The Blindboy Podcast - Sustainable food systems and a Scientific explanation for Ghosts

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Sustainable food systems and a Scientific explanation for Ghosts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pause the call from the jaws of a crow, you swampy morris. Welcome to the Blindby podcast. If this is your first time listening, consider going back to an earlier episode. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. We're firmly nestled in the breast of autumn. It's the middle of September. And there's a welcome chill of my hands wrapped around the microphone here.

And my hands are filthy with dirt. because I was harvesting cabbages all morning. I had a crack at grown vegetables this summer. Bit of a disappointing harvest, but fuck it. But the dirt, the mud, under my fingernails, and caking all around my knuckles. And the contrast of the dirty, earthy hands against the green of the cabbage

was bringing back memories of my childhood. But I couldn't immediately recall the specific memories. Because the thing is, I didn't grow up on a fucking farm. I've no context for seeing vegetables being harvested or pulled up out of the ground. I don't know what that looks like. The dirt on my own hands. The black earth against the green leaves. It was bringing up something strong.

And I was thinking, maybe it's a film I saw when I was a kid about farmers. And then it came to me. Fucking Vinnie the Vegge. Vincent Vegetable, we called him. So when I was a child, when I was a little child, maybe seven years of age, this man called Vinny the Vegge used to arrive in my neighbourhood

in a big blue truck and pull up outside in the road. I know it was the evenings because when I'm remembering that specific shade of navy blue, it's against the backdrop of that pinky orangey, slenty evening sun and he'd beeped the horn and my ma would say it's Vinnie the

veg it's Vinny the Vegge it's Vinny the Vegge I gotta go out to Vinny the Vegge used to arrive about three times a week so Vinny the Vegge he sold vegetables out of his big blue truck but the thing is it was like an ice cream van the way that nowadays if you live in an estate seven or eight o'clock in the evening you hear that ice cream van and then all the kids go out into the road and they buy their ice cream. When I was a little child and I'd fucking completely forgotten about it, that would happen in Limerick City with vegetables. Now we're not talking about that long ago.

Terminator 2 was in the fucking cinema. Ice Cube had songs out, the prodigy. But when I was putting up the cabbages this morning and looking at the dirt on my hands and the green on those leaves, The memory that was coming back to me would have been being a little child and accompanying my mother to purchase vegetables out on the road outside the house. I remember it being fun because everyone else's ma is out on the street too, because it was a little event. And this makes me sound ancient, but he used to sell the apples on a lollipop stick dipped in caramel and wrapped in that crinkily plastic. And when you bit into them, it was terribly disappointing.

Because you had this thin, sweet meniscus of fucking caramel and then hard apple in the middle, which couldn't compete with the sweetness of the caramel. Vincent was old school. And you'd queue up and finally you'd get to the back of Vinny the Vegge's van. I'd be there with my mother. And she'd order the vegetables. She'd order carrots, parsnips, whatever he had. And I remember two things.

Well, three things. The first one was, my eyes could only reach up as far as the floor of the truck. So my eyes were level with Vinny the Vegge's feet. And I'd look into the back of this massive truck, full of vegetables. The second thing I remember is his weighing scales. He had this incredibly old weighing scales. It looked like an anvil and I could smell the iron. I could smell the iron of it. And around the weighing scales were these rusty metal discs of different sizes.

And these were for, these were weights for weighing vegetables. And I always wanted to touch those little metal discs. He'd had that weighing scales for about 50 years, I'd say. The other thing I remembered about Vinny the Veg's vegetable truck. I'm remembered a lot more than three things now. He had loads of religious shit. In the back of his vegetable truck, there were those tacky, plastic statues of Holy Mary

the sea through plastic ones that were full of water from lords or whatever and dotted all around his van were those little medals religious medals and the final thing I remember the dirt on his hands the dirt on his hands

against the green of the leaves because all the vegetables he sold they were like literally organic not only fucking organic locally grown in Limerick. He didn't have a sign on the side of his van that said organic locally grown produce. There was no fucking sign at all.

It was a big mad, blue truck and you didn't need a sign because it was oral culture. It's Vinny the Vegge's van. He operated under the rules of folklore effectively. Like this wasn't fancy. They weren't going out of their way to support a small local business. They weren't trying to buy organic, they weren't trying to buy local. There was nothing special about this. It was the cheapest, easiest, most convenient way to get your vegetables.

Now Vinnie the Vegge had been servicing my neighbourhood for years. Like my man knew him well. He had been doing this since the 1960s. As the suburbs of Limerick grew, and remember back in the 1960s, most people didn't have a car. The weekly shop was a big deal. The milkman used to be a thing. The milkman would deliver milk to your door. Those little tiny trolleys that you see old ladies dragging behind them now,

that's kind of disappearing you don't see them anymore. That's what young housewives had in Ireland and probably in England in the in the 1960s to physically walk to the shop to get your food. So people like Vinny the Vegge would arrive in neighbourhoods with all the vegetables to meet and need. And that established a culture. Like when I was a child's supermarket, existed. You could go to a big supermarket and get your fucking vegetables. But why would you? When the decades-long habit of going out into the road and buying your vegetables from Vinny was there. So what I'm remembering is the very end, the very end of this culture. Vinny the

veg was also a bit of a character. He was, I don't know what you say eccentric. He was a mad cunt. He, his face looked like Russell Crowe, if he gave him a bit of a fright. I think Vinny was the first adult I'd ever met that had like a permanent fear etched into his face, an anxious person and he had a terrible toupee. One of those jet black joke shop wigs glued to his head. One of those wigs

that suggested a lack of self-awareness. Your hair is made out of plastic, sir. We can all see that you're bald and the thing that is on your head that you are calling a two-payer or a wig, it's not function as a two-payer or a wig. It's a hair-shaped hat. You're wearing a hair-shaped hat.

Vincent, you have an odd hat, a hat that's doing a bad impression of hair. So he had this incredibly obvious tope on the top of his head. Also in the truck was this very powerful fan. Now not like a spinning office fan thing. This large mechanical box that had very powerful airflow from it. Something to keep the vegetables fresh. And prevent mould, this big industrial fan down at the back.

