EXTREME CUISINE: Has modern food culture in the English-speaking world become irreparably distorted? asks Haydn Shaughnessy.
When those of us who downsized our ambitions a long time ago hear that stressed out city-types are seeking a simpler life, or that high achievers are searching for meaning, we have to put aside the smugness, remind ourselves we struggle to make ends meet, and that, like burned leeks stuffed into a soggy tomato, we live with a different set of compromises.
Still we remain reluctant to acknowledge the search for a balanced life is by definition elusive.
Balance is a constant battle or - to phrase it in a less aggressively western idiom - it is a combination of search and inquisition that sends life endlessly out of kilter.
All very philosophical. But in our search for truth we only rarely own up on the core issue - did we realise back then just how much broccoli we had to eat to be healthy?
Certainly not. Attuned as we are to a sweet diet, the green vegetable world is our tormentor. Nor did we not realise that our contemporaries would go off and invent a new genre: Cooking as Art. Visionaries, we failed to see that imprisoning a dried chilli in an olive oil bottle would be rewarded with admiration.
All these things hurt.
Leaving the sandals behind for a day, I travelled recently to the launch of John and Sally McKenna's Irish Food Guide, hosted by the Avoca Café in Dublin.
For those who were there, one thing transcends all other issues. The chef on the evening became seriously ill shortly afterwards and died not long after of an illness totally unrelated to food and nutrition.
In the shadow of that tragedy, let's acknowledge that John and Sally have given focus to the Irish speciality food trade and to those in the hospitality industry who have a singular vision of what they want our food culture to be. Understanding why chefs and food producers are so dedicated and giving them a national voice has played as big a role as anything in making Ireland a home for unique food.
So what about health matters and the relationship between dedicated food producers, retailers, visionary chefs and the human body?
The great cuisines of the world are supremely conscious of imbalance's traps.
To the French "le trop est l'enemie du bien" (too much is the enemy of well being). The Chinese and Indians see life the same way - that moderation and balance are integral concepts. They are deeply persuasive to each other. No philosophy simply says "don't be a glutton". Even under-eating, we can get too much of a good thing and dangerously skew our metabolism.
And this is where modern food culture in the English-speaking world seems to have become irreparably distorted.
At the launch, John talked about his 20-year mission to transform Irish eating habits and this is year 15. The food that evening was exceptionally stylish and the wine was yet another of those dominating fruits that grab the drinker's attention on the nose and then in the mouth. Neither struck me as healthy.
The food looked great but a sweet taste predominated; the wine followed too closely the modern fashion for robustness and illusory aromas signifying what they are not - damson, blackcurrant, raspberry and apple.
Wine is made of grapes and I personally long for a return to the days when winemakers respected this instead of manipulating wines to taste like every other fruit under the sun.
A few days after the launch, in a café upstairs from Field's supermarket in Skibbereen, Co Cork, John - who had been too busy in Dublin - addressed these issues with refreshing candour.
What gets a producer, retailer or chef into the Irish Food Guide? Originally for agricultural producers, "organic" was the key criterion. But for producers and chefs, it is "a signature. Somebody who says: this is my way. Somebody who invests food with moral value." Applied to food producers, fair enough but, when it comes to restaurants, would John concede that very few provide real balance? Surprisingly, the doyen of food improvement agrees.
He puts the failing down to the continued influence of food as bourgeois indulgence and acknowledges that few restaurateurs think in holistic terms. "The problem is," he says, "we have lost the concept of body and food as in 'the best food makes me the best person'."
But John is as much a man on a mission as any of the producers in the guide. For now the quality of food (biodynamic, organic and local), rather than the balance of food on any one menu, is the main preoccupation.
In response to my contentions that even the most willing among us eat too few green vegetables and are in the habit of treating herbs as a nice smell rather than an intense source of nutrition, not to mention that chefs get away with treating these vital foods as decoration and are responsible for many of our failings because of the lead they give, while wine took a wrong turn a decade back, well John agrees with much of that too!
So, are the restaurants in the guide out of loyalty?
No. These are people who stand by a vision, and have this decisive streak of individualism that allows them to stand in the stream and brace themselves against the flow. This seems to me entirely pragmatic but for those of us who downsized our ambitions many years ago, we hope we are at the beginning of a lengthy debate rather than five years from its end.
The Bridgestone Irish Food Guide sells at €15 in bookshops - it is also available from: www.bestofbridgestone.com