right.

In 2002, having lived our whole lives with everyone asking, Are you Steve or Dave? or Which one are you? we figured it was time to see what it was like going solo. Dave started in South Africa (trying to become a golf pro before deciding he didnt like golf any more and going travelling) and Steve in Vancouver (as a snowboard instructor). Steve ended up living on the floor of a vegetarians flat for his first week in Canada. At the time, it was like meeting a different species of human! He asked the guy if he could eat the same food as him for a week. Eating so much new stuff lentils, beans, quinoa, brown rice was a huge eye-opener.

At the end of the week Steve was sold on this new way of eating. Here he was surrounded by young people wanting to party and rip it up, and he was near obsessed with beans and lentils and vegetarian cooking! He phoned Dave, expecting to get one up on him: Dave, guess what? Ive decided to be a veggie, I like the idea of thinking about food a bit more. Lo and behold, in true twin magic, Dave replied, Thats weird, I decided the same thing this week too!

Our search for health through food had started and, typically, being competitive, it was all about what we could do next, pushing the limits and seeing how we felt in terms of energy and well-being. We decided to try going vegan to see if this gave us any extra superpowers! A vegan is a vegetarian who, as well as meat and fish, also cuts out dairy products and eggs. We really got up on our high horses and stopped wearing leather and went on with a lot of holier than thou type stuff!

Next we decided to become raw foodists (still eating vegan but nothing being cooked). We did this for about a year and were both super-healthy, but a bit neurotic and obsessed with our diets! We lived separately, still on different continents, in a mixture of organic farms, intentional communities, meditation centres. After all this, by the time we got home in 2004, we were long-haired, vegan, organic, trinket-wearing, herbal-tea-drinking hippies! As we said already, before our adventures we were all about becoming millionaires. Now we were back with a totally different perspective. We were all about happiness, lifestyle, community and health. The weird clothes and long hair were just our way of letting people know we had changed.

While we were away, Steve had started reflecting on how his perspective had changed so much in a few years. The idea of taking over the greengrocers shop in our home town popped into his head. He thought that we could use it as a platform to try to share some of what we had experienced and our new perspective. After a week back home, he called around to see the owner and, to cut a long story short, within a few months we had bought the shop and the food revolution was on the way!

Our aim was to start our food revolution by making fruit and veg sexy. And we wanted to get involved with our community and drag as many people along for the ride as we possibly could.