Let them eat caviar

Yes we're in a recession, so how about some caviar? Last week Mag Kirwan from Goatsbridge farm launched her new baby on the marketplace; a trout caviar. Having had a sneak taste at her farm a few weeks ago, I have to admit it's pretty damn good. A lot of people blanche at the thought of fish eggs rolling around their mouth, but generally if you like seafood or shellfish, it's just more of the above, only better.

Mag and her husband Ger farm trout in Thomastown in County Kilkenny. After selling trout roe to Polish and Eastern European customers, they figured trout eggs were an obvious but unexploited business opportunity. So they developed a caviar, with eggs harvested from their live two-year old mature female trout. These are really lovely fish. They dive about in their freshwater ponds looking the picture of health, and more importantly, they taste fantastic.

No surprise that the caviar is also pretty good - I ate it on a water cracker with no accompaniment. It has a subtle rather than strong fishy flavour, with a light saltiness and whisper of the sea.

Regular caviar comes from the sturgeon which is a fish that lives in various parts of the world but caviar by and large is harvested from black sea sturgeon. It's so expensive because sturgeons take decades to mature and are relatively scarce. Caviar from other fish have to have the prefix "trout" etc to distinguish it from it's crazy expensive cousin (the big lad pictured below).

If you fancy tasting Mag's trout caviar you'll soon see it on high end restaurant menus across Ireland and in speciality food stores. It's a great product and judging by the early feedback it's sure to be a huge success. If you're interested in hearing more on trout, my report on Goatsbridge farm (before the trout launch) and women in rural food businesses can be heard at the link below. http://www.rte.ie/radio1/countrywide/18022012.html

Back to the future; our fabulous female food producers

Basketcase has been on a break the last few weeks while I tackled a large amount of pesky print deadlines. But it means I've a couple of strong (and some very entertaining) food stories coming up and an exciting few projects emerging in the next few months. Tomorrow I'm back on the road in my touring office - (otherwise known as the landrover held together with string) to interview a great rural food producer who is also a woman - Mag Kirwan - pictured left. Just in case there's any confusion, Pat Whelan is the butcher bloke and I'm the one in the middle.

As the Irish food and agriculture sector gets stronger each year and provides more of our exports and GDP, I'm noticing many more rural women involved in producing food, whether it be artisan products or in larger food manufacturing. Over the next few weeks I hope to bring some of their stories on air on RTE radio. One of the reasons I want to feature rural women is that they are huge drivers of growth, both economic and in a wider sense, in rural Ireland. Over many years I've spent reporting on farming and rural issues I found it was often women who were at the centre of rural development projects. In LEADER initiatives such as Ballyhoura in Limerick,

IRD Dullhallow in Cork and around the country, they were plugging away on the ground getting community schemes together, with many of them in the area of food.

It's not hard to see why women and food are a natural pairing in Ireland. While farming was traditionally considered "men's work", Irish women ran mini-enterprises from their kitchens. Selling poultry and eggs provided them with a household income that they could control. On mart days when the family livestock were sold, the profits could end up over the counter of the town pub and if they came home they were reinvested back into the

farm or spent on essentials such as animal fodder for winter or a pig to fatten. Poultry was a way for rural women to accrue money for children's clothes, school books or other needs often

seen as non-essential from a traditional farming point of view.

As in developing countries today, women and small businesses are drivers of upwards mobility. By selling crafts, saving money and forming co-ops they can completely change the future of their children through small measures. Rural women such as my grandmothers were enterprising and resourceful. Both managed dairy herds and a steady supply of eggs with my nana Campbell investing in goats to sell goats milk (very unusual in the 1960's) to local people.

My nana McGauran knitted aran jumpers for extra income. As I child I spent many evenings on the floor of her Fermanagh farmhouse holding yarn spread between my two small arms as she gathered the ream into a single huge ball to knit from. I remember the ticking of the loud slow clock and the open turf fire with its gigantic cast iron pots. My grandmothers also kept poultry flocks, turkeys and seasonally had food solutions to fit whatever produce was available. Always the focus was on saving, economising and getting the best out of what they could get trade, sell or grow. It's ironic in a sense, that while we're going through difficult times in Ireland, these women from our past learned that food can make you money; and it's a tradition we're still playing out today.

