Irish food, embarrassment of riches or plain embarrassment?

This is Donal Skehan, isn't he lovely? More on that later. This Friday I'll be locking horns in a debate with some premier Irish and international food writers at Savour Kilkenny. The topic is "Irish cuisine - embarrassment of riches or plain embarrassment?" Funnily enough I could debate either side of this but on Friday I'm on the "embarrassment" bench. Can't wait; I've got some great hideous Irish food examples lined up; the pub sandwich in the bag, rubbery, watery chicken in a wrap, the ubiquitous beef or salmon dinner - so awful they named a racehorse after it. Whatever side you might ally yourself with it's sure to be an entertaining debate. And hey opposition, don't think for a second you've a chance in hell of beating us.

Savour Kilkenny has a brilliant line up of food events - demos by Donal Skehan and Catherine Fulvio (above and right), food trails, wine workshops, children's cookery, blindfold sensory dining and a foodcamp on the Friday. Going to festivals is one of the nicest parts about writing about food and farming for a living. It's where I meet people who farm and produce food, other food journalists and all kinds of people who just like cooking and eating. Whether you write as I do for print or television it's still a solitary job. So going on the road; hanging out in windy fields with farmers and laughing with people at food festivals is where you see it all come together.
It's also where you see changes happening in the way food is presented and discussed. Five years ago in Ireland food festivals were all about food on the plate. Now they focus increasingly on where the food is coming from. What's the point offering a dish with tiger prawns intensively farmed in Vietnam, frozen and flown here god knows how long after they were harvested, as Irish Food? Unfortunately we still see this kind of thing in many good restaurants around the country. More and more chefs are realising the value of local ingredients, cooking accordingly and food festivals are thank god, following suit.

I spent five years producing Ear to the Ground - filming in stifling hot chicken houses, cold milking parlours and on wild wet mountainsides amid hundreds of black faced sheep. Learning how food is produced and handled at its early stages is essential to understanding what we have here in Ireland in terms of our food potential. Having visited factory farms in Holland, Belgium and documented GMO farming nightmares in Thailand and Vietnam, it's often sadly the case that don't know how lucky we are here, and how good and "clean" our foodstuffs are.

If you are near to Kilkenny this Friday drop into the foodcamp at the festival - it's a series of workshops where food professionals (chefs, producers) mix with foodies (journalists, bloggers, consumers) and agencies learn and share with each other. There's a day of speakers and discussions planned from 09:30 through to 15:30 running in 4 simultaneous rooms.

The day finishes with the Food Fight debate at 3:30 chaired by John McKenna of The Bridgestone Food Guide, the debate poses the question:
“Traditional Irish Cuisine – an embarrassment of riches or just an embarrassment?”
On the embarrassment side are:

Colman Andrews – Journalist, founder of Saveur magazine and food writer
Suzanne Campbell – Journalist, author and broadcaster
Regina Sexton – Author "The Little History of Irish Food"

On the opposite bench are:
Birgitte Curtin of the Burren Smokehouse
Kevin Sheridan, food campaigner, Sheridan's cheesemongers
Catherine Cleary – Journalist and food writer, The Irish Times

I'll keep you posted on how we get on and how soundly we trash the opposition. Happy eating x http://savourkilkenny.com/

Irish chicken, the end of the road?

Last week it was lambs.. now it's chicken. On Tuesday the Irish Times published the investigative piece I wrote on Irish chicken which has certainly excited some debate about what we're eating - debate being the polite word. I suppose strong reaction to any piece of journalism is what you want, and it's good to see that people are engaged with the issue and in some cases, simply frightened about what they're eating. I've had email comments sent on to me from the Times and a few strange phonecalls since the piece came out. One chap who called me this morning had a good old rant but I'm sure it's nothing a bucket of chicken at KFC can't sort out. After all, food and countryside issues often excite slightly over the top reactions. After directing an episode of Ear to the Ground (Ireland's farming programme) on fox hunting some years ago, I was delighted to find I was banned from the entire area of East Galway by the pro hunting lobby while at the same time an animal rights protestor chained himself to the gates of Leinster House. Have a look at the piece and see for yourself. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2011/0329/1224293291679.html I'm off to write my presentation for a food event "For Food's Sake" tonight at The Sugar Club in Dublin. Really looking forward to it - myself, a representative from Bord Bia and the IFA will be presenting ideas and then responding to audience discussion on the future of food and farming. And there'll be artisan foods to sample afterwards... better leave some room in the tummy, though there's not a lot of room in there with an eight month old baby taking up most of the space... Tally ho x

