In: Organics
The sheer speed at which organically grown foods have entered both the mainstream marketplace - and also our day-to-day vocabulary of food - has been astonishing. Expect further ranges and varieties in the coming year, as more farmers convert to organic growing and as the government belatedly realises that green is the way to go and offers more subsidies to the organic community.
In: World Food
Some people just don't get fusion cooking. They think it's a lazy, undisciplined style which produces a culinary mishmash and features too many chillies. But good fusion cooking, by which I mean the smart assimilation and blending of contemporary culinary ideas from other food cultures into dishes we think of as native, demands intense consideration and execution to make it work. That's why gifted chefs, such as Peter Gordon, John Torode, Jean Georges Vongrichten, plus our own Paul Rankin and Conrad Gallagher, are attracted to it.
Fusion will be the big force in restaurant cooking in the next few years, partly because, when properly done, this food is a joy to eat: light, refreshing, intriguing, offering a kaleidoscope of tastes with each course.
In: Cheek
When smart chefs such as Paul Flynn of Dungarvan's Tannery restaurant, and super-trendy chefs like Thomas Keller of the Napa Valley's glamorous French Laundry restaurant suddenly start offering recipes for ox cheek, then you know that it will be to the next five years what the lamb shank has been to the past five years and the chicken wing to the five years before that. Ox cheek - as you can see below - is a truly fine cut, and when I last bought a pair of cheeks from my butcher, they produced three meals, an unctuous stock, and they cost £1.76p.
In: Bespoke Stores
The major supermarket chains have dived happily into the organic landslide, but there are also other signs that they are realising that they have to offer more bespoke services if they are to hold onto an increasingly sophisticated audience. Leading branches of Superquinn are now selling properly matured Irish farmhouse cheeses, and admit that previously they had simply thought of these delicate-as-little-flowers foods as just another commodity. In some Tesco stores you can buy superb sushi. My local SuperValu sells a huge number of the wonderful Bunalun 160 Organic foods. If we want it, they will simply have to get it.
Out: GMOs
The battle fought over the past year between proponents and opponents of genetically modified foods has been one of the most exhilarating intellectual contests for many years. The goliath of GMOs, with all its mighty corporate muscle, was felled by that most potent weapon - the shopping trolley. Cock-a-hoop scientists, who thought they would hoodwink and bulldoze public opinion in Europe as they had in the United States, have been left bruised and confused by the torrent of opposition to their concoctions, their share prices dropping as inexorably as their sales of GMO crops.
And while pressure groups played a major part in alerting the public to what was going on, what has truly sounded the death knell for GMOs has been the practical concern by the folk wheeling their trolley around the supermarket, and declaring that if a product is labelled as containing GMOs, then they simply won't buy it, thanks very much all the same.
GMOs are the culinary equivalent of nuclear power: only a fool would touch them.
Out: Swank
For most of this century, the ethos which has defined what serious cooking and eating has been about might be called the Michelin ethos. In other words, that French guide only accorded a restaurant high status if its food and service were classical, and followed a very formal French antecedent. Basically, you needed swag curtains.
In modern Ireland, this is now bunk, and what we want from our restaurants are accessibility, affordability and affability, not to mention cracking cooking.
The trend towards more informal spaces which we can visit regularly is already in full swing: Michael Clifford is cooking in two delightfully simple rooms above a pub in Cahir; Armel Whyte has opened the lovely Allo's Bistro in Listowel; Derry Clarke has expanded and simplified L'Ecrivain; Paul Rankin's Cayenne and Nick Price's Anix in Belfast are blazing a trail for cracking food in funky rooms. And not a swag in sight.
Out: Cruelty
The march of organics will go hand in hand with concern over animal welfare in the new decade. Having finally realised that we have allowed producers to poison us with chemicals for years, we will now also reflect on the fact that stressed out animals are simply not good to eat.
Our EU Commissioner, David Byrne, could make his life easy and rewarding were he to jump on the welfare bandwagon straight away, and make it his rallying call for genuine food safety.
Animal welfare means according status and dignity to any animal in the food chain, starting with the humble chicken and the noble pig.