Red meat - the most intense nutrient-rich food available to human beings

A new take on meat - my piece in today's Irish Independent

With celebrities from Paul McCartney to Star Wars actress Natalie Portman telling us to eat less meat, switching our shopping habits towards a vegetarian diet is one of the pieces of advice dominating the food world right now.

The rise in obesity levels combined with the unsustainable nature of beef production means that consumers are now encouraged to limit the quantity of meat they eat and turn instead to buying more vegetables, fish and meat alternatives.

But a new book by Irish butcher Pat Whelan argues that going back to the old-fashioned staples of our traditional diet; eating plenty of beef, pork and lamb is not only a healthy choice but one essential to our wellbeing. Whelan, who is the fifth generation of his family to be involved in meat production, runs a butcher shop in Clonmel, Co Tipperary and his knowledge of meat from farm to fork has earned him a Rick Stein Food Hero award.

In his book "An Irish Butcher Shop", Whelan argues that one of the reasons consumers find it easy to turn away from meat is a lack of knowledge on how to prepare it and an over reliance on inferior quality meat sold in plastic packaging in supermarkets.
He points out that beef should not be sitting in a pool of its own blood in a plastic box, and that everything about the mass production of meat and the way it's marketed to consumers is contrary to the core benefits and joys of eating it.

He argues that instead of turning away from meat, we should be appreciating its unique benefits -- red meat is the single most intense nutrient-rich food available to human beings. It's a crucial source of iron and trace elements such as zinc and copper, as well as vitamins B12 and B6.
Fat on meat is also something we shouldn't be afraid of -- it is fundamental to the taste and tenderness of the finished product.

Irish beef that is fed on pasture develops a good covering of fat which gives it great flavour. Because it's grass-fed, this makes the meat a high quality, close to organic product. Meat from grass-fed animals has up to four times more omega-3 fatty acids than meat from grain fed animals. It is also the richest known source of CLA or "conjugated linoleic acid"; an exceptional omega-6 fat which has been attributed with antioxidant and anti-cancer properties.
Most of the current opposition to beef consumption is related to cattle "feed lots" -- vast industrial-scale feeding units found typically in the US but now growing in popularity in India and China. Here animals live on a regime rich in maize and cereals which is not their natural diet.
As the appetite for beef grows across the world, we have to produce more cereals (wheat, barley and so on) to make the animal feed that cattle eat.

In many developing countries, feeding cattle (or chicken and pork in large quantities) takes other foods and water resources out of the food chain. Put simply, if everyone across the world adapted to the 'Western Diet', we'd run out of many foodstuffs, and water.

Farm animals also produce more than 10% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions but new approaches to the anti-meat argument such as Simon Fairlie's book -- Meat: A Benign Extravagance has swayed even the hardened environmentalists such as best-selling author George Monbiot back towards eating meat. Fairlie argues that it's specifically feed-lot production of cattle that reduces the world's food supply and that what we should be doing is eating meat but simply less of it.

In Ireland the situation is very different; cattle and sheep roam outdoors and eat grass which is in plentiful supply, so the beef and lamb we eat takes a minimum of inputs and is fairly sustainable.

However, most pigs and poultry in Ireland are farmed in intensive indoor units where the quality of the animals' lives is poor and again they are eating a cereal based diet.
Ireland comes closest to factory farming in these pig and chicken "units"; vast indoor sheds packed densely with animals.

The intensive production of chicken and pork over decades has also affected what we're getting on our plate -- pigs are slaughtered at about seven months old, and unfortunately quality and flavour of modern pork has been affected by the breeding of faster maturing pigs. So the consumer pays the price with an inferior-tasting product.

The bacon and rashers most of us eat have been injected with brine, and can often contain more water than meat content. So while we think mass-produced cheap rashers are good value, if they end up a third of their original size after cooking then it's a bad deal.

You might get better value from an artisan-produced pork that's more expensive raw but yields more meat when cooked. One way to keep both sides happy is to continue to eat meat but put more thought into what we buy.

Pat's book is full of recipes for everything from 'pot-roasted shoulder of lamb' to 'boozy rabbit with prunes'.

His advice is to vary what you buy from the old staples of sirloin, fillet, lamb cutlets, pork chops and rashers. Try new cuts and free-range or artisan products occasionally. The pay-off is in quality, taste and ultimately better value for money.

An Irish Butcher Shop by Pat Whelan, published by Collins Press. Suzanne Campbell's food blog is at www.basketcase theblog.blogspot.com
- Suzanne Campbell
Irish Independent

The worlds first Twitter cookbook

For those of us who sometimes like our food in a hurry, Twitter is one way to share recipes for the tactfully short-handed and poetically brief.

And yes, it is possible to describe a recipe in 140 characters. American amateur cook, Maureen Evans has got pretty good at it - so good, in fact, that she developed the first ever Twitter cookbook.

Released last month, Eat Tweet (Artisan US) compiles more than 1,000 tweeted recipes from Evans' @cookbook account, which she still updates with new creations, like Whisky Apples, Roasted Tomato Sauce or Eggs Berlin: shallots, thyme, lemon, pumpkin and poached eggs. (This sounds really nice actually, I may be making it myself.)

Here's an example of how she works - "3c shallot/⅓c olvoil h@low; +6c zuke 20m@low to tender; +¼t thyme/lem&garlc/s+p. Top 4pce pumpernickel tst; +4poachedegg/basil." For those who might be wary of translating what she calls Twitterese, Evans has posted eighteen decoded recipes on her Huffington Post blog, including Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon.

Thankfully the book also contains a dictionary of terms like tst (toasted), and I have to say this is really needed for people who are mentally challenged and still can't figure out what "c" stands for above. Evan wrote on The Huffington Post site, "The abbreviated form might be a little intimidating at first, but with the aid of the glossary, it will soon become like a second language for you."

Once you start looking at her twitter account (@cookbook) it gets kind of addictive and there's loads of stuff there which sounds mouthwatering, impossible as that sounds in 140 characters with no pictures. I guess some technologies have made our imaginations work harder - I'm not saying twitter-length recipes will take over the world but as a means to impart cooking information quickly or to share recipes there can't be a better tool, all we have to do is learn a little more of Twitterese.

Doh! just realised that "c" is cup. Nobel prize for deciphering abbreviated English landing in my postbox any moment. For food news, recipes, links and an attempt at occasional humour I'm also on twitter - @campbellsuz

Is being a foodie just another kind of elitism?

I rarely publish other material here but this piece from American farmer and local food campaigner Joel Salatin was just too good not to draw attention to. He asks the question - if you're interested in good food, how should you reply when you're labelled an elitist?

His responds to the "elitist" charge with an analysis of why good food is more expensive than commercial, subsidy-aided manufactured produce. His arguments are arresting, and form what's basically a synopsis of the pressures many Irish food producers and farmers are under continually to compete with the food giants of America and Europe.

Joel writes from an American perspective where things are pretty bad for small farmers, it makes me think again how impossible it is to survive in America if you're not one of the food conglomerates, and makes it all the more remarkable that anyone even tries. People like this make us here in Ireland look very lucky indeed. See what you think and let me know your views.

The full piece can be found at http://flavormagazinevirginia.com/foodie-elitism/ here's a synopsis -

Rebel with a cause- food elitism?

Because high-quality local food often carries a higher price tag than food generated by the industrial system, the charge of elitism coming from fans of industrial food is often vitriolic, and embarrassed foodies agonise over it. For all their positive energy surrounding food, I’ve found latent guilt among this group — guilt for paying more for local food when others are starving, guilt for caring about taste when others would happily eat anything. Instead of cowering in self-guilt, let’s confront the issue of prices head on.

Why It’s Worth It

First, it’s better food. It tastes better. It handles better. And it’s safer: Anyone buying chemicalized, drug-infused food is engaging in risky behavior. It’s also nutritionally superior. For those willing to see, scientific data shows fresh foods’ conjugated linoleic acid, vitamins, minerals, brix readings, omega 3–omega 6 ratios, and polyunsaturated fat profiles are empirically superior. Better stuff is worth more.

Second, economies of scale will continue to progress as more people buy local food, which will bring prices down. The collaborative aggregation and distribution networks that have been fine-tuned by mega-food companies can and will be duplicated locally as volume increases and regional food systems get more creative.