I went all the way to Manhattan and all I got was a lousy stomach bug. Bad Food part deux

Good to see my post on food safety in Irish restaurants generating heat on twitter thanks to @keithbohanna and a bit of back and forth on whether restaurant owners are beaten down by food regs, or whether we're all a bunch of sissies who get ill at the sight of a raw steak. I agree that over-regulation drives small producers and restaurants mad, but putting customers at risk is another matter and if you are served with a closure notice, it must have been felt that bad practice was taking place.

While most restaurants in Ireland put food safety high on the agenda it's still sadly the case that we've all been poisoned by some food outlet at some stage, and this is coming from someone who survived a long period in India eating street food without any catastrophes. I think my stomach out-bugs any newcomers. Can't be a good sign but anyway...

Taking the topic further afield, it seems the most swanky city in the world still has big problems with food safety, New York's Department of Health's recent list of restaurants-breaking-the-rules featured two Michelin starred eateries - Gilt and A Voce on Madison Avenue. Another well-known downtown restaurant The Meatball Shop was given a fairly high score of infringements including “food not protected from potential source of contamination” and inadequate personal cleanliness. Lovely.

So just because you put your high heels on (yes gentlemen), spend two months on a waiting list and pay a fortune, it doesn't gaurantee what you're eating is perfectly safe. I think in general Irish chefs and restaurant owners open restaurants because they have a passion for food and would never fall into a standards vortex. Most of them feel that the food safety regs here are too severe, but if they are really involved in their businesses and regularly police the standard of food leaving their kitchens they have nothing to worry about. It's the cowboy operators that put customers at risk, and some tales told to me recently would seem to bear this out.

I thought the recession might weed some of them out but it seems recession kills off good joints as well as bad ones. The only thing we can do is vote with our feet; eat where food is prepared with care and has an authenticity behind it. If possible, eat food produced in Ireland. And no, chicken caesar salads in Temple Bar are not Irish food. I think consumers are becoming more educated on what is genuine food and what is a cheap rip-off, but not everyone can spot this. In the meantime the FSAI are going to keep rapping knuckles, hopefully as time goes on, there will be less of them to rap.

Have Walmart just discovered It's a Wonderful Life?

Wal-Mart, the worlds biggest food retailer has just announced a programme of investment for sustainable agriculture and to increase the amount of food it buys from small farmers. This has huge implications, including for us here in Ireland. After all, ASDA are owned by Walmart and they are waiting just over the border for the right moment to pounce down here, and possibly buy out Dunnes. To say I'm shocked with this turnaround in policy is an understatement. Did Walmart suddenly discover a DVD of It's a Wonderful Life? Is their CEO about to die and feels he must leave a legacy to the world? Is it some giant PR game? Lets look at the details -

According to today's New York Times...

"The program is intended to put more locally grown food in Wal-Mart stores in the United States, invest in training and infrastructure for small and medium-sized farmers particularly in emerging markets and begin to measure the efficiently of large suppliers in growing and getting their produce to market.

Given that Wal-Mart is the world’s largest grocer, with one of the biggest food supply chains, any changes that it makes would have wide implications. Wal-Mart’s decision five years ago to set sustainability goals that, among other things, increased its reliance on renewable energy and reduced packaging waste among its supplies, sent broad ripples through product manufacturers.

Large companies like Proctor and Gamble redesigned packages that are now also carried by other retailers, while Wal-Mart’s measurements of environmental efficiency among its suppliers helped define how they needed to change.

“No other retailer has the ability to make more of a difference than Wal-Mart,” Wal-Mart’s president and chief executive Michael T. Duke, said at a meeting Thursday morning, according to prepared remarks. “Grocery is more than half of Wal-Mart’s business. Yet only four of our 39 public sustainability goals address food.”

Ok, back to me - it's still sounding too good to be true. Up until now it's been in Walmarts interest to squeeze suppliers on margin until they can barely survive and keep the price of food down. There have been mountains of PhDs written about the devastating effect they have had on everything from farming and the environment to the shape of small towns in America. I'm afraid I'm suspicious about all this but lets face it, their financial commitments are a drop in the ocean to their normal spend and the changes won't be fully met until the end of 2015.