I was talking to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland during the week who confirmed that huge numbers of queries are still coming into the organisation from people wanting to start new food businesses. Many are from women who are skilled cooks and have a resource to sell. It never fails to amaze me the passion and will to succeed that food producers have to keep doing what they do. To start businesses in difficult times and in an environment that is heavily regulated as Ireland is no mean feat. But there's new food businesses popping up all the time, and much goodwill and positivity in the sector.

If you want to support rural businesses and small producers there's plenty of fabulous food to choose from. Typically when I visit these women and listen to their inspirational stories I am sent home with a bundle of their produce on the passenger

seat of the jeep - delicious cheese, pork, lamb, milk, chocolate... And guess what? I still buy their food, months or even years afterwards. In fact it's not a stretch to say that on any given week a large amount of what we eat at home is produced by the women below, with some of it (Ann Rudden's chocolate, Ballymaloe relish) making an appearance every single day. This isn't an exhaustive list of Ireland's female food producers, but its a picture of those that I've shared a cup of tea with, or buy from regularly as I really believe in their food. I promise to compile a more thorough version when I get a chance as its a great resource for both for Irish business women and foodies. But for the moment, check them out, buy some of their food and you may create a habit, and some friendships of a lifetime x

Birgitta Curtin from Burren Smokehouse, Bernadine Mulhall Coolanowle organic farm, Eileen Dunne Crescenzi, Ann Rudden from Aine Chocolates, Saoirse Roberts Connemara Smokehouse, Debbie Johnston at Sweetbank Farm, Mag Kirwan Goatsbridge Trout, Mary Kelly Moonshine Cheese, Giana Ferguson Gubbeen Cheese, Margaret Farrell of Oldfarm pork, Sarah Furno at Cashel Blue cheese, Avril Allshire-Howe Roscarberry Recipes, Eileen Bergin The Butlers Pantry, Maxine at Ballymaloe Relish, Emma at Glenisk (we couldn't survive without the Cleary family's milk, yoghurt and cream) Nicole Dunphy at Pandora Bell, Bernie Burke of Burke's ice cream, Kate Carmody Beal Organic cheese, Darina and Myrtle Allen, Amy Caviston of Caviston's fishmongers, Janet Drew from Janet's Country Fayre, Lorraine Fanneran restaurateur and Italian Foodie Sauces, Caroline Hennessey from 8 Degrees Brewing, Jen and Claire from the Dungarvan Brewing company, the amazing Margaret Jeffares from Good Food Ireland, Sharon Ni Chonchuir Dingle food seller, Hannah from Waterfall Farm, Santina Kennedy from Kennedy's Enniskerry, Glenillen Farm, and finally The Dominican nuns at An Tairseagh organic food market, Wicklow.

Happy Eating x

And I thought salmon was naturally that colour

Smart Consumer: The unpalatable truth about the salmon on your plate
By Suzanne Campbell
Thursday September 23 2010



Close your eyes and picture a salmon. Odds are that you think of a gleaming muscular fish leaping up a river in full flood. It's this image which informs our decision making at the fish counter.



We also think of salmon as a healthy food -- rich in omega-3 fish oils and a tasty source of low-fat protein. But a new book by American food writer Paul Greenberg probes into the image of salmon, revealing some uncomfortable truths about Ireland's favourite fish.
More than 99% of the salmon sitting on Irish supermarket counters and in delicatessens is farmed.



Some of it is Irish fish but most of what we eat originates in Scotland or Norway.
Wild salmon is scarce around the world and with the ban on drift netting in Ireland, it's now out of reach for most of us and will only appear on the menus of very good restaurants or in small quantities at specialised fishmongers.



The fact that we are eating almost exclusively farmed salmon doesn't seem to affect our appetites for it. What Greenberg points out is that while salmon has obvious health benefits, questions have to be asked about what eating farmed salmon does to the availability of other fish. The book also shows how our demand for cod, tuna and sea bass led to their shrinking availability.



But for Irish consumers who return to the fish counter again and again for salmon, what does he say about how healthy a choice it really is? Salmon from fish farms are artificially spawned, reared in pens with thousands of other fish all swimming tightly together in circles and fed a diet that contains colorants to make its flesh pink. There's little natural about a farmed salmon except that it's still living in water.