Third, eating unprocessed foods is the best way to bring down your grocery bill, regardless of where the food originated. A 10-pound bag of potatoes costs the same as a 1-pound bag of potato chips. Cultivating domestic culinary arts and actually reinhabiting our kitchens—which we’ve remodeled and gadgetised at great cost—can wean all of us away from expensive processed food. A whole pound of our farm’s grass-finished ground beef, which can feed four adults, costs about the same as a Happy Meal. (And guess which one is more healthy?)

Fourth, non-scalable government regulations—which are designed to protect eaters from the dangers inherent in the industrial food complex but are not relevant in a transparent, regional food system—inordinately discriminate against smaller processing businesses like abattoirs, kitchens, and canneries, because the costs of complying with the (inappropriate) paperwork and infrastructure requirements cannot be spread out over a large volume of product. These regulations lead to price prejudice at the community-based scale: Small processors are at a disadvantage because they must pass those costs on to consumers, making their products more expensive than the mass-produced ones. These burdensome regulations also discourage entrepreneurs from entering local food commerce.

Fifth, unlike huge, single-crop or single-animal farms, diversified farms like ours do not receive government subsidies. Nor do the production, processing, and marketing of our food create collateral damage like that caused by factory farming—damage left for taxpayers to fix. Subsidies and government clean-up measures are not included in the price you pay for processed food at the grocery store, but if they were, local food would not seem so expensive in comparison.

Consider the Rhode Island–sized area in the Gulf of Mexico now known as a “dead zone” because nothing can survive in the oxygen-starved water, a result of manure and pesticide runoff. Who pays for the clean up and the reversal efforts? Who pays to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria like MRSA, caused by the overuse of antibiotics in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)? Who pays to treat people with Type II diabetes, which they get from consuming processed food that is sold cheaply because the corporations making it have received subsidies? Who pays to clean up stinky rural neighborhoods with densely populated poultry and livestock compounds? And what is the value of the land irreversibly damaged by bad farming practices?

Sixth—and this is where I wanted to head with this discussion—plenty of money already exists in our economic system to pay for good food. Can you think of anything people buy that they don’t need? Tobacco products, $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees, KFC, soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup, Disney vacations, large-screen TVs, jarred baby food? America spends more on veterinary care for pets than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.

I won’t labour the point, but if you took all the money people spend on unnecessary baubles and junk food, it would be enough for everyone to eat like kings. We could all be elitists.
With that money, we could create a world where all the people eat food that is above average. Almost everyone I know who owns a community supported agriculture (CSA) share could afford to purchase an extra one for an impoverished family. And if you had to give up a few $4 lattes to do it? What a pity.

Spare Change?

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think we need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves. Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine. Most people are more connected to the celebrities in People than the food that will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at the next meal.

The other day I saw precooked bacon in a box at the supermarket—for $30 a pound. Do we really have to buy precooked bacon? If you took the average shopping cart in the checkout line and tossed out all the processed food—everything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce, everything you can’t re-create in your kitchen, and everything that won’t rot—and substituted instead locally sourced, fresh items, you would be dollars ahead and immensely healthier.
We can all do better. If we can find money for movies, ski trips, and recreational cruises, surely we can find the money to purchase integrity food. The fact is that most of us scrounge together enough pennies to fund the passion of our hearts. If we would cultivate a passion for food like the one we’ve cultivated for clothes, cars, and entertainment, perhaps we would ultimately live healthier, happier lives.

Embracing Elitism
To suggest that advocating for such a change makes me an elitist is to disparage positive decision making and behaviour. Indeed, if that’s elitism, I want it. The victim mentality our culture encourages actually induces guilt among people making progress. That’s crazy. We should applaud positive behavior and encourage others to follow suit, not demonize and discourage it. Would it be better to applaud people who buy amalgamated, reconstituted, fumigated, irradiated, genetically modified industrial garbage?

The charge of elitism is both unfair and silly. We foodies are cultural change agents, positive innovators, integrity seekers. So hold your head high and don’t apologize for making noble decisions.

Food that's a little too wild to eat

It's nice to have food in the garden this time of year but perhaps not the Fly Agaric mushroom. Styled by Walt Disney; it's poisonous, psychoactive and great news if you own a head shop, but not if you've a toddler who wanders round the garden in the tutelage of a mentally challenged Labrador. So I need to get rid of it, fast.

Popular as a hallucinogenic it's not famous by accident. Fly Agaric was used popularly to kill flies but its real claim to fame is that vikings were fond of it to jizz themselves up for battle. They reckoned it was too strong to be eaten raw so fed the mushroom to reindeer and then drank the deer's urine to limit the effects.

And in our garden, unfortunately it's not alone, there's a whole nightclub of mushrooms partying on the lawn at the moment, including lots of "magic mushrooms" of different types, we counted over twenty varieties before giving up. From peering into my wildlife book, it looks that we have Orange Peel, Butter Cap, Tawny Grisette, Shaggy ink cap, Sulphur tuft, Bay Bollette, Sickener (no surprise - poisonous), Rose Russula and Chanterelles which are very nice to eat indeed.

While I've gathered and cooked the common white mushroom before, I dithered over whether to cook any of the stuff in the garden - it's simply too hard to identify which is poisonous or not, and some of them looked like death caps. There were a ring of what looked like fairy ring champingnon but again I bottled it when it came to eating them. I know that at this time of year there are mushroom gathering days around the country to help identify what gems you might have in your garden, but without this expert advice I decided not to chance it.

My father who knows a bit about mushrooms looked at me in shock when I told him I was going to cook the fairy ring mushrooms. He's suspicious of anything that grows in a circle, maybe he's right, lots of nasty things grow in circles - like ringworm. His warning worked and I didn't eat them. In fact we gathered the whole lot off the lawn and filled two barrow loads before we gave up for the day. There are literally hundreds still growing, and they will probably continue to appear over the next few months. If it weren't for the baby I would be happy to leave them be.

This is one of the dilemmas with wild food - I'd much rather gather food on my doorstep then have to pay for it elsewhere, but foraging takes knowledge and experience, otherwise you could find yourself in A&E getting your stomach pumped. And in respect of many mushrooms; some foods are just too wild to tolerate inside, or outside your kitchen.

It's not just our banking crisis that's brought Ireland under the gaze of the international media

As a countryside lover it's easy to fall in love with horses, and if you ride or look after these lovely animals its very hard to ignore the huge welfare problem we have in the horse sector in Ireland.

Today the Irish Times published a piece I've written for them on the complex and ugly issue of equine welfare and why no one is willing to take ownership of it. I really hope it brings some pressure to bear on the department of Agriculture to provide emergency funding to the horse charities this Winter or to provide a cull scheme, ideally both.

If the problem is being reported as far away as Switzerland and New Zealand, it's clear we've a crisis on our hands. If we don't sort it out our image of being a horse loving, and great horse producing nation we only have ourselves; the Irish to blame. Please, Government bodies, help us do something about it.


Piece is linked here or read the whole feature below -
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0928/1224279819356.html






The number of starved and abused horses is rising. As winter approaches and charities are forced to turn animals away, is a cull the only way to clean up Ireland's horse welfare mess? Suzanne Campbell reports

IN A STABLE yard in Co Wicklow, a small, emaciated thoroughbred mare stands dejectedly with her head almost touching the straw. Much of her coat has fallen out and her spine and ribs protrude from distended skin resembling the bare timbers of a boat.

“This mare is typical of what we’re seeing at the moment,” says Sharon Newsome, who runs the yard. “She’s starved, but actually she’s a well-bred horse.” In another time the pretty filly would probably have been in training on the Curragh – but not today.

Newsome runs the Irish Horse Welfare Trust (IHWT), a charity under immense pressure to clean up the mess left behind by the Celtic Tiger’s surge in horse ownership. While in the past decade the leisure horse industry flourished, it was racing which really expanded, as hundreds of syndicates of both elite and ordinary folk seized their moment to live the dream. From 2001 to 2006 the number of racehorses in training in Ireland increased by 22 per cent. When the economy collapsed, trainers’ fees weren’t paid and fields full of horses suddenly had no owners. Culling horses may now be the only way to reduce the number of cases of starvation and abuse.

Alongside our banking woes, Ireland’s horse welfare crisis has put us under the gaze of the international media. Earlier this month the Sunday Telegraph joined Swiss Television (Schweizer Fernsehen) and Horse and Hound magazine in airing Ireland’s horse welfare problems. To read in a foreign newspaper that a horse in Dublin “was recently found with its legs bound, sunk to the bottom of a river” is to be presented with an image at odds with the sleek and glossy one that the €1 billion Irish horse industry likes to present.

