This year saw the first ever UN/ FAO Junior World Food Day and a group of Cork kids along with The Kabin Studio brought their own flavour to the international event.
Garry McCarthy AKA GMCBeats is the Co-Ordinator with The Kabin Studio and he tells us how it all came about and how a music video from all over the world gets made...
How did you get involved?
Well, we do a lot of rap and songwriting workshops in schools, and one of our songs on Climate Change with Cappabue National School went viral.
The FAO have their headquarters in Italy and an Irish woman named Aoife Riordan saw the video. Then one day, I got an email to ask us if we had any ideas or we wanted to get involved and we were delighted.
What happened next?
Well we were told that it needed to be multilingual with the six languages of the UN/ FAO. So that's English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. Initially we considered finding kids speaking those languages in Cork but we decided it would be more authentic to go international.
How did you pick the Cork schools?
We work with lots of schools here and we have great connections. We happened to work with Glasheen a while back and we just thought they were great and had such great energy from the students to the teachers.
So, we went to them and worked with the boys and girls schools. We also got some of our teens at the Kabin Studio to help out with recording the lyrics - Cara, Chloe, Sophie and Darren!
Then you went international...
We were very lucky that the FAO have so many people on the ground that they were able to link in. There was a brief sent to them and then we started to translate parts of the song and they picked six local kids in their countries for the music and video.
That was really fun to be trying to think about rapping in other languages. The clips and everything were sent and then Seán Downey, who was on TV with Davy's Toughest Team, co-directed and produced the video.
The 'We can all become #FoodHeroes' music video was launched at the first ever Junior World Food Day on 5 October and it was a hit - it got everyone dancing.
Aoife Riordan from the FAO said: "Students from around the world really enjoyed hearing about simple actions they can take to be food heroes both from the video and from speakers including ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, Brazilian food influencer Bela Gil, James Corden, Chef Elijah Amoo Addo from Ghana and the Director-General and Chief Scientist of FAO.
The video features all six of the UN/FAO languages - English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. When screened on Italian Rai TV, Pope Francis even got to enjoy the video before saying Angelus. Other countries are really interested in the video and Guinea Bissau has already translated a version in Portuguese."
Click here to find out more about World Food Day and the work of the FAO!
AND check out all the cool dance challenges from Food Heroes all over the world!!
You can follow The Kabin Studio on here Instagram if you want to get involved.
