Food is best when it's fresh. Organic is good, too. But it can take weeks for fruit and vegetables to reach the shops after harvest, and they may travel the world before they reach your plate. Catherine Cleary goes in search of the 'five-mile meal' - and meets Irish farmers and distributors who want to ensure you can buy good local food
How difficult is it to make a five-mile meal? The question cropped up over dinner in our house recently. It was a simple meal of chicken and salad. Supermarket chicken apart, the rest of the produce on the plate had come from within about five miles of where we live, grown under the same patch of sky.
When you start looking at the mileage on your plate, food has never been so complicated. How ethical is organic farming now that it has gone mainstream? It's better for you and the environment, you might say. But when you take a closer look at a product such as organic strawberries, you might find that they were picked by an illegal Mexican farm worker who was paid about 35 cent a pound, then flown in the belly of a Boeing to a warehouse and supertrucked to your supermarket aisle. The final insult is usually to the taste buds. After all the international travel, aviation fuel and warehouse refrigeration, the flavour is a watery pinkness vaguely reminiscent of strawberry.
The warm halo that an organic label gives to food - enough to persuade a cost-conscious consumer that it is worth the premium price - loses some of its glow when you look more closely at country-of-origin labelling. You might even say we are in danger of eating ourselves into oblivion. Scientists have calculated that it takes more than 100 calories of aviation energy to fly just one calorie of lettuce from California to Ireland.
Future generations will view our use of the planet as one big food basket as impossibly wasteful. In the meantime we keep dropping those Kenyan sugar snaps in our trolleys in a shopping daze. The organic apples on our shelves all summer have probably come from South Africa or New Zealand, countries not only thousands of air miles away but also places where autumn - apple season, in other words - ended some time ago. Only varieties that can withstand months of cold-housing and global transportation are grown. Even though Irish apples and pears are now in season, their elderly, well-travelled rivals will remain steadfastly available, and be cheaper than the local offering.
Our five-mile-meal included lettuce from polytunnels on a hill where the organic farm An Tairseach is based, on the lands of a Dominican convent in Wicklow town, and freshly podded peas grown by our three-year-old son and his grandad in his own patch of allotted garden, a few miles in the opposite direction.
Had we bought our chicken from Martha Crocker, whose organic farm, producing poultry, lamb and eggs, is in nearby Glenealy, the meal would have been truly local. At the local farmers' market, in Ashford, Crocker explains that she and her husband, Gary, supply chickens in boxes of six, with the price working out at about €3.50 a pound. Lamb comes in the form of half an animal, packaged for the freezer, at about €4.50 a pound. Often, two or more households get together to buy in bulk. "We grow our own feed and are subject to on-the-spot inspections by the [ organic] certifying body," she says. The Crockers left Dublin 13 years ago to start farming organically. "In those days it was a scary place to be, with no support."
At the An Tairseach stall nearby in the market, a large head of lettuce costs €1.50, four finger-sized courgettes are €2 and a cucumber comes in at €1. The economic reality is that our five-mile meal - which might have to be a 15- or 25-mile meal were we in a city - cannot compete with a meal made from the cheapest ingredients sold by any large supermarket. A sorry battery-farmed chicken could cost less than half the price per pound of Crocker's organic offering, although it would be nowhere near as nutritious or tasty. The cheapest supermarket vegetables are also about half the price of their pesticide-free and local counterparts in the wicker baskets of farmers' markets.
Siobhán Morris, the author of Organic & Green: Guide to Ireland 2005-2006, is one of the many people passionate about taking locality to heart when planning a meal. It is, she says, "food that was grown or reared with flavour in mind rather than the ability to be transported around the world and still look pretty. So from the start you're in for a treat. On top of that your custom is helping to support and sustain local food heroes - and so your community."
Her day job is as manager of Atlantic Organics, based at the Organic Centre, in Rossinver, Co Leitrim. Atlantic Organics has been set up to bring about 120 food producers in the northwest together under a professional umbrella and get their produce out to a wider market. "It feels to me like there is change afoot," she says. "In the UK more people are buying organic, but this year, as a percentage, less is being bought through the supermarkets. I think this is happening here, too. This means people are buying elsewhere, through farmers' markets, from farm-gate sales and from speciality-food shops.
"Supermarkets just aren't set up to take small volumes of food from local producers. There are a few exceptions of pioneering convenience stores, but most shop owners I know say they've used up their tiny local quota and would love to take more local produce directly from producers, but they're not allowed."
The benefits of local sourcing are immense, she believes, even leading to a feel-good factor that goes beyond diet. "Everyone is connected and feels better for it. It's a way of closing the gap, of doing something about that feeling of being dislocated, powerless or just oblivious about the food you eat."
One exception to the gulf between farmers' markets and supermarkets is located in (where else?) west Co Cork. Eugene Scally decided nearly two years ago, when he enlarged his SuperValu store, in Clonakilty, to bring local producers under his roof. He modelled his shop on Roche Bros, a food store in Boston set up by a family from Kinsale. He recruited a former Tesco employee, Michael Walsh, as his fresh-food manager and sent him out to speak to producers. "We go and look at things, and if we see something of interest we sit down and talk to a producer. We have in the region of 50 to 60 local products in the shop now. It's something that will work if you're committed to making it work," he says.