As winter approaches, welfare groups project that hundreds of abandoned and starving horses will be found countrywide. In the case of the thoroughbred mare rescued by the IHWT, her owner was an elderly man who didn’t want to part with her even when a member of the public called gardaí and asked them to seize the horse.

“The problem is that now we have no room for even seized animals – the bad cruelty cases or starved horses like this one,” says Newsome. “I dread answering the phone or looking at our email because there are so many people desperate to get rid of horses.”



Horse ownership “is like a disease in this country”, says Paddy Wall, one of the writers of a UCD report on the welfare problems currently tarnishing the sector. While in the boom years everyone wanted to be part of the sport of kings, the recession hit horses particularly badly.
Over the past two years many animals went to the sales but came home unsold or went for well below their asking price. This brought them into the ownership of people who could afford to buy a horse for a few hundred euro but not the thousands of euro it takes to keep one over its lifetime.
Since 2007, well-bred racehorses and showjumpers have started to change hands for less than it would cost to feed them for a year. A fit thoroughbred was recently sold out of a training yard in Co Kildare for €200. As this reality hit home, some owners trade them on down the chain to those even less capable of looking after them. Then last winter the crisis truly hit.
“Last year was worse than I could have imagined,” says Newsome. “The bad weather meant there was no grazing and animals were left to starve or set loose on bogs or mountains if the owners didn’t want to be prosecuted. There is no facility where they can go. We’re the only dedicated horse charity in the country, and the few local authority pounds can barely cope.”
ISPCA CENTRES HAVE also seen a huge surge in the number of people contacting them about abandoned horses. “In 2008 we had 408 phone calls about horses, then last year we had 1,100,” says the organisation’s chairwoman, Barbara Bent. “Already this year we’ve had hundreds of rescue cases. We can’t take on any more animals and I don’t know what’s going to happen once the summer grass runs out.”
It is not only to welfare groups that the crisis is evident. The UCD report, published this summer, recognises the problem is “a human one, not a horse one”, as Wall puts it. Welfare issues exist across all sections of the industry, from National Hunt racing to horse fairs. The report identifies over-production of horses, lack of traceability in the system, poor understanding of the costs of horse care, all exacerbated by the effects of the economic crash, as the key factors in bringing horse welfare to crisis point.
“This is not a popular message, but it doesn’t get us past the fact that this is a difficult situation,” says Joe Collins, co-author of the UCD report. “Energy can be spent talking about it, but it’s no substitute for action.”
Prosecuting owners for cruelty doesn’t seem to be the way to get people to buy feed for their animals. The courts can take 18 months or more to turn around a cruelty case, and the fines are small. “The legislation is a hundred years old and the penalties are too small,” says Bent. “Unless we really do something about this problem, Ireland is going to lose its good name as a horse producer – and we need to protect that name.”
Three weeks ago, on a housing estate in Co Wicklow, a welfare officer from the IHWT identified a black and white gelding left to starve in the garden of a boarded-up house. It appeared to have been stabbed in the chest. As it was being removed, the horse’s two teenage owners arrived in a highly emotional state. “You’re not taking this horse, get away from my horse,” they yelled, jostling the three gardaí who had arrived to help out the welfare officer.
It emerged the teenagers had bought the animal for €100 from a 10-year-old boy standing in the middle of a roundabout the week before. It was untrained, and neither of them had any experience to turn it into a riding horse. But the lure of horse-owning status outweighed such practical considerations.
Coaxing by the gardaí and the IHWT officer eventually won out and the two lads relented, admitting they wouldn’t be able to feed the animal. As for the stab wound and other scars on the horse’s flanks, the teenagers were adamant it wasn’t them but that some of “the other lads round here” weren’t as nice to their horses as they were.
The gelding is now awaiting a new home. His story may yet end happily, but that’s not the case for the ponies driven in harness on roads, at high speeds, until they drop dead. The over-supply of horses has diminished their value and, in a world where value brings respect, this can be fatal. The Dublin SPCA reports horses changing hands at Smithfield market for as little as €20, or being swapped for mobile phones. When an animal’s life is so cheap it’s not hard to imagine why a teenager might choose to ride it to death for sport.
At an Oireachtas Agriculture Committee meeting this summer, TDs listened to expert opinion from the horse sector predicting a disastrous winter ahead.
Some witnesses, including RTÉ racing pundit Ted Walsh, explained to the committee that euthanasia can cost up to €300 per horse in Ireland, and that many owners will therefore abandon an animal instead. If a horse has a “clean passport” – meaning that it hasn’t received drugs in its lifetime which make it unfit for human consumption – it can go to a meat factory, where it will be humanely killed. Its meat will then go into the food chain destined for Europe. However, few of the horses affected by the current crisis have passports.
One of the solutions is a cull scheme, involving a once-off amnesty whereby the State would absorb the cost of humanely destroying unwanted animals. As draconian as it sounds, to put a horse down in such a way is better than making it endure a slow death by starvation.
Fine Gael’s agriculture spokesman Andrew Doyle is adamant that a cull is needed to take horses out of the system. “There should be some sort of incentive for people to bring unwanted horses forward rather than being prosecuted later for cruelty,” he says.
Another option would be to look for a derogation from the regulations on horses going into the food chain to permit animals without passports to go the meat-factory route.
“If you do a cull for a year or so, the problem is dealt with and you won’t have to do it againsays Doyle. “It’s in our face now – we’ve a whole load of unwanted animals that no one wants to know about and if we don’t so something quickly the outcome won’t be good.”
The Department of Agriculture acknowledges the current welfare problem but its view on a cull is that it’s “not an appropriate approach as such an initiative would not necessarily result in the slaughter of the target population – ie, those horses that are most vulnerable”.
The department has approved five meat plants around the country for horse slaughter, but these facilities can only take animals with clean passports so they can join the food chain. The average horse starving on a bog or a housing estate is not the type of animal that has a passport.
While the TDs on the Agriculture Committee may call for a cull, will they have the appetite to lobby the department after the political brawl caused by recent legislative moves against dog breeding and stag hunting? Cork TD Christy O’Sullivan (FF), for one, is adamant that a cull is the only route to take.
“I’ve cross-party support on this and I want to see the problem addressed rather than get worse,” he says. “We’re all part of the problem.”
A world away from Leinster House, Sharon Newsome views the possibility of such a scheme with scepticism. “We went to the Minister for Agriculture in October 2009, with industry bodies, and told them that this problem was coming. Then we said this problem is here. Now we have a UCD report backing up the evidence we are seeing on the ground, but what is it going to take to get something done?” she says.
Ireland may be the land of the horse, but the horse welfare mess we’ve created has yet to find an owner

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

How Twitter saved my bacon

Cooking isn’t easy without a cooker. This lightbulb moment struck when we moved into our new house this week and found a 90cm gap in the kitchen. So a new Smeg it is, but as the Smeg elves don’t deliver till 2014 or something, we still have a giant hole and no cooker. I did think of building a small fire in the centre of the kitchen but P intervened, suggesting that fires around small children might not be safe, I pointed out that I wasn’t a small child anymore but a teenager.


After an appeal on Twitter for solutions, a friend saw the Tweet and replied, saying she could call round pronto with a mobile hot plate. How fantastic is Twitter, I might generally discuss my current needs and wants online and wait for people to answer the call -

@campbellsuz - shoes in bits, need a pair of studded Lamboutin pumps

@campbellsuz - knackered, holiday in Peter Mantle's new place in the Bahamas please

@campbellsuz - and a new set of pots to go with my fancy cooker

It comes down to this; if you don’t ask you don’t get, and a big network of people are much better placed to help you out in such life threatening occasions as having to eat from a microwave for several weeks. So the Tweet Plea saved our bacon, or rather, cooked it. The mobile hot plate is not the prettiest item in the world– made by Prima circa 1987. It’s a flat square thing and comes with its own induction heat base saucepan and frying pan. When you switch it on it roars with the intensity of a space shuttle warming up, which frightened myself and the dog quite a bit, but overall it's working quite a treat.


I could have just used the microwave for a couple of weeks and left the good people on Twitter alone. But I have a fear of microwaves and especially with the baby’s food I go to great lengths to avoid using it. I’m certain that it’s only a matter of time before some really frightening research bursts out of Berkeley or someplace on what microwaves are doing to our health and how we’ve been nuking our food for decades now in complete ignorance (I know the truth is out there somewhere and you will find it Michael Pollan).