I don't remember this because I'd have been too young. But my ma reminded me. I rang my ma earlier going, do you remember Vinnie the Vegge? Because I was too young, do you remember Vinny the Vegge? What can you tell me? And she told me.

So herself and her friends, all the maas, would be queuing up back of his truck and his truck would be open. And then you'd have like one teenager queuing up as well,

one teenage lad, and then all his friends over there watching. And the teenager would go to Vinny and say, Vinny, I'd like to buy one stalk of rhobarb place.

And Vinnie, is that it? You don't want anything else, any carrots? Spuds are on special today. No, Vinny. One stalk of rhobarb, that's all I need. And then Vinny'd say, all right, so. And he'd walk to the back of the truck. The thing was is,

the rhobab was right beside that fan that he had at the back. And when Vinny would, when he'd bend down to get the. rhubarb, the fan would blow the fan would blow his toupee up it was a really strong fan so that his, his toupee

would be stuck to his head but then it would flap like a flag in a gust and flap on his head and that was the only reason that the lads were ordering rhubarb just to do that to the top of his fucking head and you just, you would never have that type of crack buying your rhub

in Tesco today. It's not just here's what you have there. It's not just organic, locally sourced, locally grown, fresh vegetables affordably to your fucking door.

It's not just that. It's the sense of community. Three times a week in the evening. Everyone is out on the street, purchasing vegetables at the back of Vinny the Vegges van, meeting each other connecting, having the crack.

And then the young lads are doing the rhubarb joke every single week because what else have you got? What else if you got? There's no memes. But I got kind of pissed off when I when I remember, I'd forgotten all about fucking Vineyard of Edge. I was seven years of age. I'd forgotten about it. But I went out my back garden this morning with the intention of harvesting everything I'd tried to grow

this summer. Now I didn't try to grow much. Couple of potatoes, a few cabbages, a bit of broccoli, couple of tomato plants, grew everything from seed. I put more stuff in growing bags and pots and then I got a very small raised bed, a little kit, four planks of wood in a rectangle, bothered them being Q and that was my little raised bed and I put some produce in there as well. Everything in the bags and pots died in July with the heat wave. The didn't matter how much I watered them, it was so hot in July that the soil temperature

killed the plants, the soil temperature was just too hot. And I let them die. I could have moved them, I let them die. Because this summer was an experiment. So I learned, right, okay, if you're growing potatoes or cabbages in bags, they can't handle the soil temperature, they'll die. But then everything that was in the small bed that survived. One potato plant and two cabbages.

That's my entire harvest. harvest this summer. I did it for the crack and I also did it for my little kids so that they could see the entire process from seed and learn about photosynthesis and food and pests and insects and pollination and eventually the joy of eating food for tiny little kids to eat food that they saw grow themselves out the back garden. I'm also doing it because of food security. More as a symbolic thing. Like I'm not going to feed myself on two cabbabilms. and fucking one plant of bananas. Me doing that in practical terms is fucking futile.

I just got so pissed off about when Trump started that war in Iran six months ago, that it caused a food crisis because so much of the world's fertiliser comes from the Middle East because it's made out of gas. So I think 60% of the world's fertilizer did not make it out of the strait of hormones. at the beginning of the growing season. So for me and you, that means our groceries are gonna be more expensive in the supermarket. And then for people living in the global south,

the UN estimate that 45 million people could be pushed into starvation because of the beginning of that war. What's fucking frustrating about it and what made me angry is that this is all by choice. There's no actual need for the world's fertilizer, for 70% of the world's fertilizer to come from the Middle East. It comes from the Middle East because it's cheaper, it's for profits.

So then when something happens like a war in Iran and the strait of hormones is shut off, that little shock has a massive ripple effect, which leads to empty shelves and scarcity and higher prices and people in the global South dying a starvation. And it's frustrating because it's completely fucking avoidable. So my anger and frustration around that, that's also one of the reasons. I just tried to grow a couple of vegetables this year. Not that it would make a difference, but I channeled my anger and frustration and sense of injustice

into a little small individual action for nothing other than to regulate my own emotions around it. Here's some cabbages that I grew out my back garden with my kids in Limerick City. organically. Here they are, I'm looking at them. It made me feel a little bit of control. Doesn't change anything, but it made me feel hope. And what good are two cabbages? Well I'll boil the few spuds I have and eat them. Can't wait to do that. And then with the two cabbages, I'll wash them. I'll wash them and I'm going to make sourcrow. And with two cabbages, I'll get a year's supply of sourcrow. And sourcrow is fantastic because it's Natural probiotics.

Sourcrow is fermented cabbage. Wash the cabbage leaves, chop them up, stuff them into a jar. A clean, sterilized jar with a lot of salt and that cabbage will ferment and become fizzy and stay preserved for months and it continues to ferment the longer you leave it. And the beauty of that fermentation is

it's lactic acid bacteria, but not just the only just the fermentation. that? A powerful source of probiotics. Sourcrow that you buy in the supermarket or even in the Polish shop, sometimes it's pasteurized so it tastes like sauerkraut but it doesn't have the active alive probiotics in it because it might explode on the shelf. But ever since I spoke to Ted Dinan who was a professor down in UCC, I had him on the podcast and he's an expert in the gut-brain connection, he converted me to probiotics. So I'll eat about two tales of two tales. tablespoons of sourcrowd a day, alongside vegetable fiber, like broccoli, and that will keep

my gut biome incredibly healthy and that has knock-on effects for everything, the health of your immune system, how much nutrients, the way that you process nutrients for your body and your mental health. And we know this. Probiotics that you get yourself from real fermented foods are essential to the diet. And sourcrow too, There's no heat, there's no flames. It's really, really simple. It's just cabbage and salt and a jar. So it's great fun to make if you have kids.