Even less appetising is that farmed salmon are fed pellets made from ground-up wild fish, mixed with soya and cereals -- not quite its natural diet. The pellets also contain a pigment to colour the salmon's flesh; the tone depends on the country the fish is destined for. So you'll find farmed salmon in South America very red in colour, whereas we in Ireland prefer it a soft pink.
Critics of farmed salmon find this 'Dulux colour card' approach enough reason to boycott it, but the fish farming sector claims that the colourant is nothing more than a natural carotenoid pigment named astaxanthin; exactly the same molecule that wild salmon get from eating small shellfish.



Astaxanthin is now made in a laboratory rather than by shellfish, so what are we worried about? Aren't many of the foods that we eat artificially coloured? Or is it just that colouring the flesh of live animals crosses some kind of line?



Of more impact is the colossal amount of other fish species that go into creating the fish pellets farmed salmon eat. Greenberg points out that it takes up to six pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of salmon and that part of the problem with the world's diminishing fish stocks is this hoovering up of other species to feed our insatiable appetite for pink fish.



The farmed salmon currently on our fish counters has also been genetically selected to have a quicker growth rate. Since the Norwegians pioneered farming salmon on a mass scale they've engineered a fish that has double the growth rate of wild salmon. This super salmon matures faster and dominates salmon production across the world, so much so that three billion pounds of farmed salmon are produced globally; three times the amount of wild fish harvested.
While this may be hailed as a breakthrough by fish breeders, this immense salmon production has been at the cost of the nine billion pounds of wild fish that have been caught and ground into pellets to feed them.



Greenberg points out that as humans have been farming salmon since the 15th Century you'd think we'd have got it right by now, but sadly mistakes have been made.
Blood meal from chickens was routinely fed to salmon to provide micro nutrients and only banned after BSE came to light. Fish were also crammed into cages that were too small and sea lice proliferated, affecting other species.



In Ireland, Scotland and Norway, studies found that the presence of salmon farms increased the level of sea lice infestation on sea trout. It also badly affected Irish wild salmon.
But most detrimental to the image of farmed salmon was the extent to which they were found to contain PCBs -- polychlorinated biphenyls, which came to light in a report published in 2004.
PCBs are toxins which have found their way into fish from run-off into rivers of waste from manufacturing plants. They accumulate progressively over time meaning that those at the top of the food chain -- humans -- are exposed to the highest levels.



In the research published in the journal Science, farmed salmon was found to contain higher concentrations of PCBs than its wild counterpart. PCBs were subsequently banned, but not before confidence in farmed salmon had taken a hit. Many Irish fishermen still claim that the waste from salmon cages is not sufficiently washed out to sea and affects the local environment as waste pellets and faeces fall through the nets onto the seabed underneath. The Irish fish farming sector claims it's one of the cleanest in Europe as it is located in strong Atlantic seas which quickly get rid of the waste.



How to spot the best fish over the counter -

Salmon farming will continue to grow all over the world, despite its detractors. If you want to still eat fish with strong health benefits that doesn't wipe out our future choices of seafood, here are some alternatives.

For fish rich in Omega-3 oils, buy anchovies, sardines and mackerel. Mackerel and herring have healthy populations in Irish seas and have plenty of flavour; even when grilled and served with a simple salad.

Ling, blossom and coley are cheap substitutes for cod. They are so close in flavour, texture and appearance to cod that they have been found to be labelled and sold as their more expensive cousin.

If you really want salmon, ask for salmon that's farmed in Ireland at the fish counter of your supermarket or delicatessen. 75% of salmon produced in Ireland is organically certified, so not only is the cereal feed organic, the fish component of the pellets is of a low percentage and comes from monitored fish stocks. The stocking density in organic salmon cages is also less dense.

Buy fish in M&S -- they have been rated the leading retailer for responsible fishing by Greenpeace and only stock tuna caught by the pole and line system which is more sustainable.

Look out for the Bord Bia Seafood Circle mark at the supermarket fish counter or at the fish mongers. These fish sellers are the most educated in terms of the quality and source of the fish that they stock, and can give you the best information about what's fresh, in season and how to cook it.

Suzanne Campbell for The Irish Independent



Four Fish by Paul Greenberg is published by Penguin. Suzanne Campbell's food blog is at www.basketcasetheblog.blogspot.com