Plenty of people cook all their evening meals in a microwave, and no doubt they are great tools of convenience. I remember the arrival of a giant fawn-coloured Bosch microwave into our house in the eighties. It was the size of a small car, and the object of general fear and awe. It hummed and vibrated with a golden spread of light from the interior in the manner of the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones before it explodes and melts all the Nazi’s faces – a special effect that had to be borrowed from a microwave’s own effect on cheese.

Until we find out the possible murky truth about their effect on our health, I still don't like the effect they have on food - everything is roasted on the outside and ice cold in the middle. For the moment I'm sticking with the hot plate. It's not glamorous, it's not sexy, it's not Smeg. But it sure beats the microwave. Thank you Twitter.

A "back to front" dinner party, and why I'm giving up cooking

When you're surrounded by house-moving boxes and flailing through bubblewrap for wine glasses is one job too many, it was a blessed relief to have a dinner invitation this weekend and escape the mess. The worst part is agonising over what to throw out - today I finally let P ditch my t-shirt from Notting Hill Carnival 1991. Sacrilege, yes. Piece of shit garment that I was never going to wear again, yes.

So when someone tells you its dinner time at their place, the prospect of having a break from saying things like "can you Oxfam sunscreen?" to eat someone else's fantastic food is pure bliss. And to make things even better, the occasion was no ordinary meal, but a gastronomic adventure in time travel - bear with me on this.

The hostess - Francesca Walsh, not only entertains on a grand scale but puts the type of expertise and effort into technical, high end cooking that leaves most of us far behind and still hunting around for a tin of tuna.

With twelve dining, Francesca's candlelit summerhouse was the venue for her "back to front dinner party" - where all the dishes had the appearance of something from the opposite end of the meal. Complicated yes, and the type of thing best left to Heston Blumenthal. But novelty cooking has a fun factor and offers a welcome change to over-safe restaurant menus which constantly list the same ten or so dishes. It's got to the point where "beer battered cod with pea puree" sends me into a coma.

Francesca's starter was Cashel Blue cheesecake with tomato ice cream. Yes, this was a starter. To be fair, she admits this wasn't the most successful of the dishes - her comment was "Vile. Do NOT try this at home" but she's exaggerating. Blue cheese in a cheesecake is a genius idea, this one just had slightly too much of it, likewise the tomato ice cream.

Main Course was served in the form of an afternoon tea. A baked prawn mousse in the shape of a muffin not only looked the part but tasted sublime. This was accompanied by a small triangular sandwich of flat bread enclosing fresh green beans with a baked pollock fillet. A crisp round of short-cut pastry was dressed as a drop scone and topped with lump fish caviar (the jam).

And there's more. To accompany this course she served a cup of tea - a saffron and mushroom broth served in delicate china cups, this was so delicious I had seconds. By this stage I was making a mental note never to cook for Francesca again.

Dessert was soup (Back to Front dinner party ..... remember?) - The chilled raspberry and black cherry soup was accompanied by breakfast lavender cream served in egg shells. The eggs were placed in delicate silver egg cups and dressed with`toasted soldiers' of Madelaine's which sat within the lavender cream placed in the eggshells. The raspberry and black cherry soup was fantastic - really sweet flavours but with a richness and depth that suited being served as a soup.

This was following with Petits Fours - black chocolate truffles with popping candy inside. It was a deliciously smooth end to a fun meal. At this point, I felt I needed a small lie down a la Christmas dinner but my plans were interrupted by a loud rhythmical thumping in the next room. Guests paused, Petit Fours half-way to our mouths while we encouraged our lovely hostess to ignore the noise. Good job she didn't - Lily the cat was rotating steadily in the tumble dryer - having her own version of Funderland without having paid for the pleasure.

As you can imagine, full on drama ensued but Lily was retrieved and apart from a little dazed seemed in good spirits. It's just as well dinner parties like this don't happen on a regular basis. For one, how could I serve my Oliver Twist type offerings knowing that such delights exist on other people's tables, and secondly, how can you top "cat survives tumble dryer" as your evenings entertainment. So I'm throwing in the towel, just as well our dinnerware is in packing boxes, it won't be leaving there anytime soon.

Tony Blair "hunting ban was a mistake"

In Tony Blair's repentance splurge surrounding the publication of his new book, he admits that banning hunting was em, a bit of an error. Asked today if the ban was a mistake - "I think yes on balance it was in the end. Its not that I particularly like hunting or have ever engaged in it or would. I didn't quite understand, and I reproach myself for this, that for a group of people in our society in the countryside this was a fundamental part of their way of life." Blair accepted that the ban was "not one of my finest policy moments".

No sireee. The ban turned hundreds of thousands of countryside Brits onto the street to march to protect their way of life, and galvanised people who didn't feel strongly Tory to commit to vote for them. It's clearly not the morals of the issue Blair regrets but losing the labour party's rural vote for perhaps a generation. In my research for the book I came across a labour MP who smugly admitted that hunting was a "class issue" for them. It's really depressing that perceptions of class should drive a policy issue in a childish, -"we'll show the rich toffs" manner. Well they certainly paid for it in the 2010 election and will do so for lets say, about another 20 years.

Rural voters whether they cared or not about hunting saw the vote as proof that labour wasn't in touch with countryside issues- food prices, subsidies, closure of rural services and how British farming was a dying activity. The hunting ban simply galvanised all these issues together. If you talk to people living in rural Britain they still feel passionately that Labour let the countryside go to rot in this period. That's why any move in this country to ban hunting will bring about a meltdown - look at what happened with the Ward Union.

And typically, when if does happen, a proposed ban will come from urban based TDs who don't see the kind of mania this issue raises in the countryside, as it pulls all sorts of other emotions and grudges into the mix. Watch and learn Leinster House, if you don't get countryside issues right they eventually come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Food poisioning, animal cruelty and rape of employees - the real nice side to America's factory farms

US agriculture is reeling from a salmonella outbreak which has left more than 1500 Americans ill with food poisioning and lead to the recall of more than half a billion eggs. The food firm at the centre of this outbreak had already been named a "habitual violator" of regulations and has been breaking the law since 1994. If there was an ugly face to factory farming, and an example of how loose food regulation is in the US, this is clearly it.

The DeCosters plant in Iowa which is the focus of the outbreak produces 2.3 million dozen eggs a week and has also been sued by neighbours for noxious gases, millions of gallons of uncovered manure and putrid animal carcasses left on roadways,

Not only has Mr. Austin DeCoster habitually broken food and environment regulations, in 2002 he paid a settlement to eleven female workers at his plant. Most of the women were Mexican, and the payment was made for sexual harassment and assault charges, including rapes by supervisors.

Notwithstanding the current salmonella outbreak, here's a quick run down of DeCosters adventures so far -

In 1997, he agreed to pay $2 million in fines for health and safety violations. The US labour secretary at the time, Robert Reich, said conditions on his farm in Maine were "as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop." Reich's successor, called the farms "simply atrocious," citing unguarded machinery, electrical hazards, exposure to harmful bacteria and unsanitary conditions.

In 2000, the state of Iowa designated DeCoster a "habitual violator" of environmental regulations for problems that included run-off of pig manure into local waterways.

In 2002, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced the $1.5-million settlement of the lawsuit against DeCoster Farms on behalf of the employees who reported sexual harassment, rape, abuse and retaliation by supervising staff at DeCoster's Wright County plants.

In 2007, 51 workers were arrested during an immigration raid at his farms. This was the fourth illegal immigration raid carried out by authorities.

In June 2010, Maine Contract Farming, the successor company to DeCoster Egg Farms, agreed to pay $25,000 in penalties and to make a one-off payment of $100,000 to the Maine Department of Agriculture over animal cruelty allegations that were spurred by a hidden-camera investigation by an animal welfare organization.

Why does America continually turn its back on the catastrophic problems evident in their factory farms, if anything, surely their risk to human health should at least prompt a re-think. The Department of Agriculture and the FDA in the US have so far shown little regard for cleaning up anything other than food crises long after they've happened and public health has already been put at risk, let alone the issues surrounding animal cruelty and the monopolies operating food production in the US.

"Light touch" regulation in the US is the order of the day. After all, the FDA still allows growth hormones in cows despite their link with tumours, they also permit the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock to promote their growth, a practice which allegedly contributes to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and they also allow cloned animals be be sold without special labelling.

On top of this the Department of Agriculture has just announced a recall of 8,500 pounds of ground beef for possible E. coli contamination. It's sad that we know of food horrors in the US only come to light when it's too late. If you really want to know what does on on American farms read Johnathon Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". It'll tell you not just what's behind the label but also behind the farm, read it. It ain't pretty.