You could also make kimchi, a little bit more complicated, spicy. You don't have to grow your own cabbage either. You can go to the shop and make sourcrow out of cabbage this evening if you wanted to. It's a bit of a challenging taste at first, especially sourcrow that you make yourself. We're talking about fizzy cabbage. Cabbage isn't supposed to be fizzy, especially if you come from a culture, where there's not a lot of fermented foods. We didn't grow up with fermented foods in Ireland.

The closest thing would be buttermilk that was used for baking. Sourcrowders, Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe. Lots of cultures have fermented vegetables. It's a sustainable food system. Why was anyone fermenting cabbage? To preserve it for longer. All your cabbages come in August. So you stuff them in jars and ferment them

and then you've got cabbage until the next growing season. Now we did have fermented food in Ireland a long time ago. I did a podcast on it about three years ago, but I found a 12th century Ashling. And Ashling is a type of early medieval Irish vision literature. But I found this poem written down in the 12th century called that Ashling Macon Glynn, where a hungry monk has a dream. And in his dream he visits a land of plenty, where there's lakes of bubbling milk that you can chew.

and he uses this fizzy milk to cure a king who has a stomach parasite. So that's a poem about kefir. Kefir is fermented probiotic milk. Again, go down to your Eastern European shop or your Polish shop, go into the fridge and get some of their mad, fizzy kefers. A very challenging taste at first, but fantastic for your gut health. But anyway, yeah, I started getting pissed off about Vinny the Veg. I got annoyed.

How fucking annoying is. that locally grown, fresh organic vegetables were being delivered to my neighborhood three times a week like the ice cream van when I was a kid. Not that long ago. Okay, think of it this way. The first Gulf War, the fucking Iraq, the first Gulf War, 1991, 1992, massive Against Saddam Hussein, massive US-led coalition, 6 or 700,000 troops, aircraft carriers, a much bigger war, we'll say, than what's happening in Iran now. That had no impact on Vinnie the Vegge, that had no impact on my mother's ability to get cabbages and potatoes, because Vinny the Veg is getting the vegetables from farms around Limerick

that are using silage and manure. I bought a bag of broccoli green beans and peas last week. Fresh, not frozen, for a euro. I looked at the bag. They were grown in Morocco. Cabbage is coming from Spain. It's completely normal to go to the supermarket and to purchase vegetables that you assume are Irish, but then you look at the fine print and they've traveled a massive distance to get here.

And often what Irish supermarkets will do, they'll create like, fake brands. So you'll go to your supermarket and buy a cabbage and it says McGinty's farm and it'll have an Irish flag on it and shamrocks and you'll get the feeling that McGinty's farm is an actual farm up in Wicklow or whatever. But it's not, it's just the name of a company that gets its cabbages from Morocco. It's what we call unsustainable. You're buying cheap cabbage but the costs are very well hidden, terrible for the environment, massive amounts of water in countries that experience drought, the exploitation of human labour, cabbages being grown by people by the poorest of the poor who are actively being exploited, food being grown outside the EU on gigantic

industrial farms, but very little regulation, using huge amounts of banned pesticides that destroy the environment and destroy biodiversity. so you don't have that supply chain transparency. And then just the carbon footprint, the amount of energy, petrol, oil that's required for a fucking cabbage to travel halfway around the world. And all of this has created a food system that's not sustainable, it's terrible for the environment and it's not secure either. It's not a secure food system.

We're seeing it this, the past month in Ireland with honey in particular. regulations came in about six months ago that if you're selling honey in Ireland now you have to show exactly where the honey was sourced from so now you have all these brands on supermarket shelves calling themselves Irish Irish names proudly providing Irish honey since 1973 and now you can see on the side of the jar there's no Irish honey there it's honey that's coming from China or Africa now what's wrong with honey that comes from Africa or comes from China aside from the carbon footprint. You don't have transparency in the chain. So he could actually just be eating sugar

syrup. But what happened to Vinny the Vege? He went out of business around 1995. He just stopped. He was probably going to retire anyway. But nobody replaced him. And his profession is forgotten. You know, I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of why Vinny the Vege disappeared just yet. I'll address that later on in the podcast because there's something my ma said to me on the phone and it's been rattling around my mind so I rang her up about Vinny the Vegge because I was too young to remember it

going to you know what vegetables were you buying and she was confirming everything this was locally grown organic she'd have to wash the vegetables thoroughly because they'd have muck on them and sometimes they might have worms or butterfly eggs on the cabbage and this is what she was purchasing

And she was adamant. We didn't know about organic meant. Any of that, this is just how it was. And then she says, ah, poor old Vinny, his nerves were at him. He wasn't right in the head. And I'm like, go on. And she says, he was forever on about ghosts. He was forever talking about ghosts.

To be honest, people used to make fun of him because of it. So I'm like, go on. She said that Vinny used to go through periods of... He mightn't show up for two or three weeks. And I'd say, well, what would you do for vegetables then? She'd say, well, I'd go to the supermarket. I'm like, well, before then, in the 70s and the 80s, what would you do? Well, back then, you might have to go without spuds for a couple of days.

Because Vinny wasn't showing up. And I said, was it drink? What was it? What do you mean, fucking ghosts? Did you just say ghosts? And then my ma'er says, Ah, he was full of old pish ogs. He was full of pish oaks.

His nerves were at him. Now my ma's in her 80s. when an older Irish person says someone's nerves were at them that was the best way that people back then could describe mental health issues we didn't have those words so someone's nerves were at them

that could describe depression anxiety fucking autism whatever Pishogs is an Irish word that means superstition when my ma would refer to someone as having Pishogues it meant that that person was mentally unwell, a superstition had taken over that person's life. Remember I mentioned earlier that in the back of Vinny the Vegge's truck, beside the weighing skills, he had all of these holy water bottles, Holy Mary, and he had religious

medals everywhere. When my ma said, he was convinced he thought his vegetable truck was haunted, haunted by ghosts, and he was adamant about this. And sometimes he'd get so frightened. in the van, that he wouldn't be able to get into it and he wouldn't show up and sell vegetables because there was activity going on in his fucking van. And he was like this for years and he'd mention it, but it's not something you could really speak to him about because this was fucking serious.

