Slow Food Ireland

I first heard of Slow Food when I was a chef in the kitchens of Ballymaloe House in East Cork, Ireland. There was a local event happening, but I thought it was a member's club that was for an elitist group that I wasn’t part of. Years later I met a lady called Giana Ferguson of Gubbeen Farmhouse in West Cork and she asked me to be involved in the West Cork Convivium (group). Through her eyes I began to see the bigger picture of what Slow Food meant. It was not an elitist group that sat around philosophying about wine and cheese, rather it is a movement that is trying to reconnect the consumer (us) with where our food is coming from.

Our lives are becoming so fast that we are disconnecting ourselves from the realness of food; the basic need to connect with other people; the pleasure of sitting around the table with our families to share a meal and not sharing a pizza in front of the television.

Everyone has their own take on what Slow Food means to them. For me, it is simply using my local butcher, farmers market, fishmonger and allow myself the time to prepare and eat the food with people I care about. Everyone deserves this pleasure --  it is not an elitist thing, it is what my grandmother did and her mother did not because they were rich materially but because it brought them a richness in life that no money could buy.

I was determined that I would try and make every other person in Ireland see Slow Food as the way forward in holding on to our food culture and also become involved in building a new one. As a result, in 2003 I started an annual event which would be The Slow Food Ireland Weekend – which would hold workshops, dinners, a market and trip to producers.  Additionally, we stared a guide to producers and markets to help reconnect the consumer with the producer. I went to a Slow Food meeting at the Borough market in London and met the fantasticly dymanic Renato Sardo, who was head of the International office and my Slow Food world changed forever. All of a sudden I saw the BIG PICTURE. He was, for me, the connection to all of what Slow Food was internationally, giving support and guidance on how Slow Food Ireland could grow. We then started an Irish newsletter that is edited and printed in Italy.

The first International event that I attended was in 2002 – Salone Del Gusto. The Salone is the biggest indoor market that you will attend in your life, with producers selling and giving samples of their food from all over the world. Here, I was asked to bake Irish Soda Bread for the Irish Wild Smoked Salmon stall and so I brought with me 50 pints of butter milk in a bag on the plane – you should have seen the face of the security guards when I tried explaining that I couldn’t replicate the taste of Irish butter milk with any in Italy. So every morning my very willing friend that I roped in to help, Thomasina Miers and I would get to the Salone at 6am and stared baking, its was exhausting but the thrill of baking traditional Irish soda bread and feeding it to everyone was so incredible! I remember the overwhelmingness of this first trip but what it gave me on my return was that we were all fighting for the same thing, the right to eat good food and not be fooled my huge commercial producers.

I now live in Italy but I come back to Ireland to do cookery demonstrations and talks for Slow Food Ireland. I also look after the recipe page and answer emails from the Slow Food Ireland website.

www.slowfoodireland.com
www.terramadreireland.com
www.slowfood.com