Back to the New York Times -

In the United States, Wal-Mart will double the percentage of locally grown produce, to 9 percent, the company said. Wal-Mart defines local produce as that grown and sold in the same state. Still, the program is far less ambitious than in some other countries — in Canada, for instance, where Wal-Mart expects to buy 30 percent of produce locally by the end of 2013, and, when local produce is available, increase that to 100 percent.

In emerging markets, Wal-Mart has pledged to sell $1 billion of food from small and medium farmers (which it defines as farmers with fewer than 20 hectares or about 50 acres). It will also provide training for the farmers and their laborers on how to choose crops that are in demand as well as the proper application of water and pesticides.

Both in the United States and globally, Wal-Mart will invest more than $1 billion to improve its perishable supply chain. For example, if trucks, trains and distribution centers could help farmers in l Minnesota get crops to Wal-Mart more quickly, the result would be less spoiled food, a longer shelf life, and presumably more profit for both the farmer and for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart said it planned to reduce food waste in emerging-market stores by 15 percent, and in other stores by 10 percent.

As it did in the environmental arena, it will begin creating an agriculture-specific index to figure out how to measure waste and efficiency among produce suppliers. It will be asking its biggest producers to answer questions about water, fertilizer and chemical use. The eventual goal is to include that information in a sustainability rating that customers would see, so they could decide whether to choose one avocado over another based on how much waste it had created. Wal-Mart would also use the information when it decides from whom to buy.

Finally, it announced specific sourcing guidelines, including that sustainably sourced palm oil be used in all its private-label products (the Wal-Mart house brands) and that any beef it sells not contribute to the deforestation of the Amazon because of cattle-ranching expansion.

“When we do this on Wal-Mart’s scale, we can deliver a global food supply that improves health and livelihoods around the world,” Leslie A. Dach, executive vice president for corporate affairs, said, according to prepared remarks.

While the over all goals include Sam’s Club, the warehouse-store wing of Wal-Mart, that division also has goals specific to it: It will increase sales of fair-trade certified produce and flowers by 15 percent, require all seafood suppliers to become certified as sustainable, and reduce food waste in clubs and distribution centers by 11 percent annually.

Environmental and agricultural specialists who had worked with Wal-Mart on the program said a few items stood out.

Beginning to measure how farms produced food, with the sustainability index, was a big step, they said.
“The impact of not just Wal-Mart but the entire food and agricultural sector starting to define what is acceptable practice in their supply chain, and then what is unacceptable practice, will move agricultural producers en masse,” said Marty Matlock, a professor of ecological engineering at the University of Arkansas. “The index represents a real number that will mean improvement on the ground: improving ecosystem health, soil health and food quality.”
“This is huge,” said Michelle Mauthe Harvey, project manager for the corporate partnerships program at Environmental Defense Fund. “Once people are asked those questions, if they haven’t been measuring, they measure more.”
“Knowing what’s embedded in the food before it ever leaves the farm is really significant, because then you can begin to embrace better practices, you can begin to identify opportunities for improvement.”
Ms. Harvey said the investment into infrastructure was also a big step forward.
“The majority of efforts have tended toward some local sourcing, and you had a fairly active effort around organics” among other grocers, Ms. Harvey said, but there was a gap between support for local farmers and how those farmers would find transportation or warehouses for their food.
“Our agricultural system over the last three to four decades, as we’ve moved to reliance on key locations like California and Florida,” she said, “we’ve made it very difficult for local farmers to actually get their food to market.”

Back to me - either way, this is mega news. What's motivating their decision is what's really of interest. Are they afraid that after the recent recall of billions of eggs in the US, swine flu and avian flu that they will eventually poison half of us with factory farmed food and leave the market with no alternative?

The cynical part of me says its all about market share. Walmart/ASDA know customers are getting more copped on about food and don't want something as cheap as chips if it might possibly kill them. So they're getting in there before it's too late. But let's watch this space, I get a large smell of greenwashing from this, Tesco have tried this game before and it doesn't work. Lets just say I'll keep a close eye on their progress and let you all know how its going. Walmart turning into environmental guardian angel? Yeah. Let's see what actually happens.