This was dead serious. Vinnie de Vegge had a van that was haunted and he believed it with all of his heart. What type of ghosts ma'am? From the famine. What? So where Vinnie used to get his vegetables? The area in Limerick, which is now the park canal, the canal that goes out to U.L. That area, that's the natural flood plains of Limerick.

So historically, a lot of fruit and vegetables were grown in that area. Going back a couple hundred years. I mean, if you'll allow me to. be incredibly nerdy. It's just this is a fact I've been holding onto and have never had the opportunity to speak about this specific fact. I read a local history paper by a Limerick historian called Kevin Hannan. That area called Park, you know, the flood plains. Flood plains are fertile. Vegetables have been grown in that area for so long that up until the 1950s, there was a very unique way of dividing fields in that area. But the only other place where that specific

method of field division was taking place was Denmark, which means you can trace that the vegetable growing tradition and that specific area back to the literal Vikings who founded Limerick City in the 8th century. That's 1200 years of an unbroken vegetable growing tradition in one small area in Limerick City. Now there's no vegetables, people smoke crack in the canal. but that was produce growing territory that was where you got produce and because of that there was a lot of fruit and vegetable

suppliers around there to this day if you look at the few small fruit and veg suppliers limerick ones still left there's one out there near the park canal and another very close on broad street but also there's a musgraves

right there now there's a musgraves and musgraves is it's like the big warehouse you go to If you own a shop, you go to this central warehouse to buy your shit. The reason Mosgraves is there is because, I suppose you'd call it the historical breadbasket of Limerick City, by the park canal. But it's also, when people were starving during the famine 200 years ago,

that is where people would go to get on a canal boat that would then take them to a ship, to a coffin ship, that might get them out of Ireland. You're talking famine, people starving to death. A lot of people died during the famine around the Park Canal trying to get to that boat. If you look at the ordinance map, just there beside where Mosgraves is now,

there's a mass rock, which is a rock where illegal priests would have mass and people would gather around this rock at a time when being Catholic was illegal and this tradition would have kept. going well up until the famine. It's also reported that there's graves around there, mass graves of famine victims. Anyway, fucking Vinnie the Vegge. When he was alone in the back of his fucking

truck with his vegetables, used to experience the presence of ghosts and got it into his head. The ghosts of starving people, of starving Irish people, were clambering into his truck so that they could get food. That's somehow because he was getting fruit. vegetables in this area that was so associated with the famine and death that their ghosts were climbing into his van and when he was alone he would see them or feel them and hear them and this was a huge deal to him and that's why he had all the religious shit to protect himself from the ghosts and he'd get so worked up and so anxious that he'd sometimes abandon his duties completely and not get into the fucking van so my ma says his poor old nerves were at him

He was tormented by Pishogs. And that's what a Pishog was. It's anxiety. It's anxiety before we had words for it, before we had mental health professionals. But in the 60s and 70s in Ireland, there was someone who had a supernatural belief that was so profound that it changed how they behave

and how they interact with people and the quality of their life. Now I came away from it going, isn't that fucking gas? Not only were vegetables delivered to the neighbourhood, But it was by a man who genuinely deeply believed that his vegetable van was being haunted by the ghosts of the starving dead from 200 years ago. But then that got me thinking about a ferocious hot take. A violent hot take.

And I'm going to need you to stick with me on it. Trust in the process of my pattern recognition. So I've an English tour coming up. Scotland and Wales as well Now I'm playing in very obvious places Glasgow London Cardiff

But there's other places that I gig That are more like personal choices Like you know I gigged in Sheffield earlier Because The Sheffield Fart Lamps I needed the visit there Nottingham I'm back in Nottingham

This isn't an advert for my fucking tour This is relevant to the hot take Nottingham My thing with Nottingham is the caves There's an underground cave system all around Nottingham and I'm fascinated with it. I'm also gigging Coventry. There's a very, very specific reason that is drawing me towards Coventry. There was an engineer in Coventry in the 1980s by the name of Vic Tandy.

He worked in the University of Coventry and he also worked in Warwick University. My gig is in Warwick University at the Warwick Arts Centre. There's a reason my gig is there. obviously I'm coming because there's podcast listeners in Coventry and I want to come and have crack with you. But also it's about this man Vic Tandy and his research. So in the 1980s Vic Tandy used to work late at night in a laboratory in Coventry, very close to Warwick. He was an engineer working on life support machines. That was his thing, life support machines. A machine that keeps a human alive. And when that machine is turned off, the human dies.

And the laboratory that he was working in, they called it a laboratory, but it was two garages, converted garage, and he'd worked there late into the night. Now I'm reading this from his research paper, a research paper that he put out in the 1990s in the late 1990s. So before Vic Tandy went to work in this laboratory, this converted garage, laid at night by himself, he'd been warned that, you know people say that, haunted. And he goes, fuck that. I'm an engineer. What the fight? I don't believe in ghosts.

I don't give you shit about that. He kept on working in his laboratory by himself late at night. One night he met a cleaner. And the cleaner was fucking terrified. She had felt the presence of spirits in the laboratory when she was cleaning. I was like, I need to get the fuck out of this place. And she was so serious that it spoke Vic a bit. but not so much that he didn't stop going back working late night in the laboratory. And then he told his colleagues about the story, about the cleaner. And then his colleagues, who are scientists, say to him, well, Vic, we've all felt it too.

Felt what? Well, you know, we've been working here by ourselves and like, we've felt a presence that something is fucking off here. you know, I know whatever about the cleaner we can corroborate we've had similar experiences in fact Vic

the other night I was sitting down here at this end working away on my machinery and I turned to my left because I saw you beside me or who I thought was you right beside me

and then when I turned you weren't there at all you were at the other end of the fucking laboratory so I think someone was like sitting beside me the other night a ghost and it didn't feel nice.

