As people make the move from the supermarket to the local market, Haydn Shaughnessy asks is locally produced food really better
The Renaissance man or woman will dig his own garden. Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg, the man referred to in alternative health circles as the greatest chemist of the 20th century, was keen also with the spade.
In between experiments and authoring breakthrough science, Warburg grew organic vegetables, holding firmly to the belief that local meant the back garden.
The great man's advice is not lost on our house where we have become avid, almost obsessive, gardeners since my wife, Roos, became ill. The result is an abundance of turnips and beetroot. Anyone want turnips and beetroot?
What surprises me most about gardening is the pleasure that comes from repetition. I must have turned over 1,000 spades of soil and pulled at least as many weeds, yet the compulsion to go out there to do more remains an irresistible force.
Surely that says something about our inner nature. Now, though, I'm turning to the local markets once again for food.
During the summer months I broke my supermarket habit. No longer chasing off to do the Tesco weekly, we've become more measured in what we eat and we've turned to the farmers' markets and the delis that stock locally produced food.
Is it so evidently better than what's in the supermarkets? Or, in what sense is it better than what is in the supermarket?
Sitting in the cafe at Cork's Crawford Gallery talking to Caroline Workman about her recent book, Good Food in Cork, seemed like a good place to get a handle on what's happening in the local food world.
Workman works with Les Routiers, the French association of quality places to eat, and runs her own food consultancy here in Ireland.
Good Food in Cork is a catalogue of the local artisan food production scene in a part of Ireland that could reasonably be credited with pioneering local artisan foods as a part of the regional character (or brand).
Workman says there are now guides to good local produce in other areas of the country. She let me have three of them. Savour Tipperary, produced by Tipperary Leader Group, an EU-funded local development agency, Savour Kilkenny/Carlow, produced by BNS Rural Development and Carlow Leader, and Offaly Delicious, produced by the Offaly Leader development group.
The momentum behind artisan food production is coming from the public, according to Edmund Connelly, a business adviser at the South Tipperary Enterprise Board. "There's certainly been a proliferation of artisan foods and farmers' markets and there are more people setting up as artisan producers in response to the development of farmers' markets," he says. He reckons that they've become the lifeblood for the producer.
Gabrielle Carroll at Kilkenny Leader says: "Local food producers here in the Kilkenny and South East Tipperary Region play an increasingly important role in the area of tourism. In particular, by being served in local restaurants they underline the local brand. The opportunity for tourists to mix with local producers at the markets is a serious plus."
Workman draws a distinction between different groups of food producers that we tend habitually to lump together. There are the new food producers, artisans creating new food lines such as chocolate and patisserie; and producers who have taken on old traditions like fish smoking, but which are relatively new companies.
And then there are the really traditional food producers, companies that have been a part of the local Irish scene for generations and which typically have a long association with the land. A case in point is Dan Moloney's butchers in Bandon, which is one arm of the Moloney family's farm. There's also the Breslins and O'Flynns in Cork city.
Ironically, this latter group (of food producers) is, Workman believes, under threat. For example, small butchers who have their own abattoirs or use a local abattoir and can therefore make their own fresh blood sausage, are under threat from health and safety regulations and from the changing economics of their business.
"It's the older food producers who interest me most," she says, and lists a number of bakers in the Cork area, whose businesses go back over generations and whose products are exceptional because of the lifelong experience of the owners.
The existence of this group should give us pause for thought when we talk about local food. Are we in any danger of becoming cheerleaders for the whole artisan sector when we should be more discriminating?
On my own first visit to a farmers' market I had the unusual sensation of feeling slightly foxed. Was there more than one farmer there? I doubt it.
But to query the current trend towards the artisan is almost irrelevant in the mad rush to put up stalls. And the four books I've mentioned are really about celebrating the rebirth of tradition.
Nonetheless, I put to Workman the kind of question she must have been dreading. Are they all good? There was a notable pause before we agreed a little laughter was in order.
The books I have in front of me are regrettably slight. Workman's Cork book is by far the most comprehensive but the other three hold a lot of promise.
They owe their origins in part to the growing commercial opportunity that our appetites present, but also to the same impulse that has me striding into my garden most days of the week, or sees me boasting about my worms to bemused neighbours. It's about cultivating a new way of life. Not a bad place to be in these money-focused times.