Is being a foodie just another kind of elitism?

I rarely publish other material here but this piece from American farmer and local food campaigner Joel Salatin was just too good not to draw attention to. He asks the question - if you're interested in good food, how should you reply when you're labelled an elitist?

His responds to the "elitist" charge with an analysis of why good food is more expensive than commercial, subsidy-aided manufactured produce. His arguments are arresting, and form what's basically a synopsis of the pressures many Irish food producers and farmers are under continually to compete with the food giants of America and Europe.

Joel writes from an American perspective where things are pretty bad for small farmers, it makes me think again how impossible it is to survive in America if you're not one of the food conglomerates, and makes it all the more remarkable that anyone even tries. People like this make us here in Ireland look very lucky indeed. See what you think and let me know your views.

The full piece can be found at http://flavormagazinevirginia.com/foodie-elitism/ here's a synopsis -

Rebel with a cause- food elitism?

Because high-quality local food often carries a higher price tag than food generated by the industrial system, the charge of elitism coming from fans of industrial food is often vitriolic, and embarrassed foodies agonise over it. For all their positive energy surrounding food, I’ve found latent guilt among this group — guilt for paying more for local food when others are starving, guilt for caring about taste when others would happily eat anything. Instead of cowering in self-guilt, let’s confront the issue of prices head on.

Why It’s Worth It

First, it’s better food. It tastes better. It handles better. And it’s safer: Anyone buying chemicalized, drug-infused food is engaging in risky behavior. It’s also nutritionally superior. For those willing to see, scientific data shows fresh foods’ conjugated linoleic acid, vitamins, minerals, brix readings, omega 3–omega 6 ratios, and polyunsaturated fat profiles are empirically superior. Better stuff is worth more.

Second, economies of scale will continue to progress as more people buy local food, which will bring prices down. The collaborative aggregation and distribution networks that have been fine-tuned by mega-food companies can and will be duplicated locally as volume increases and regional food systems get more creative.

Third, eating unprocessed foods is the best way to bring down your grocery bill, regardless of where the food originated. A 10-pound bag of potatoes costs the same as a 1-pound bag of potato chips. Cultivating domestic culinary arts and actually reinhabiting our kitchens—which we’ve remodeled and gadgetised at great cost—can wean all of us away from expensive processed food. A whole pound of our farm’s grass-finished ground beef, which can feed four adults, costs about the same as a Happy Meal. (And guess which one is more healthy?)

Fourth, non-scalable government regulations—which are designed to protect eaters from the dangers inherent in the industrial food complex but are not relevant in a transparent, regional food system—inordinately discriminate against smaller processing businesses like abattoirs, kitchens, and canneries, because the costs of complying with the (inappropriate) paperwork and infrastructure requirements cannot be spread out over a large volume of product. These regulations lead to price prejudice at the community-based scale: Small processors are at a disadvantage because they must pass those costs on to consumers, making their products more expensive than the mass-produced ones. These burdensome regulations also discourage entrepreneurs from entering local food commerce.

Fifth, unlike huge, single-crop or single-animal farms, diversified farms like ours do not receive government subsidies. Nor do the production, processing, and marketing of our food create collateral damage like that caused by factory farming—damage left for taxpayers to fix. Subsidies and government clean-up measures are not included in the price you pay for processed food at the grocery store, but if they were, local food would not seem so expensive in comparison.

Consider the Rhode Island–sized area in the Gulf of Mexico now known as a “dead zone” because nothing can survive in the oxygen-starved water, a result of manure and pesticide runoff. Who pays for the clean up and the reversal efforts? Who pays to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria like MRSA, caused by the overuse of antibiotics in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)? Who pays to treat people with Type II diabetes, which they get from consuming processed food that is sold cheaply because the corporations making it have received subsidies? Who pays to clean up stinky rural neighborhoods with densely populated poultry and livestock compounds? And what is the value of the land irreversibly damaged by bad farming practices?

Sixth—and this is where I wanted to head with this discussion—plenty of money already exists in our economic system to pay for good food. Can you think of anything people buy that they don’t need? Tobacco products, $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees, KFC, soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup, Disney vacations, large-screen TVs, jarred baby food? America spends more on veterinary care for pets than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.