It felt sad and lonely and chilling and cold. Like this was not a nice feeling. This was not nice. And I'm using all of my logic and all of my science. But something's off, Vic. And Vic starts coming up with excuses. Just go, this is anxiety. You hear one person talking about a ghost

and then everyone tells you it's haunted. Your own mind is going to start playing tricks on you. until one night Vic Tandy is by himself in the laboratory, late at night, working on a piece of equipment, and suddenly he feels... I'm going to quote this from his actual published scientific paper. I was working on my own one night after everyone else had left. As I sat at the desk writing, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. I was sweating but cold and the feeling of deterrential. impression was noticeable. He could hear cats outside the building and there were noises and this made it feel spooky.

But as he said himself, there was something else. At this point he starts to get a little bit freaked out and he goes, right, okay I felt something strange there, but let's sort that out. There's gas masks in this laboratory. There's canisters of carbon dioxide. There could be a gas present here and this is making me feel this way. So he walked walks all around the lab, make sure there's no gas leak and everything's turned off, everything's fine. He sits back down at his desk again after checking for a possible gas leak. He got himself a cup of coffee and then sat down again. And again, this is from his scientific paper. As I was writing, I became aware that I was being watched. And then a figure slowly emerged to my left. It was in the periphery of my vision, but it moved as I would expect. a person to move. The apparition was grey and it made no sound. The hair was standing up on my

neck and I felt a distinct chill in the room. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that I was terrified. I was unable to see any detail. Frozen. I finally built up the courage to turn around and face the thing and as I turned the apparition faded away and disappeared. There was absolutely no evidence to support what I had seen, so I decided that I must be cracking up and I went home. So I'm not reading you a Reddit thread there or hearsay. This is from a scientific paper that he published in April 1998 as an engineer with the Coventry University in a peer-reviewed journal. The next day, Vic was apprehensive about going back to the lab, but this is his place of work. It's his job, he has to show up so he turns up the next day to the laboratory.

Now, Vic's hobby was fencing, fencing with swords. And the next day when he goes back to work, by himself in the lab, he brings his fencing sword with him. Now, I wonder, A, did he bring his fencing sword because he was afraid of ghosts and he might have to fight the ghosts with a sword? Or B, if this was his passion, his interest. Maybe bringing this along would make him feel safe. which I can completely understand. Years ago, when I used to get anxiety attacks, alone by myself, in my room,

I'd whip out my guitar, I'd play my acoustic guitar, and it would help my anxiety settle. So Vic goes in the next day and he brings his fencing sword with him, and he wanted to replace the blade. So he gets the sword at his engineering desk, and he places the sword, the thin, long fencing sword. Remember, a fencing sword, very, very thin, long piece?

of metal. He places it in a vice grips, in a clamp on his desk. He goes over to get some tools, returns back about 10 minutes, but when he goes back to the fucking desk, the fencing sword is now wobbling and vibrating and he starts to feel that chill again and the terror returns. And now he's in poltergeist territory because his sword is He's in a fucking clamp and it's vibrating by itself. And this is really deeply troubling him. But because he's an engineer and he's dealing with a vibrating piece of metal, this is his territory.

This is his territory as a scientist and he knows, I'm going to quote his paper, if the file blade was being vibrated, it was receiving energy which must have been varying in intensity at a rate equal to the resonant frequency of the blade. Like a tuning fork. If you play instruments, like I was saying there with my guitar, so a tuning fork is a small piece of metal that looks like a fork. And it has a resonant frequency of 440 hertz, which is the node of A.

So if I have my guitar and I'm trying to tune my string to an A and there's a tuning fork beside it, when I tune that perfect A, It resonates equal to the tuning fork and then the tuning fork starts to vibrate. Sound. Sound is vibrations of air. So Vic Tandy figures. There's a sound in this room and this sound is equal vibrational frequency to my fucking fencing sword.

And wherever this sound is coming from that I can't hear, it is vibrating that sword perfectly. And then Vic starts to realize. this perfectly rectangular garage. If there's a sound coming from somewhere, this garage is a perfect tube to test this out. So he starts to move, place the vice with the fencing sword in different places around the laboratory until he notices a sweet spot

where the fencing sword does begin to vibrate but when he moves it, it doesn't vibrate. So then he concludes as an engineer. in this room there is a low frequency standing wave. Not all sound is within the range of what the human ear can hear. Some sounds are very, very high pitched, and then other ones known as subsonic are so low that you cannot hear them, but you might feel them, but also the shape of this room that he was in.

Almost like an echo chamber, but for a sound you can. here, the sound was reinforcing itself until it focused on one point in the room and that's where it was strongest and that's where the fencing sword was vibrating the strongest. And so because he's an engineer, he's able to calculate what this frequency was, was 19 hertz. So that's a subsonic low rumble that the human ear cannot hear. So the first question he has is where is this subsonic sound coming from? He spoke with the caretaker of the building and turns out, they installed a new extraction

fan in the cleaning room at the end of the laboratory and when he turned that off the sword stopped vibrating. So the extraction fan was definitely generating a subsonic sound and this sound was 19 hertz. And then his second question was, what does 19 hearts do to the human body? So he went researching and found case studies. One case study was that there was a factory and in one part of the factory the workers kept reporting that they felt uneasy.

And then they tested it and they found that machinery was generating subsonic low frequency sounds and the symptoms that people were experiencing were dizziness but also eye watering, difficulty breathing and sensations of fear, excessive sweating and shivering. So he found that low frequencies from between 15 hearts to 9. 19 Hertz have an impact on the human body that we feel them, but we can't hear them. Then he found a case study that NASA had done. They were testing pilots and the human body's response to vibrations caused by sound. And they found that somewhere around 18 hertz is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.

