Michelin men: chef says supermarkets 'controlling people's minds'

Chef Kevin Thornton has said Irish consumers need to search for good-quality food, as supermarkets are "controlling people's minds".

Publicising this year's Taste of Dublin festival, alongside fellow Michelin-star chef Ross Lewis of Chapter One, Mr Thornton said there is a tradition of "amazing" home-grown produce in the country, but that "what has happened is that you go to supermarkets and you see they're really destroying a lot of that stuff, they're controlling people's minds." He said people's notion of "expensive" food needed to change. "What do you value?" he asked. "Do you value that if you're paying €1.99 for a chicken then that is a serious problem? The chicken has a serious problem. What did the chicken eat?"

Mr Thornton will be among the chefs who will cook for up to 32,000 people in Dublin's Iveagh Gardens over four days in June. Praising the Irish public's growing interest in food, he said: "We're starting to be a bit more adventurous. The Irish only ate to survive, because of our history."

However, he said the Government is not taking the Irish food industry as seriously as it should.

"You drive from Dublin to Cork and you could count on one hand how many fields are in use. We should be using our resources correctly. The farmers' markets are a bit of a joke because some of them are really good and some of them are really bad."

The chef was recently accused of throwing a group of diners out of his Michelin-star restaurant, Thornton's, for ordering chips and then not eating them. He said he was "flabbergasted" by the reaction to the story.