I won’t labour the point, but if you took all the money people spend on unnecessary baubles and junk food, it would be enough for everyone to eat like kings. We could all be elitists.
With that money, we could create a world where all the people eat food that is above average. Almost everyone I know who owns a community supported agriculture (CSA) share could afford to purchase an extra one for an impoverished family. And if you had to give up a few $4 lattes to do it? What a pity.

Spare Change?

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think we need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves. Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine. Most people are more connected to the celebrities in People than the food that will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at the next meal.

The other day I saw precooked bacon in a box at the supermarket—for $30 a pound. Do we really have to buy precooked bacon? If you took the average shopping cart in the checkout line and tossed out all the processed food—everything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce, everything you can’t re-create in your kitchen, and everything that won’t rot—and substituted instead locally sourced, fresh items, you would be dollars ahead and immensely healthier.
We can all do better. If we can find money for movies, ski trips, and recreational cruises, surely we can find the money to purchase integrity food. The fact is that most of us scrounge together enough pennies to fund the passion of our hearts. If we would cultivate a passion for food like the one we’ve cultivated for clothes, cars, and entertainment, perhaps we would ultimately live healthier, happier lives.

Embracing Elitism
To suggest that advocating for such a change makes me an elitist is to disparage positive decision making and behaviour. Indeed, if that’s elitism, I want it. The victim mentality our culture encourages actually induces guilt among people making progress. That’s crazy. We should applaud positive behavior and encourage others to follow suit, not demonize and discourage it. Would it be better to applaud people who buy amalgamated, reconstituted, fumigated, irradiated, genetically modified industrial garbage?

The charge of elitism is both unfair and silly. We foodies are cultural change agents, positive innovators, integrity seekers. So hold your head high and don’t apologize for making noble decisions.

Food poisioning, animal cruelty and rape of employees - the real nice side to America's factory farms

US agriculture is reeling from a salmonella outbreak which has left more than 1500 Americans ill with food poisioning and lead to the recall of more than half a billion eggs. The food firm at the centre of this outbreak had already been named a "habitual violator" of regulations and has been breaking the law since 1994. If there was an ugly face to factory farming, and an example of how loose food regulation is in the US, this is clearly it.

The DeCosters plant in Iowa which is the focus of the outbreak produces 2.3 million dozen eggs a week and has also been sued by neighbours for noxious gases, millions of gallons of uncovered manure and putrid animal carcasses left on roadways,

Not only has Mr. Austin DeCoster habitually broken food and environment regulations, in 2002 he paid a settlement to eleven female workers at his plant. Most of the women were Mexican, and the payment was made for sexual harassment and assault charges, including rapes by supervisors.

Notwithstanding the current salmonella outbreak, here's a quick run down of DeCosters adventures so far -

In 1997, he agreed to pay $2 million in fines for health and safety violations. The US labour secretary at the time, Robert Reich, said conditions on his farm in Maine were "as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop." Reich's successor, called the farms "simply atrocious," citing unguarded machinery, electrical hazards, exposure to harmful bacteria and unsanitary conditions.

In 2000, the state of Iowa designated DeCoster a "habitual violator" of environmental regulations for problems that included run-off of pig manure into local waterways.

In 2002, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced the $1.5-million settlement of the lawsuit against DeCoster Farms on behalf of the employees who reported sexual harassment, rape, abuse and retaliation by supervising staff at DeCoster's Wright County plants.

In 2007, 51 workers were arrested during an immigration raid at his farms. This was the fourth illegal immigration raid carried out by authorities.

In June 2010, Maine Contract Farming, the successor company to DeCoster Egg Farms, agreed to pay $25,000 in penalties and to make a one-off payment of $100,000 to the Maine Department of Agriculture over animal cruelty allegations that were spurred by a hidden-camera investigation by an animal welfare organization.

Why does America continually turn its back on the catastrophic problems evident in their factory farms, if anything, surely their risk to human health should at least prompt a re-think. The Department of Agriculture and the FDA in the US have so far shown little regard for cleaning up anything other than food crises long after they've happened and public health has already been put at risk, let alone the issues surrounding animal cruelty and the monopolies operating food production in the US.

"Light touch" regulation in the US is the order of the day. After all, the FDA still allows growth hormones in cows despite their link with tumours, they also permit the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock to promote their growth, a practice which allegedly contributes to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and they also allow cloned animals be be sold without special labelling.