That this caused a smearing of vision, hyperventilation, lightheadedness and a point. panic attacks and a sudden fear of oncoming death and Vic Tandy reckoned, if you find yourself in a sweet spot of low frequency noise, it can vibrate the eyeballs sufficiently that you might see something in the corner of your eye, but also your sympathetic nervous system kicks in and you begin to experience a panic attack because your body is experiencing a threat and he found of when he was sitting at the desk, when he saw the ghost, he was sitting exactly at where that resonant frequency was strongest. And that paper, published in 1998, called A Ghost in the Machine by Vic Tandy when he was at Coventry University, is the closest scientific

explanation that we have for people who believe that they are experiencing ghosts, not just seeing something, but the chills down your spine, the sense that something isn't right in a room, that you're being watched, that there's another presence in the room, the fact that several people can report similar feelings in the same location, that's the closest we have to an explanation for hauntings and ghosts. I've been fascinated by that for a long time. It's what's drawing me towards Coventry to do that gig there in Warwick University. And that was 1998, And Vic Tandy, he did go on to try and take that research to test it out in various locations that were haunted. But he died in 2004.

And it's still there as a strong explanation. What the fuck does this have to do with Vinny the Vegge? Remember the fan that I mentioned, near the rhubarb, the fan that would force Vinny the Veg's toupee to flap against his scalp, like the tongue of a thirsty Labrador, the industrial box fan that's used to keep to keep a van for food, cold and aerated. And then you think of the inside of Vinny the Vegge's van when he's there by himself. The door is closed at the back. It's a perfect rectangle.

If that fan was generating a hum between 15 and 19 hearts and Vinnie the Vegge is in that van alone with the doors closed, then that's going to create a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. where that sound bounces around and focuses. That's what the fuck I think was happening. He's in the veg van by himself. The fan vibrates, generates a 15 to 19 hearts sound wave. It vibrates Vinnie the Vegge's eyeballs.

He experiences chills, uneasiness, a rising feeling of anxiety. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in, so now you're in panic attack territory. And then the human mind does what the human mind does. I am experiencing uncomfortableness and fear. I must identify the threat. There's a ghost. I feel a presence.

I'm alone on the park canal. I'm loading up with vegetables. I know about the history of this area. I know about the famine. I'm thinking about the people starving to death. While I'm looking at potatoes. And Vinnie the Vegge slowly convinces himself. With good fucking reason.

If the fan theory is correct, with good reason. He is being haunted. by the starving ghosts of people who died during the famine who were getting some type of revenge on him because of his abundance and that's why he's got so many Holy Mary's and religious medals to protect himself from the ghosts Vinny the Vege is dead long ago

his van is gone I'll never be able to test this theory but you can imagine my excitement when I connected to two things together but when I get that cabbage the cabbage that reminded me of Vinny the Vege that I grew myself and I wash the muck off it, chop it up and salt it,

put it into a jar and let it ferment. If the gas builds up sufficiently in that jar and it explodes, I'm going to take that as a sign from Vinny the Vegge that I was right. Actually that makes no fucking sense.

That makes no sense. If that happened, that would mean I'm wrong and ghosts are real because otherwise why would Vinny the Veg be haunting my sourcrow? Anyway, fucking Ocarina pause. 50 minutes in. Look, sometimes lads,

you know, I really should be doing the Patreon and the gigs earlier on in the podcast so people hear it, but sometimes you just got to tell a story from start to finish. I'd have lost you.

I successfully connected to wildly disparate themes there and you just got to let that run through. Now I'm going to play a fucking whistle. No, I'm going to plug the Patreon. Right? This podcast is supported

by you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. This podcast is my full-time job. And if it brings you, Marth and Merriment or entertainment or distraction, please consider supporting it directly. This is a listener-funded podcast. I'm really out of my own here, I think.

That was a very strange episode there. I mean, that's a monologue podcast that I wrote, and that is a... that's some odd shit. These are not the themes, the type of themes that a successful podcast would have in order to attract advertisers. But we don't have to worry about that

because this is listener funded. When you fund this podcast directly, I have the time and space to fully pursue my curiosity and to pursue failure. And this episode, this is a pursuit of failure. episode because it's so stupid, if we're being honest.

What's this week's podcast about? Well, I reckon I can make a plausible connection between sustainable food systems and a scientific explanation for ghosts. Oh, fantastic. We'd like to sponsor that podcast. Would they fuck? Doesn't matter. Not a consideration.

This is listener funded. Thank you to all of you who are patrons, who fund me directly. this is how I rent out my office, pay for my equipment, this is how I earn a living. Thank you for paying me to pursue my curiosity. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. If you can't afford that, no problem, you listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast whether you pay or not, and I get to earn a living.

It's a wonderful model. I'm eternally grateful. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and if you're a new Patreon subscriber don't sign up on the iPhone app because Apple are greedy cunts

and they'll take 30% so sign up on your browser on your phone Ocarina pause here's some adverts I really should have played the subsonic ghost frequency this act no

no I shouldn't be doing that that'd be irresponsible this is irresponsible for any dogs listening Right, gigs, that upcoming tour that I'm doing next month, England, Scotland and Wales. I'm still looking for guests for interesting local people to speak to at each of these locations. So get on to me on Instagram with a DM at Blind by Boat Club if you have some suggestions. Kick it off on the 18th of October in Brighton at the Brighton Dome. That's almost sold out.

Then we're at in Cardiff at the new theatre in Cardiff on the 20th of October. off the Coventry on the 21st at the Warwick Art Centre. That's there at Warwick University. Hopefully I'll be able to do some type of Vic Tandy related pilgrimage. I don't think the garage from 1998 where he conducted his research exists anymore. But if anyone from Coventry knows where it is, let me know because I'll probably take a little trip down there. I've made some 19 hearts frequency noises with my synthesizers. I haven't had the courage to play them

and I don't think my studio monitors could You'd need a fairly big set of speakers To vibrate a room and create that sound But I can generate the 18 hearts On my mini-mug synthesizer But I might just bring a little MP3 with me And play it in my ears As I walk around some Vic Tandy locations

That's a bit strange blind by I'm autistic, what do you want What are other artists doing when they come and do a gig in a city, fucking cocaine. I'm gonna be listening to 18 hearts resonant frequencies. By myself inside specific locations. That's my cocaine.

