‘You are what you eat’

There is something I am not quite getting here. Isn’t this Ireland, the emerald isle of green pastures, benign climate and fertile ground; where we pride ourselves on the volume of clean, healthy and nutritious food we produce? Don’t we grow 20 times more food than we can eat ourselves? Hasn’t Ireland been named as the top country for security of food in the world? Won’t Ireland be forever associated with the potato – the humble spud?

Published: Sat 15 Jul 2023, 11:15 AM

Would it therefore not surprise you to learn that Ireland imports more than 70,000 tons of potatoes in a year?

I came across CSO figures for 2017 showing our food imports and to me, it provides serious food for thought. We promote our grass-fed beef and naturally produced dairy products. But how come then that 80 per cent of animal feed is imported? Does this figure not take a bit of the gloss off the green scene?

Some food imports are even harder to figure out. I am no gardener, but even as a kid going to primary school, I used grow lettuce. Is there anything in the world easier to grow than lettuce? 15,000 tons of lettuce takes an awful lot of salad cream to cover, but that’s what we import into this country every year.

Bananas I can understand, because we are not a banana republic and tropical fruits don’t grow here. Most of the bananas imported come from Costa Rica and we eat a staggering 100,000 tons in a year. But onions? Here we have another vegetable I grew from onion sets during my school days… easy peasy. I just cannot believe that we import around 50,000 tons of onions into this country. What’s going on at all? And don’t forget the negative effect that this food transportation is having on the environment.

‘We are what we eat’, they tell us, so why don’t we eat more of what we grow in our own ground? Some of this has to do with how vegetables look on a supermarket shelf. A good old floury Irish spud may have harmless but unsightly scabs on the skin; and all carrots don’t grow straight down like you see in the picture. About 30 per cent of good food is thrown away. But shouldn’t the quality of the food be the first thing a shopper might look for? I had what looked like new potatoes for my dinner today and I don’t know where they were grown. Not so terribly long ago, almost every household had its own little garden. There is nothing more satisfying or better for children if you get them involved.

South Africa is a long way to haul foodstuffs to Ireland – and there is every excuse for importing the stuff we cannot grow – but it should stop there. Worryingly, there is an ever-decreasing number of commercial vegetable growers operating here.

Up until the end of the last century, most inhabitants of the globe had as their daily diet what they sourced locally.

Different people depended on local food to survive and there are some mighty contrasts in food menus, depending on which country you find yourself. It makes a lot of sense for us to return to that modem – and not be so hung up in Ireland with our zucchini and artichoke! Eating seasonal, local food has always been an essential – as well as exciting ingredient for most cultures since the beginning of time. It’s time to take another look at the garden – and maybe even to keeping a few hens.

Like many other rural households, we killed a pig at home when I was a kid. No part of the pig was wasted. Once, when I was about 10 years old, I got the job at one such killing of holding the basin to catch the blood after the pig’s throat was slit. The rest of my work entailed keeping the blood stirred with a wooden spoon until it cooled. That was for my mother to make black pudding. Unfortunately, I got bored and abandoned my post too soon. The blood congealed and there were no black puddings that year.

Some of you reading this may be horrified that I can write in such gory detail of the pig-killing.

Others will be even more fearful that their children might happen to come across this article. But that’s how it was… and I wonder which is better; that the children of today are totally screened from this sort of story; as they engage in killing virtual humans on the computer: or were we all the better for being part of the real life and death reality? Time will tell…