For more on the salmonella outbreak and the incredible flouting of regulations by the DeCosters http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27eggs.html

Irish fruit growers - a dying breed

No wonder we can't find Irish fruit in our supermarkets; on Saturday's Countrywide we discussed how sadly many people have stopped farming Irish fruit over the past ten years, particularly apples. Not only are there few farmers left in the business, for those interested in starting up it's very costly to enter – to plant an acre costs about 10,000 euros. And not only are the start up costs prohibitive, you’ve a lot of expense on labour afterwards. And if you haven’t an existing market or relationship with supermarkets it’s hard to sell them. All of this points to why as consumers we have little choice but to buy foreign fruit in our supermarkets.


Generally the multiples are fairly unapolegic about all this, saying that for value they need to import apples from as far away as China and Chile and have a year round supply. But Irish apples can be available from September to April if they are stored and many varieties store well but it's more about what the consumer wants and if they stop looking for Irish fruit there’s no need for the supermarket to stock Irish fruit. So we can only blame ourselves for not looking for Irish produce, if there's no demand for it supermarkets won't stock it, it's as simple as that.

Despite this there are still a few growers around the country who are keeping the tradition of apple growing in Ireland and saving the breeds that were once plentiful in this country. In Tipperary Con Traas runs a great example of a thriving apple and soft fruit business despite difficult times in food retail.

He has 30 acres in apples about 20 of that is commercial breeds which he makes into juices and sells the apples, but he also has about 10 acres in Irish rare breeds. His parents were fruit growers in Holland and they came to Ireland in the 1960s as land was short in Holland, buying the land he still farms on. When they first came to Cahir they grew everything from tulips to cabbages. Apples were also something they produced and in addition to keeping on that tradition, Con has a large amount of soft fruit in the summer time; mostly strawberries and raspberries, but coming into September, now is the height of apple season on the farm.


Con also has old Irish Breeds of apples but we don’t these commercially for sale. It’s a real pity, we have some great old Irish apples with wonderful names like Buttermilk Russet, Cavan Newington and Ballinore Pippin but the fact of the matter is that in today’s mass market, Irish apples just don’t cut the mustard so to speak. You might have a great variety but it blemishes easily, or you have a lovely tasting apple which falls off the tree too early and you can’t sell them all at the one time, so in terms of commercial apple growing they have missed the boat, but in terms of growing them at home or saving Irish varieties it’s a great thing to have in your garden and also important to keep that genetic heritage alive. Con still thinks it’s important to grow these apples and he juices them and sells them direct in his farm shop.


It's great to see an example of a farm shop working really well. Certainly on the apples he is very competitive on price, somewhere around half the price of the supermarkets. On the soft fruit his prices are around the same or a little bit lower than the supermarkets - obviously the supermarkets can offer special offers but he has the freshest of produce that’s picked at the last minute. So in terms of ripeness, taste and quality Irish fruit rather than imports definitely wins out.

Fruit growing is one of the areas in Ireland where farmers have real problems dealing with the supermarkets. I was talking recently to a farmer who offered to match the price of what one of the convenience stores was selling their fruit from Chile for, but even then this particular supermarket didn’t want to take their locally grown goods. They often don’t see the merits of Irish fruit and want to sell it as cheaply as possible so what you get is fruit from all over the world while Irish strawberries are being sold at the side of the road. Con gets round that by direct selling to most of his customers but does sell some to the supermarkets. He also said to me that if you’re producing a huge amount of one fruit, raspberries for example and the supermarket change the terms of the contract or refuse to take them off your hands you’re really in a vulnerable position so having small amounts of different produce is a safer bet, if you’re solely reliant on a supermarket to take your whole production then you can end up finding things very hard.


He also makes his own juices on the farm starting with apple juice about 15 years ago. A while back he began freezing his excess strawberries and raspberries to make mixed apples and berry juices. And this is fairly technologised stuff done on a large scale, for example he has a juice pressing machine that’s the size of a small car that’s one of the only ones in Europe, so it’s quite specialised stuff. And while you might think that’s enough to be going on with he also has a another alternative enterprise on the farm - a camping and caravan park.

It's amazing to see so many enterprises on the one farm, all of which are pulling in money and working well. There’s no doubt that hard work is one of the key things that goes into his operation, when I was down with him his phone is constantly going, he’s checking in with workers picking the apples and strawberries and really it’s the definition of multitasking. Despite this there is an approach which is working for him in doing small things that don’t require massive investment at the outset.

He warns about farmers growing 500,000 tonnes of something being a lot more vulnerable than someone smaller so it works for him to spread the risk among different enterprises, particularly in dealing with the supermarkets this seems to be an advantage. So while farmers are often told you have to be huge to compete, trying alternative businesses out in small stages seems to also work.

The Countrywide programme featuring this item on Irish apples can be heard at -
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/countrywide/

Cons website is www.theapplefarm.com and he's located outside Cahir on the road to Clonmel, its a super place and a real example of alternative enterprises not only paying their way but being hugely successful.

No, not fish, it's an Omega 3 enhanced cow

"Heart-smart" bacon? "Healthy" hamburger? The GM giant Monsanto thinks it's found a way to make red meat better for us and guess what, it's got both foodies and environmental activists worried.

Monsanto has produced a genetically engineered soybean that contains a version of omega-3, the well known "smart food" which has been shown to improve cardiovascular health. That's why we're told to eat more oily fish as omega-3 is usually found in seafood.

Monsanto's genius is to come up with meat products that have omega 3, so consumers can ditch that healthy serving of salmon and tuck into a burger instead. The omega-3 enhanced pork and beef comes from livestock being fed with the enhanced soybean, a nifty way to add value to your cheap as chips burger for sure.

And of course, Monsanto has filed patents on the "derived benefits" of feeding animals its new wonder product. Food products normally aren't granted patent protection. According to a story filed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "the new patent applications have touched a raw nerve among those who see them as an attempt by the company to exert control over the food chain.""There's been a much more liberal approach to patenting food, and this patent raises issues about that," Dr. Matthew Rimmer, an Australian expert in agricultural intellectual property, told ABC. "Jurisprudence in the United States takes a very expansive view of patentable subject matter."

Monsanto replied by saying that it has no doomsday plans to control the world's food supply. "Monsanto does not intend to take ownership of livestock or fish or to sell company-branded milk, meat or eggs enriched with omega-3s to consumers," the company posted on its website in June. But environmental activists don't believe them, not for the first time. A representative from Greenpeace told the broadcaster "As a community, we need to decide whether we want our most basic foods to be owned by chemical companies."

This is not a new debate - the ownership of seed patents is something Monsanto continually comes under attack for. But if the widespread use of enhanced soya brings Monsanto to a stage where they also own the patents to meat produced from soya-fed animals, then some parts of the meat sector, particularly in the 'States could arrive at a sticky situation.

GM crops are not currently allowed to be grown in Ireland but there is an argument that we should let in GM animal feed as it would keep costs for farmers down, especially in the pigmeat sector. And you can imagine if this omega-3 enhanced feed is available, wouldn't many Irish farmers want it as it adds value to their product?

Keeping Ireland the Food Island GM free is worth the extra we pay for non-GM animal feed. Remaining GM free and keeping the perception that we have as a clean, green island has a lot more value in the long run to Irish, UK and especially EU consumers of our beef and pigmeat products. I just hope the regime stays as it is in this country - stick it out and consumers will stick with us, if we go down the American road, we'll only have more heartache in the longterm.

Irelands only wine, double entendres aside

I went onto RTE radio yesterday (The Mooney Show) to natter about David Llewellyn's Irish wine. I ended up saying "So I met up with David and he took me down to his tunnel to look at his grapes". The production team were hysterical, I wasn't. Apart from that clanger it was a nice item about what is essentially a novelty wine but Dermot O'Neill the gardening expert added to the discussion saying by that many more of us might be producing wine in future years as the climate warms. I'm on for that, it would definitely cut our wine bills.

Wine making in Ireland might seem a little bit far fetched, but various people in the past have produced wine in very small quantities - particularly those in the South and South West of the country who have been growing grapes or buying grapes and making their own wine for their household, a bit like home brewing I suppose, but few of these wines have been commercially available until now.