Then I'll go down to Bristol on the 22nd. I mean, I love Bristol. I love Bristol. That's, I think that's almost sold out. That's in the Beacon Hall. Then up to Guildford. I mean, what's my connection to Guildford? When I was 14,

I used to order cannabis growing equipment from a shop there. London. Pretty obvious, London. Got to do London. London is sold out. Barbekin Hall. Glasgow on the 28th. Delicious, beautiful Glasgow that's also sold out. And then after Gateshead derives its name, I believe,

for an old Anglo-Saxon word for a goat's head. And what I've learned about Gateshead is the people there are very, very sensitive that you don't refer to them as Newcastle people, that they have their own separate identity. At their T-side, I believe it is. so I'll be respecting that when I arrive in Gateshead on fucking Halloween night isn't it? No, I have a day off in Gateshead on Halloween night.

Maybe... fuck it! Yeah, maybe I'll get my hands on some big speakers on Halloween night in Gateshead and freak the shit out of myself. Conjure up a few ghosts on the night that the ghosts are allowed out and I'll be finishing the tour in Nottingham. Nottingham the city of caves on the first of fucking November and I doubt I'll be gigging. England's gotten in Wales for a good while after that because I want to begin writing a book.

I want to begin writing a new book. What's it going to be about? I don't know. It will arrive to me in a state of flow. Why am I going to write a new book? For the enjoyment of doing it. For the joy and pleasure of experiencing flow state over the course of several months. When I get back to Ireland then, I'm in Sligo on the 19th of November at the Hawkswell Theatre.

There are few tickets left for that. There might be a few Irish gigs in the new year. I can't be arse promoting them now, but let's just talk about New Zealand and Australia which is almost sold out. Auckland on the 9th of April 27. Tickets left for that. Melbourne at the Palais. That's going real quick.

Down to the last hundred for Melbourne. Brisbane sold out. Perth sold out. Sydney Opera House. I could have called it sold out last week. out last week but we managed to release an extra couple of hundred tickets for it. I think there were extra pews or something that they could open up so you can still get tickets for the Sydney Opera House in April 27. That's the crack. I want to go

back to food sustainability now. That wasn't just a ghost story. What happened to Vinnie the Veg? He went out of business around 1995. He was probably going to retire anyway but he was never replaced. No one else came in and took his job and became the person who travels around in a truck delivering vegetables to people's neighbourhoods. That job disappeared. And it disappeared so much that me telling you about it, it sounds absurd, sounds like a fantasy. It makes me sound way older than I am and it's an example of what we call shifting baseline syndrome. The world has changed so much. Our relationship with,

with food, with produce, has changed so much that we don't have context for something which was normal within most of our lifetimes. From the mid-90s, everyone just started getting their veg in the supermarket and it became incredibly cheap. What happened? How did we get here? The collapse of the Soviet Union was a massive fucking thing. 1991.

Capitalism, the West lost its main competitor, communism. In the Soviet Union, the entirety of the 20th century was predicated upon this fear of all-out nuclear war, East and West. After World War II, a lot of countries treated food security as national security. Like Ireland had a national fertiliser company that operated up until the 1990s. Britain would have had the same. In 1962, six European countries introduced the common agricultural policy. You could think of it as a social net for food security. Food security is more important than profits.

So that meant guaranteed prices for farmers. There were tariffs and quotas to protect European produce. The states would buy surplus food. A system of protection based around being able to earn a little living if you grew food locally, being able to earn a living if you sold food locally, and then all of that being affordable and accessible for anyone. But it's against the Cold War backdrop. It's the post-World War II expectation of World War III is going to kick off at any point.

But then Berlin Wall, 1991, the Soviet Union collapses. The Cold War is over. The West feels as if they won. Capitalism wins. A narrative emerges that the war. world is safe. You go on further into the 90s, all these huge ex-Soviet countries now open up. That's where you end up with like Ukraine. There's a war in Ukraine right now. Ukraine was called up until before the war, the breadbasket of Europe. Huge, huge percentage

of our grain that was used for bread and pasta and animal feed was being grown in Ukraine. So when the war kicked off, supply chains are in massively, the price of food goes up. And Russia knows this. Like this year alone a shitload of grain did not make it out of Ukraine because Russia are making sure it does not leave the Black Sea. Like if your favorite restaurant closed sometime in the past two years your local restaurant that you love and that's gone.

The war in Ukraine was a huge contributor to that because that pushed the restaurant's raw materials prices up, then they can't afford to keep their prices the same. And the only thing that can weather that storm is a fucking McDonald's. That's why McDonald's is still open. But back to Vinny the veg, almost immediately after when the Soviet Union collapses from 92 onwards, the EU moves towards agricultural policy that's not based around food security and becomes based around the market. Neoliberalism, like with housing. Housing becomes financialized.

Moves away from the social net into the speculative forces of the market. I move away from the price protection of food and guarantees and food safety into, well now all the farmers now can compete in a common market for prices, capitalism, pure capitalism. Then 1993 you get the EU single market takes effect. So Vinny the veg who's buying cabbages caked in dirt from a farm 15 minutes down the road. That small farm on the outskirts of Limerick is not a farm. Emmerich is now in direct competition with a gigantic farm in France and Spain. Now you think Vinny the Vegge is ordering a bunch of cabbages from Spain? Is he fuck?

But Tesco is, done stores is. They now have free tariff free access to this gigantic cabbage farm in France or Spain. And now the supermarket shelves are flooding with cabbages that are half the price of Vinny's cabbages. Which one is your ma buying in 1993? She's buying the cheap supermarket cabbages. 1995, the World Trade Centre Organisation. They brought in an agreement of agriculture. Brought in global rules.

What you'd call globalisation. These free trade agreements. I mean, they sounded excellent at the time. They sounded fantastic at the time, but now it's 2026. And Donald Trump acting the prick down in Iran has me growing cabbages out my back garden. And like I said, that's going to do fuck all, but it's just the fact that I even have to think about it. But what that?