On top of this the Department of Agriculture has just announced a recall of 8,500 pounds of ground beef for possible E. coli contamination. It's sad that we know of food horrors in the US only come to light when it's too late. If you really want to know what does on on American farms read Johnathon Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". It'll tell you not just what's behind the label but also behind the farm, read it. It ain't pretty.

For more on the salmonella outbreak and the incredible flouting of regulations by the DeCosters http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27eggs.html

Irish fruit growers - a dying breed

No wonder we can't find Irish fruit in our supermarkets; on Saturday's Countrywide we discussed how sadly many people have stopped farming Irish fruit over the past ten years, particularly apples. Not only are there few farmers left in the business, for those interested in starting up it's very costly to enter – to plant an acre costs about 10,000 euros. And not only are the start up costs prohibitive, you’ve a lot of expense on labour afterwards. And if you haven’t an existing market or relationship with supermarkets it’s hard to sell them. All of this points to why as consumers we have little choice but to buy foreign fruit in our supermarkets.


Generally the multiples are fairly unapolegic about all this, saying that for value they need to import apples from as far away as China and Chile and have a year round supply. But Irish apples can be available from September to April if they are stored and many varieties store well but it's more about what the consumer wants and if they stop looking for Irish fruit there’s no need for the supermarket to stock Irish fruit. So we can only blame ourselves for not looking for Irish produce, if there's no demand for it supermarkets won't stock it, it's as simple as that.

Despite this there are still a few growers around the country who are keeping the tradition of apple growing in Ireland and saving the breeds that were once plentiful in this country. In Tipperary Con Traas runs a great example of a thriving apple and soft fruit business despite difficult times in food retail.

He has 30 acres in apples about 20 of that is commercial breeds which he makes into juices and sells the apples, but he also has about 10 acres in Irish rare breeds. His parents were fruit growers in Holland and they came to Ireland in the 1960s as land was short in Holland, buying the land he still farms on. When they first came to Cahir they grew everything from tulips to cabbages. Apples were also something they produced and in addition to keeping on that tradition, Con has a large amount of soft fruit in the summer time; mostly strawberries and raspberries, but coming into September, now is the height of apple season on the farm.


Con also has old Irish Breeds of apples but we don’t these commercially for sale. It’s a real pity, we have some great old Irish apples with wonderful names like Buttermilk Russet, Cavan Newington and Ballinore Pippin but the fact of the matter is that in today’s mass market, Irish apples just don’t cut the mustard so to speak. You might have a great variety but it blemishes easily, or you have a lovely tasting apple which falls off the tree too early and you can’t sell them all at the one time, so in terms of commercial apple growing they have missed the boat, but in terms of growing them at home or saving Irish varieties it’s a great thing to have in your garden and also important to keep that genetic heritage alive. Con still thinks it’s important to grow these apples and he juices them and sells them direct in his farm shop.


It's great to see an example of a farm shop working really well. Certainly on the apples he is very competitive on price, somewhere around half the price of the supermarkets. On the soft fruit his prices are around the same or a little bit lower than the supermarkets - obviously the supermarkets can offer special offers but he has the freshest of produce that’s picked at the last minute. So in terms of ripeness, taste and quality Irish fruit rather than imports definitely wins out.

Fruit growing is one of the areas in Ireland where farmers have real problems dealing with the supermarkets. I was talking recently to a farmer who offered to match the price of what one of the convenience stores was selling their fruit from Chile for, but even then this particular supermarket didn’t want to take their locally grown goods. They often don’t see the merits of Irish fruit and want to sell it as cheaply as possible so what you get is fruit from all over the world while Irish strawberries are being sold at the side of the road. Con gets round that by direct selling to most of his customers but does sell some to the supermarkets. He also said to me that if you’re producing a huge amount of one fruit, raspberries for example and the supermarket change the terms of the contract or refuse to take them off your hands you’re really in a vulnerable position so having small amounts of different produce is a safer bet, if you’re solely reliant on a supermarket to take your whole production then you can end up finding things very hard.