Climate is key to producing wine but interestingly the grapes themselves have a lot of importance in terms of climate. The development of varieties in Germany and particularly the South of England has led to vines that do well here providing the summer temperatures don’t plummet. It's been 20 years since David Llewellyn planted his first vines after returning from working in the wine business in Germany. He calls our climate “challenging” – a very polite term, and he’s spent a long time experimenting with what might work in this climate and has a couple of different varieties of vines growing on the farm.


Last week I went out to his farm to record the radio piece. Disappointingly the vineyard doesn't look anything like the beautiful stepped terraces of Northern Italy or the huge level hectares of vines that you see in Southern France. Because it’s Ireland, David has his vines in plastic tunnels (don't go there) to protect them from the damp and disease. At this time of year the grapes are a smaller version of a table grape, so about the size of a marble. The grapes are incredibly sweet and melt in your mouth which is the surprising thing, but it's that sweetness which is essential as its fermeted sugars which produce alcohol, therefore no big sweetness, no wine

Between now and the end of September the grapes will ripen then they are brought to a little machine that crushes them and takes the berries from the stalks, the stalks are quite bitter and need to be separated. Then that pulp is taken out, put into a press and pressed through cloth under pressure and then that juice is fermented into wine.

Like the general rules with wine, David bottles the whites sooner - in the spring after their harvest, but the red takes a year to two years to be ready. He sometimes adds sugar to bring up the alcohol level from about 10 to 12%. He produces a Sauvignon Blanc, a Rondo Regent, and a Cabernet Merlot. I've tasted the Cabernet Merlot and it is surprisingly good, a little young if you like, with no huge depth of flavour but it's a light fruity red wine and for people not fond of big heavy Merlot flavours this might be a nice alternative.

If climate does warm in future years we could see some farmers entering the wine business but really it's hard work to do it in Ireland and you need good knowledge of viticulture and be passionate about wine. But there’s no reason why anyone couldn't start a few vines and produce your own wine for drinking at home, and it could save you a bit of cash. Lusca wines are expensive – 38 euro a bottle, though he does half bottles as well. If you're looking for wine at more value you will certainly find it but the idea of growing your own wine is hugely appealing - a bit like owning a chateau. But a few vines in tubs on the terrace? I think I'll try it, if all else fails they'll still look pretty.

The programme can be heard at -
http://www.rte.ie/radio/mooneygoeswild/archive/index.html

To semi-rural or not to semi-rural

Peregrine falcons are bad bastards. This morning one of them dive bombed a wood pidgeon who was calmly pottering in the field outside our house and in a matter of seconds made mincemeat of him. Then he sat on top of the poor bird and tore him apart. While brutal, it was fascinating to watch.

The rain was pelting down, even the neighbours horses had squeezed into the field shelter (all five of them, which is usually interesting) but the peregrine ignored the driving rain and the horses and chewed up chunks of pidgeon for a good half hour.

Myself and the baby watched from the bedroom window but the baby wasn't very impressed. She likes her mammals large and her birds small, so that she can point at the bird feeders hung outside the kitchen windows and bellow "Tit!". Or rather "Dhat!". I found the whole thing thrilling, even if my knowledge of birds is limited to finches of various colours and a strain of robin we seem to have at our place who are so violently territorial they make Quentin Tarantino characters look lame. [One morning I found one of the robins sitting on top of the dead body of his rival pecking out his eyes for a small snack.]

So, downstairs we headed, to look in the bird watching books and sure enough the bird outside the window was a peregrine, with his distinctive black cheeks. I was delighted, I felt like texting all of my friends instantly, then I remembered that they have real lives where they do not look out of the window at birds killing other birds for half an hour in the morning.

At the moment we are living in a rural area close to a large town. It's great; I can keep an eye on farming and food production and who's doing what in their fields, while we still have our going- out nights, our nipping down to the shop for Bad Snacks, and all the advantages of country life - peregrines in the garden, pheasants patrolling the hedgerows, the activities of the dairy farm nearby and of course, loads and loads of illegal dumping.

While I loved watching our neighbours cut their barley last week (I hope they get a decent price this year) what I don't love is the sky high piles of scary stuff appearing in the lanes. And if you're situated in anything that looks like a country lane that's close to a urban area you've had it. And it's not only the usual - carpets, household rubbish, mother in laws etc, early this year we had five deer carcasses dumped over successive months, some of them headless, in a lane close to our house.What I can't work out is why.

Around that same time I did a report for RTE Radio's Countrywide programme on deer stalking and for sure, poaching of deer is a thriving activity at the moment. But it's usually to sell the venison to some naughty game dealers are buying out of season. Some say that lamping of deer at night is taking place, again for venison or for cheap meat for dogs - lurchers and the like which are used to bring them down. Nice.

To dump the carcasses makes no financial sense as you have to transport them to the lane, and drag them into the hedge - presumably to hide them, which hasn't worked at all well if I can see the white arses of the deer sticking out of the hedge ten yards away.The neighbours and myself can't work it out. It could be a farmer who is culling them because they're eating his grass. And doesn't want the bodies left on his land. Whatever the case it's an ugly practise and presents obvious public health issues if they are not removed.

This is the thing with country life. While you think you're safe from mad urban stuff it doesn't mean that mad stuff, whether urban or rural, doesn't come knocking at the door. In a few weeks we are to move from this house, to a more rural area. It'll be a big change and we will miss the proximity to urban life that we have now. I really don't want to go as I love it here but one thing is certain, I don't want to go back to living in an urban area. My daily walks round the edges of the fields are truly, the nicest part of the day. If we moved back into a town the labrador would get fat, and the baby and I would have nothing to look out the window at. Mind you, there's always Dr. Phil on the telly...

How your iPhone could trim your grocery bill, beat the supermarkets at their own game

Smart Consumer: How you can be a winner in the great supermarket sweepstakes
Suzanne Campbell, The Irish Independent Thursday August 12 2010

This week the National Consumer Agency announced that the price of branded goods in our supermarkets fell by on average 14 per cent from January last year to July 2010. It's good news -- but it doesn't mean that shoppers can relax.

What's clear is that we're much savvier at shopping than before. It's easy to clap ourselves on the back for buying discounted goods but to prevent prices rising again, we must still shop smart and let the supermarkets know that we're keeping a close eye on what they're charging us.

The National Consumer Agency survey also showed that while retailers are competing with special offers and promotions, they are also frequently changing the price of individual items.
In recent weeks Irish food and consumer internet forums were busy with shoppers angrily citing price rises across a number of goods. "The hot chocolate I buy used to be €1.55 for nearly a year, only to be raised to €3.55", "one of my favourite yoghurts went from 99c to €1.35 per pot over night, how does that make sense?".

Add to which numerous angry posts about the shrinking number of Irish goods being stocked and a rise in the marketing and shelf space occupied by a supermarket's own brand products. Is it the case that in order to keep the balance of power on the side of the consumer we must continually monitor what the supermarkets are doing?

Tara Buckley from independent retail group RGDATA says that shoppers need to stay savvy if they're to continue to get bargains. "We're hearing from retailers that consumers are going to a particular shop for one discounted product; nappies or wine for example, and then leaving with just that item rather than shopping around which is what the retailer wants."

There has also been a shift in the type of foodstuffs we are buying: "Retail figures show that more of us are buying home-baking goods and cooking from scratch. And there is also a slight upturn in the sale of treats such as chocolate. Where people feel they are shopping smarter across the board they are rewarding themselves with small treats, and the World Cup gave a great boost to snacks and alcohol sales."

But it's also clear that discounted goods have to be paid for elsewhere in the store. Supermarkets are good at raising prices by stealth on products that don't get a lot of attention, and then heavily marketing their big discounts. To make sure you're always one step ahead, be aware of the game playing that's taking place when you least expect it -- during your weekly shop.

Use Technology
If you've an iPhone, apps such as Red Laser (€1.59) are useful for price comparisons -- it scans a barcode and tells you where the item is on sale for less.
Sites such as Thatsagreat offer.com searches local areas for grocery discounts and also carries hair and beauty discounts and dining-out offers. Using online shopping sites such as Tesco's or Superquinn's gives you up-to-date pricing without leaving your home.

Don't be suckered by signs
Once in the supermarket door, don't be swayed by big signs screaming out promotions.
Big red "discount" signs give the impression that everything on the supermarket floor is good value. Lots of signs doesn't necessarily mean lots of bargains.

'Buy One, Get One Free' or similar deals
Unless you are sure you are going to eat these foods don't buy them. And don't think that freezing them gets rid of the issue -- they still have to go into your mouth or in the bin once they get to your home.