The 1995 World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture, that really put a nail in the coffin of the 1962 common agricultural policy, that social net based around food security. The 1995 World Trade Organization Agricultural shift, it made that, it made food security appear to be anti-cali. capitalist, anti-market, anti-competition, the logic being, it's 1995, the Russians are gone, the Soviet Union is gone, there's no nuclear bombs, there's not going to be any war, capitalism won, everything is safe and amazing, everything's incredible. Why would you possibly want food security? Security from what? We won. You don't need to make your own fertiliser, we can get it there from the Middle East, who's going to fuck with us? It's way cheaper from

the Middle East. You don't need to protect your farmers to make. make sure they get a fair price. Now they have freedom. Let the best farmer win. Handed all over to the market, to competition. So that made it global. And then the big change in Ireland would have been, 1997, Tesco came in and they bought Quinnsworth.

Quinnsworth was a supermarket chain in Ireland, but Tesco came in, this huge, huge English corporation, bought Quinnsworth and crazy prices. And they could bulk buy at an unprecedented scale. So now Vinnie the Veg is gone. And the farms in limerick are around limerick that were grown carrots and spuds and potatoes and broccoli and all that shit, those small farms that were doing fine, they can't compete with the gigantic cabbage farm in Spain,

which is legally being treated as its next door neighbor. There's no tariffs. Complete free trade. So Tesco just buy all the cabbages from Spain. Me and you get cheaper, cabbages. We also, seasonality doesn't become a thing anymore. I'm old enough to remember avocados not being a thing. I'm old enough to remember garlic.

Garlic existed. It was in the supermarket when I was a little child. But you didn't fucking buy garlic. My ma wasn't buying garlic. Garlic was purchased by doctors and solicitors. It was expensive. Like I've said this before, but I've never tasted a radish. I have never tasted a radish.

Now that's a choice. I'm trying to see how long I can keep it going. But the reason I've never tasted a radish, it's probably quite autistic as well. But I have very, very early memories of being in the supermarket with my mother, probably the 1980s, very young. And I remember always looking at the radishes

because they look so cool. They looked so tasty and different and fancy. And I'd go to them and I'd say to my ma, what are these? What are these? Can we get them? And she was like flat out, no, that is extravagance. They are extravagant.

No, we're not getting them. So they were probably pricey. My man could afford them. We could have afforded radishes. It's not the point. Whatever was going on with the radishes in the 1980s, they were either being grown in Ireland in greenhouses, so they were expensive because of that,

or they were being imported from Europe, and they were expensive because of that. But I, it was drilled. into me stay away from them fucking radishes. That's extravagant shit. Now radishes are affordable. You don't even see them that much anymore because they've gone out of fashion, they've gone out of style. But I bet you I could get my hands on a radish fairly cheaply. But the thing it, my mother and radishes, it was drilled into me so thoroughly that these were off limits, that these were extravagant, that I've never gone near a radish. It became a taboo food. Even and now as an adult,

it's a novelty for me. As an adult now, I can get a radish right now. What's my mad going to do? Give out to me. I can do it right now. I'm not going to do it. I want to hold on to it. I want to see how long I can go

without ever taste in a radish. We need to get back to sustainable food systems. We need to get back to our vegetables being grown locally by farmers and then being able to earn a living or doing it. For the environment and for security. A war in Iran should not cause a shortage of fertilizer. That's a choice, a choice that benefits billionaires. And if you're

thinking it'll be too expensive, too expensive to support farmers, too expensive to grow locally, too expensive to make our own fertilizer. We've got a cost of living crisis now. The price of oil goes up, the price of everything goes up. There's a war in Ukraine, the price of food goes up. There's a war in Iran. Fertilizer can't leave hormones. There's scarcity. The price of food goes up. doesn't have to be this way. Let's just take fertilizer as an example. Because the thing is, even when we had a national fertilizer industry, we were still importing natural gas in order to make the fertilizer that way. But you know what they're doing in China. They're making fertilizer from the Black Soldier Fly on an industrial scale. There's one company doing this in Ireland

at the moment they're called Hexafly. But the Black Soldier Fly, it's this fly and it's maggots. its larvae are voracious eaters and you could produce all of the fertiliser that Ireland needs by farming this black soldier fly you'd have a building I was talking to Colleenis about this the biodiversity officer up in Trinity College

you can farm black soldier fly vertically so you could have a building full of vertical boxes of black soldier fly larvae they eat kitchen waste vegetable scraps, fruit scraps, they eat these things voraciously. From this they produce incredibly potent fertiliser. Then the maggots are all fat.

The thing with the black soldier fly, it spends most of its life as a maggot that eats. And then once it becomes a fly, it only lives for five days and it doesn't actually eat as a fly. So the black soldier fly larvae, that can be made into food for animals. full of protein. Now does that sound nuts? You've got all these buildings where you're harvesting flies to make fertilizer. That sounds mad.

Do you know what's mad? Data centers. You know what's so utterly unsustainable that it costs you an extra 300 quid on your electricity bill a year because it's so expensive and so unsustainable. Fucking data centers

dotted all over Ireland using our water and electricity. A vertical black soldier fly farm would look like a data center. It wouldn't use all that energy, all that water. Throw solar panels on the roof have a battery. It feeds upon waste. It produces fertilizer that could service the entirety of the country and then it also feeds animals a circular system. Nationalize it. Don't put it out to the market forces. Cheap organic fertilizer for all the farmers to grow produce locally. The Chinese are already doing it on an industrial scale. I'm really I'm realising now the second part of the podcast is possibly stranger than the first part,

because I've gone from radishes to black soldier fly farming. But fuck it. I'm going to be speaking to more people in the future on this podcast about sustainable farming, sustainable food systems. I can buy crack cocaine in Limerick City. Easier than I can purchase. Affordable, locally grown organic vegetables. All right, that's all I have time for this week.

I'll catch you next week I have a little treat for you next week Well hopefully We'll see if I can put it off But in the meantime Rub a dog Genie flick to a swan Wink at a cabbage

Dog bless