He also makes his own juices on the farm starting with apple juice about 15 years ago. A while back he began freezing his excess strawberries and raspberries to make mixed apples and berry juices. And this is fairly technologised stuff done on a large scale, for example he has a juice pressing machine that’s the size of a small car that’s one of the only ones in Europe, so it’s quite specialised stuff. And while you might think that’s enough to be going on with he also has a another alternative enterprise on the farm - a camping and caravan park.

It's amazing to see so many enterprises on the one farm, all of which are pulling in money and working well. There’s no doubt that hard work is one of the key things that goes into his operation, when I was down with him his phone is constantly going, he’s checking in with workers picking the apples and strawberries and really it’s the definition of multitasking. Despite this there is an approach which is working for him in doing small things that don’t require massive investment at the outset.

He warns about farmers growing 500,000 tonnes of something being a lot more vulnerable than someone smaller so it works for him to spread the risk among different enterprises, particularly in dealing with the supermarkets this seems to be an advantage. So while farmers are often told you have to be huge to compete, trying alternative businesses out in small stages seems to also work.

The Countrywide programme featuring this item on Irish apples can be heard at -
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/countrywide/

Cons website is www.theapplefarm.com and he's located outside Cahir on the road to Clonmel, its a super place and a real example of alternative enterprises not only paying their way but being hugely successful.

Irelands only wine, double entendres aside

I went onto RTE radio yesterday (The Mooney Show) to natter about David Llewellyn's Irish wine. I ended up saying "So I met up with David and he took me down to his tunnel to look at his grapes". The production team were hysterical, I wasn't. Apart from that clanger it was a nice item about what is essentially a novelty wine but Dermot O'Neill the gardening expert added to the discussion saying by that many more of us might be producing wine in future years as the climate warms. I'm on for that, it would definitely cut our wine bills.

Wine making in Ireland might seem a little bit far fetched, but various people in the past have produced wine in very small quantities - particularly those in the South and South West of the country who have been growing grapes or buying grapes and making their own wine for their household, a bit like home brewing I suppose, but few of these wines have been commercially available until now.


Climate is key to producing wine but interestingly the grapes themselves have a lot of importance in terms of climate. The development of varieties in Germany and particularly the South of England has led to vines that do well here providing the summer temperatures don’t plummet. It's been 20 years since David Llewellyn planted his first vines after returning from working in the wine business in Germany. He calls our climate “challenging” – a very polite term, and he’s spent a long time experimenting with what might work in this climate and has a couple of different varieties of vines growing on the farm.


Last week I went out to his farm to record the radio piece. Disappointingly the vineyard doesn't look anything like the beautiful stepped terraces of Northern Italy or the huge level hectares of vines that you see in Southern France. Because it’s Ireland, David has his vines in plastic tunnels (don't go there) to protect them from the damp and disease. At this time of year the grapes are a smaller version of a table grape, so about the size of a marble. The grapes are incredibly sweet and melt in your mouth which is the surprising thing, but it's that sweetness which is essential as its fermeted sugars which produce alcohol, therefore no big sweetness, no wine

Between now and the end of September the grapes will ripen then they are brought to a little machine that crushes them and takes the berries from the stalks, the stalks are quite bitter and need to be separated. Then that pulp is taken out, put into a press and pressed through cloth under pressure and then that juice is fermented into wine.

Like the general rules with wine, David bottles the whites sooner - in the spring after their harvest, but the red takes a year to two years to be ready. He sometimes adds sugar to bring up the alcohol level from about 10 to 12%. He produces a Sauvignon Blanc, a Rondo Regent, and a Cabernet Merlot. I've tasted the Cabernet Merlot and it is surprisingly good, a little young if you like, with no huge depth of flavour but it's a light fruity red wine and for people not fond of big heavy Merlot flavours this might be a nice alternative.

If climate does warm in future years we could see some farmers entering the wine business but really it's hard work to do it in Ireland and you need good knowledge of viticulture and be passionate about wine. But there’s no reason why anyone couldn't start a few vines and produce your own wine for drinking at home, and it could save you a bit of cash. Lusca wines are expensive – 38 euro a bottle, though he does half bottles as well. If you're looking for wine at more value you will certainly find it but the idea of growing your own wine is hugely appealing - a bit like owning a chateau. But a few vines in tubs on the terrace? I think I'll try it, if all else fails they'll still look pretty.

The programme can be heard at -
http://www.rte.ie/radio/mooneygoeswild/archive/index.html