Only buy "Two for One" meat deals if you have a meal to put them in.
But picking up discounted mince is usually a good buy because in five minutes it can be made into home-made burgers (just add a little garlic, onion and packaged sage), a simple chilli with peppers and tomatoes or a spaghetti bolognese. These are great meals to freeze if you want to make a big quantity once-off.

Multi-buying
Don't assume that the bigger pack is cheaper. Sometimes you have to really look at the label to find that buying four or six bottles of cola isn't that much better value. Large quantities of foods like this encourage you to get through them quickly, and may not be the healthiest option.

Premium Discounts
Supermarkets love discounting luxury items such as wine or their premium ranges. Before you buy it, think for a second if you wanted this item before you saw it reduced, and that there may be another item alongside it which is still actually cheaper.

Fresh fruit and vegetables
Loose vegetables are usually cheaper and have a lot less packaging for you to dispose of at home. The cheapest way to buy veg is usually at your local vegetable shop. They'll usually throw in a few bargains and it's nice to feel part of a local food culture rather than someone to be got through a till queue as quickly as possible.

Promotional cards
Use your loyalty card but beware of accruing points for the sake of it. Remember that loyalty cards track every item you buy. If you're a fan of luxury ice cream, the supermarket will target you with promotions for ice creams or more cynically, try to win you over to their own premium brand and away from the brand you were buying before.

Tempting your palate
Other tricks supermarkets use include displaying foods that go well together; soft drinks with salty snacks, crackers and cheese or fresh fruit and cream. This is to encourage to you to spend more. Vegetables are put near the entrance to convey a feeling of freshness and health, and bread is placed at the door to get a consumer salivating and prod them into buying more food. Ditto the rotisserie chicken. It's not there just to sell chicken is it?

You against them
The supermarket's goal is to keep you there as long as possible, confused, and buying things you didn't come in for. Their layout tricks are putting essentials far away from the entrance so you have to pass lots of other goods before you get to them.
The most expensive goods are also placed at eye level throughout a store, check the shelves above and below eye-level for a cheaper alternative.

Use a shopping list
It's boring but plan ahead. Think at the beginning of the week how many nights you will be eating in, entertaining or weekend meals you will need. Write a list with staple simple dishes on it.

Choose meals that are simple to prepare and buy for and you're more likely to make them. Making a list cuts out several trips to the convenience store during the week. This is when your grocery bill can really shoot up.

Just remember that the supermarket's job is to make margin, and if they discount products they have to make their money back elsewhere in the store. Shop around, watch the figures on your receipt and always stay one step ahead if you want to keep your grocery spend at an affordable level.
- Suzanne Campbell
Irish Independent

Why does the National Consumer Agency want Walmart here?

Despite us having the second highest grocery prices in Europe, today the National Consumer Agency are saying that competition among the big four retailers is cooling down as that they are all charging virtually the same for the popular branded goods we buy. While the NCA are happy to admit that supermarkets are raking in exceptionally high profits they are also advocating taking away the cap on the size of retail units to invite bigger firms into Ireland and provide more competition. Hello, have you looked at what's happened in the US, what are you thinking NCA?

Allowing huge units to locate here will only lead to chains like ASDA (owned by Walmart) coming in to promote a cheap food policy, squeeze farmers and food producers virtually out of business. I went to an ASDA/Walmart store recently in Swindon which was about the size of Colorado. I bought a loaf of what was described as "bread" for 26p. Two weeks later it had the same consistency and appearance that it had the day I bought it.

Can you call this food? If we invite these types of retailers into Ireland they will still source everything they sell from the cheapest producers in the world, Irish farmers will be left out in the cold and ultimately, superstores will prescribe what and how we eat. I don't want Walmart as my food future thanks.

It's incredulous that the National Consumer Agency think that cheap food from giant American conglomerates is the way to go. It's bad for everyone in the long run. Over the past ten years there has been about a thousand Phds completed on the effects of cheap food and the impact that giant retail units has had on towns and local businesses. Michelle Obama recently identifed whole regions of the US which are food wastelands - nothing is grown, everyone eats crap. The NCA really need to read a bit more, look at what has happened to America's food environment and get a bit of sense.

Todays NCA statement -
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0810/breaking29.html

We might laugh at Vogue Café but lets not pretend we don't do branded restaurants

I thought themed restaurants died off in the '90s. Apparently not. According to the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast is looking to expand its magazine-themed restaurant business across the globe.

Apparently Moscow already has a Vogue Café, and a GQ Bar. If that's not bizarre enough they also have a Tatler Club. What next? Condé Nast Traveller cocktail bars with Malaysian palm beach decor and plinky plink music? Maybe not - I spent some of my dissolute youth on a Malaysian paradise island which had banned alcohol, a fact which rather inconvenienced Philip and myself.

It's testament to the power of Condé Nast's brands more than anything that they can expand willy nilly into what have been diffcult waters for other groups, remember the Fashion Cafe anyone? The company is apparently trying to build its brands beyond print magazines, which have been suffering from drops in advertising.

Is it the case that outside Europe and American the lure of Western brands will still bring people to a food outlet? Have we moved on here or have we just re-trained our brand sensitivites to Marco Pierre-White and Frankie Dettori, - both of whom have branches in Dublin. We may pride ourselves on being more sophisticated than to eat in a Hard Rock or Vogue Café, but we do exactly what everyone else does in the world by eating branded food restaurants that we somehow percieve as being of gauranteed quality. In my experience branded outlets usually mean very much the opposite. Yes of course we're more sophisticated than people in Moscow. Starbucks anyone?

Interesting that cloned meat is classifed as "novel foods" under the Food Safety Authority in the UK

This latest UK food safety cock up says more about traceability in our food chain and how badly it is working than the ethics of eating cloned food - that's a whole other story. I just hope that this can't happen in Ireland. Today the Food Safety Authority here said that as far as they know there is no cloning research going on in Ireland, but more to the point, many of the prepared foods such as pizzas, ready-meals etc that we buy in Irish supermarkets contain meat from the UK. So it's not as if we're free from any risk as consumers.

More worryingly, the FSA in the UK has said that it does not know how many embryos from cloned animals have come into Britain from abroad. They are continuing to investigate reports that milk from cows born from US embryos have entered the food chain.

I can't believe the FSA haven't learned their lesson from BSE and controlled the use of cloned animals better. BSE destroyed UK's beef sector for over ten years. This is exactly the type of thing that scares people away from eating beef, and if I wasn't an informed consumer who knows that Irish traceability in beef is top notch, I might be looking at burgers in a new light.

The story so far - from the BBC today:

Meat from two bulls which were the offspring of a cloned cow have entered the food chain in Britain, officials have admitted, as they continued to investigate further possible breaches.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said that meat from two bulls, Parable and Dundee Paratrooper, "will have been eaten".

The animals were among eight cattle conceived using eight embryos harvested from a cloned cow in the United States, it said. The news has fuelled debate in Britain about the ethics and safety of cloning, although experts insist food products from the offspring of cloned animals pose no health risk. Under European law, foodstuffs produced from cloned animals must pass a safety evaluation and gain authorisation before they are marketed.

The FSA is responsible for authorising "novel foods" such as meat and other products from clones and their offspring and said it had neither granted any such authorisations nor been asked to do so.
Its investigations started earlier this week after a newspaper report that milk from the offspring of a cloned cow had gone on sale to the public. But as it carried out this investigation, it discovered that meat from Dundee Paratrooper, which was slaughtered in July last year, had entered the food chain. Local council officials identified its owner as farmer Callum Innes of Auldearn in northern Scotland.

Hours later, it also confirmed that meat from Parable, which was slaughtered in May this year, was likely to have been eaten. The FSA has also said Wednesday that it did not know how many embryos from cloned animals had come into Britain from abroad. Investigations are continuing into whether milk from two cows also born from the US embryos had entered the food chain. Food products from the other four in the group have not done so.

Campaign groups for animal welfare and organic farming have voiced concern over the issue.
Compassion For World Farming highlighted risks to animal welfare posed by cloning, while the Soil Association voiced safety fears and said the use of clones could reduce genetic diversity within agriculture. But the National Farmers' Union Scotland said there were "no risks" to human health posed by food products from the offspring of cloned animals.
Professor Hugh Pennington, a leading microbiologist at Aberdeen University, said that while the word cloning "has an H. G. Wells ring to it", the process was "perfectly safe".
"They are just the same as their parents from the genetic point of view so there's no problem there," he said.

David Bowles of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals told the BBC the issue was about "transparency" and showing consumers they could "trust what they go into shops to buy -- and at the moment that is in doubt".

