In this week's episode, Keely Farrell and Kate Ryan adopt a gender approach to the history of food, in particular butter making in Ireland.

Keely Farrell is a postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin studying Public History and Cultural Heritage. Inspiration for this episode came from a paper written for a course titled, Food, Drink and European Cultural Identities. In a similar realm, Keely has worked at Spritmuseum, a museum centering on the cultural history of drinking in Sweden and has developed tour content on Christmas food traditions at the Montclair History Center in New Jersey. She is a member of Phi Alpha Theta, a History Honor Society in the U.S. Most of her research focuses on early African American and U.S. history with a recent dissertation on the public involvement in searching for and discovering slave shipwrecks globally.

Kate Ryan is a multi-award-winning food writer and founder of Flavour.ie, a platform dedicated to promoting Irish Food. Kate is a food features writer for The Echo and The Irish Examiner newspapers, and her articles have also featured with BBC, Vittles, Sunday Business Post, Food & Wine Magazine (Ireland), Scoop Food Magazine, among many others in print and online. She also writes on her blog, The Flavour Files. In 2017, she published 'A taste of west Cork - artisan food guide”, a project funded by Cork County Council and Taste Cork.

Her paper 'Perfectly civilised and proper' – the social and cultural history of blood as food in Ireland was selected for inclusion in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2023.

She is a member and current Treasurer of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild, a judge for Blas na hÉireann, Great Taste Awards, Irish Quality Food Awards, National Dairy Awards and Restaurant of the Year Awards.

Kate holds First Class (Honours) in UCC's MA in Food Studies and Irish Foodways and Postgraduate Diploma in Irish Food Culture.

In 2023, Kate was named the Blas na hÉireann Irish Food Producers Champion and bestowed the inaugural award for Food Storyteller of the Year by Listowel Food Fair. In 2022, she was awarded an Irish Food Writing Award for the Food Writing category.