Irish poultry and pork farming, River Cottage it ain't

Good to see Brendan Smith our Minister for Agriculture is to introduce new grants to improve the standards in sow housing and poultry farms. Out of all the livestock we produce in Ireland, sows and poultry get by far the worse end of the deal. For these animals, being raised for our plate is rarely how you see it on prettified food programmes. I've filmed in pig houses, a lot of what goes on tape couldn't go on air.

Cattle and sheep in Ireland are reared in an “extensive” system, which means they are outdoors in low stocking ratios with access to grass and only housed in the winter months. On the whole, this is ideal from a welfare standard and we can all sleep easily at night knowing that while that lamb shank at dinner tasted fantastic, the lamb that provided it had a fair shot at a decent outdoor life.

Pigs and poultry are a different matter. Both are as near to intensive farming as you can get in Ireland, and having been in poultry houses and seen how densely packed the birds are, I am compelled, despite the price difference to only buy free range chicken that has some kind of access to outdoor grazing and foraging.

Pigs have the worst situation of them all. Pig farming in Ireland is indoor, intensive and free range pork is still a tiny minority of the marketplace. Pigs are kept indoors in tiny pens their entire life and cannot live in a group, forage and do the intelligent pig stuff they like to do. Sows farrow (give birth) in metal stalls the length of their body with no room to move whatsoever, the piglets are kept away from the sow by a rail to stop her lying on them. If the sow was in a larger area she wouldn’t lie on them in the first place. If we kept our dogs this way there’d be a national uproar.

However under new EU animal welfare directives which will come into force at the end of 2011, both sows and hens will benefit from more animal friendly accommodation. Battery farming of hens in the EU will be entirely banned by 2012, so the infamous metal cage the size of an A4 sheet of paper will exist no more. Interestingly, in February of this year Poland campaigned to remove this ban or have it exempted for another five years but they were overturned.

Farmers in Ireland are at least going to get some help to comply with the new regulations in the form of 40% grants towards investments in new animal housing. To be fair, Irish farmers are regularly under pressure to comply with EU legislation that constantly alters and inforces new regimes such as the Nitrates Directive. However, when Ireland took on board the Nitrates Directive and complied with its purpose of keeping our waterways clean of agricultural run-off the plan worked.

Change can be costly but if it’s change that benefits the welfare of the animals we choose to raise for food, the environment and those who we share this planet with, we all benefit.

From starving on the side of the road to Ring 1 of the RDS. The journey of a rescue pony

HORSE SHOW SEASON: When Lulu the pony was found by the Irish Horse Welfare Trust on a housing estate, she was rake thin and lice infested. Next week, though, she will take her place in the distinguished surroundings of the RDS for the Dublin Horse Show. SUZANNE CAMPBELL on the work of the trust

NEXT WEEK LULU the pony will find herself groomed to perfection as she enters the ring at the Royal Dublin Society’s Horse Show. But it was on the edge of a housing estate in Finglas where the pony first came to attention, not by a judge wearing a bowler hat, but a volunteer from the Irish Horse Welfare Trust (IHWT).

Lulu’s early misfortune is typical of an increasing crisis in horse welfare across the country that has seen levels of abandoned animals soar. She was spotted by a member of the public, who reported seeing a pony at the side of the road who was tiny, starved and covered in lice. The IHWT took her in, rehabilitated her and found her a loving owner. In a pristine stable yard in Co Tipperary, Lulu now looks like a different pony.

“She was probably only a year old at that stage but had already been put into harness; she still has some marks from it,” says Katie Tobin, who has had horses all her life and became the pony’s guardian after she rang the IHWT and offered to rehome a horse.
“I had enough grazing to keep another animal so I told them I’d take one off their hands – whatever they wanted to give me. When the horsebox arrived, I thought there was no horse in it she was that small.”

In her stable, Lulu is quiet but self-possessed, eyeing us in quick glances as she munches through her breakfast, anxious to appraise her visitors without missing a scrap of her food. It was clear from the beginning that the pony wasn’t the usual offspring from the black and white horses kept around Dublin’s housing estates.

“She has a lot of quality blood in her, and with her pretty head she could be part Welsh pony,” says Tobin. She thinks the pony was probably stolen as a foal and fell into the wrong hands. “I’m just so glad she was picked up by the IHWT and then came to me.”

For the past 10 years, the IHWT has been taking in welfare cases and retraining horses coming from the racing industry, giving them a second chance as riding horses. Currently, it is inundated with rescue cases as economic woes have put many horse owners under pressure; starving and abandoned animals are being reported to it daily. In a new campaign, Welfare Aware, it hopes to raise more money from equestrian-related industries, as it relies hugely on public donations.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the work they do on so little money,” says Tobin. “Without the IHWT, the simple fact is that this pony and many others that they’ve rescued would be dead.”
Tobin saw Lulu’s potential early on and began showing her in hand (without a rider) when the mare was two. “Outside the show ring she was fine, but once inside she would be really badly behaved – rearing, sitting down, everything. I used to be so embarrassed I’d want to leave.”

Then she found a local girl, Shannon Sheridan, who could really ride her and handle her personality. “I’ve no children of my own. I had seen Shannon ride ponies on the circuit and I basically pestered her mother Michelle to death to try Shannon on Lulu. Once she sat up on her, the pair just clicked. She’s a fantastic rider, for a 12-year-old girl she can read a showing class better than many adults.”

Shannon Sheridan clearly knows every inch of the pony and slides off Lulu’s rug for us to have a closer look: “She can get a bit fat so we have to watch her food.” While Lulu has plenty of quality, she is also brimming over with personality. “She landed me in the hospital once when she took a fright at some white tape coming through the field gate,” laughs Tobin.

And what are their chances in Dublin? Tobin is confident. “If Lulu behaves and doesn’t get tense, she will do well.” The pony will take an hour to be plaited up and get her coat shining for the ring, but as Tobin points out, the real work is sorting out her boundless energy before she goes in front of judges. “We work her in sometimes for a couple of hours before her class, she has bottomless energy levels.”

Does Shannon Sheridan think the pony might be a challenging ride in the big surroundings of the RDS? She gives a nervous laugh: “Yeah.”

For Tobin, the hard work and expense in showing the pony and bringing her to the top level of competition has more than paid off. “I have another pony in Dublin the same week, but you know it’s Lulu that I’m really excited about. It was my dream that she would get there, and it’s a real success story for the IHWT. It proves all animals deserve a second chance.”


A nose for bags
LOUISE O’LEARY, the designer behind Louloubelle bags, was so taken with the work done by the Irish Horse Welfare Trust that she is launching a bag in aid of the charity. “I always had rescue cats and dogs from the pound and then I took in a rescue mare. She was found by the side of the road in north Co Dublin. The vet said she mightn’t last 48 hours.” O’Leary named the mare Hazel and watched her slowly improve in health. “For the first few weeks she had her head buried in the grass just eating, then one day she came trotting over to the fence to greet me.”

Since then, O’Leary has found her “an absolute joy. It’s amazing an animal that was mistreated and left to starve can be so grateful for what she has. So I thought, what can I do to help – I can’t take in more horses but I can design, so I decided to launch a bag named Hazel [pictured below] to raise money for the trust.” One of Louise’s aims at Louloubelle bags is to make handcrafted products from ethically sourced leather. A third of the world’s leather comes from China, where animal-welfare practices have received a lot of criticism, and cats and dogs are killed for their fur. For O’Leary, this was an important issue. “I think there is a lack of awareness about where leather comes from; if people knew more about it they might make different decisions.”

When she began her business, sourcing leather that is a by-product of the food industry was a difficult task. “I searched for a long time in Italy for a factory that would produce to high ethical standards. Even Carlo who runs the factory says he doesn’t want to make money off the back of animal abuse. I get offered leather all the time that is cheaper than the stuff I buy, but I suspect it’s coming from China.” For O’Leary, the bag is a way of giving back for the pleasure she has had from giving an unwanted horse a second chance. “The work the IHWT does is unbelievable, they badly need donations and people to adopt their animals if you have a suitable home for one.” The bag is available from ihwt.ie for a special price of €250 (normal RRP is €500). All proceeds will go to charity and the bag will be on view at the IHWT’s stand during the Dublin Horse Show.

Lulu and Shannon Sheridan will be in the Show Hunter Pony class at 9am in Ring One on Sunday, August 8th, during Horse Show Week at the RDS Dublin Horse Show