Scally's fish counter boasts shark, tuna and live lobsters and crabs that were in the Atlantic until just a few hours before they ended up in the store, bought from Union Hall pier at the 4am fish auction. When "fresh fish" for the average supermarket counter comes off the truck it has usually been out of the water for several days, if not a week. Some of it was probably frozen at sea, then shipped to a central warehouse before being delivered to supermarkets. In port towns without a fresh-fish shop the produce could be driven past the local supermarket to the central warehouse, only to be brought back again a few days later.
Scally is hugely proud of what he and his team have put together. "We're still only a supermarket, and we're charging supermarket prices for our produce. But, let's be honest, the real quality is in the organic product. It reminds me of the stuff I used to rob off the trees."
His bakery manager, Robbie Ryan, explains that all their bread is baked in store. It is an unusual approach: the smell of bread in most supermarkets is actually the smell of ovens being used to finish baking part-cooked dough that arrives frozen. Instead of using flour improvers, Scally's SuperValu ferments flour, salt, yeast, water and ascorbic acid for 72 hours, to make a starter, adding it to the day's flour to make a variety of breads from scratch.
Michael Walsh sees a world of difference between a multinational where decisions about stock are made in London and the local approach they have taken. "It's all to do with passion. It's easy for people to let the supermarket run itself. The retailer is key to the whole thing."
Irish food retailing is dominated by Tesco, Dunnes Stores and Musgrave Group (which owns the SuperValu and Centra brands); between them they control almost 70 per cent of the market. Their dominance has changed the face of food production. Like supertankers docking at ports, supermarket lorries each carrying nearly 30 tonnes of produce arrive at the backs of thousands of outlets every day, unloading centrally sourced products.
"Ten years ago there were 1,000 conventional producers," Siobhán Morris says. "Now that has dropped to 200 or so, and it sometimes feels like a case of the last man standing. But producers have to learn to work with supermarkets. I don't like the idea of thinking of supermarkets as bad, because that's where most people shop."
She is hosting an organic conference in November, and she is determined that it will have a business focus "rather than everybody sitting round in woolly hats, talking about protecting the environment. We really want to get the supermarkets involved".
John Purcell, who is managing director of Good Herdsmen, is providing a bridge between supermarkets and organic farmers. From his farm and processing plants in Cahir, Co Tipperary, and around the country, he ships six tonnes of organic beef and lamb to the big three supermarket groups every week.
Organic farmers provide him with the animals "countrywide, from Sligo down to Wexford", and he has his own organic herds, which can cater for a shortfall if there is a problem with supply from one of the 210 farmers who sell their animals to him. "We're really there for the farmer, as a marketing tool for the farmer, and we're singing the organic story on a daily basis."
Good Herdsmen, which provides the meat to supermarkets under the Ballybrado label - Ballybrado also has a website offering a wide range of organic produce, including meat, fruit and vegetables, for home delivery - provides the "one-stop shop" that suits supermarkets looking for large consignments and continuity of supply. "You do have to adopt a conventional approach, and some producers are very vulnerable once they get beyond their own garden gate. We would be realistic with things like distribution, margins and continuity of supply. We know what their margins are, and we suggest retail prices that we know are realistic. Being conventionally minded is not always easy for an artisan."
Later this year the Ballybrado label will launch a selection of ready meals aimed at young women who want the health benefits of organic food without the labour of preparing it. It will be a case of moving beyond the "foodies and the beardies" to the affluent but time-poor customers at the top of supermarkets' hit lists.
"We're aware that there's a new consumer out there who's more affluent and for whom organic food is more fashionable. They're buying into that, and they want convenience," Purcell says.
At the other extreme of the organic-meat business is Pat O'Doherty, a butcher in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. Last year he took a boat out to an island in Lough Erne with some unusual passengers: 50 black pigs that now live on the island, which O'Doherty bought as part of the business. An environmentalscience graduate who got into butchering, O'Doherty realised there was a market for traditionally produced Irish bacon. "I went out with a notepad and wellies to farmers in Fermanagh and heard stories about how a pig would be hung up on a chimney for curing - all these techniques that we now consider artisan techniques."
He persuaded some local farmers to start rearing black pigs outdoors, and Fermanagh Black Bacon was born. "The difference is simple. When you throw a piece of ordinary bacon on the pan, what you see coming out is water and white stuff. That's generally a chemical mix that's pumped into the bacon that includes a lot of phosphates.
The water evaporates, but the phosphates don't." Phosphates speed up production: most factory bacon is cured in two or three days, according to O'Doherty. "Our bacon takes up to three months to cure."
Now he sells to a small number of specialist stores, including Cavistons, in Dublin, and Harrods, in London, as well as over the internet. He has created an oak-smoked rib eye of beef for Prince Charles of England and has done oak-smoked Irish lamb for Harrods' owner, Mohamed Al Fayed.
"I've turned every supermarket in Ireland down, because we feel we're not getting the right attitude. We have to be confident our products are going to be growing and not dying. With smaller shops people can discuss food. Foodies will travel to shops and talk. There is a food culture out there. We've come through the 1980s, when it was all about getting a loaf of bread for 29p and three packs of bacon for £1. Now we're back to where we were in the 1940s and 1950s, with less processing and more understanding. No matter how successful your country is, it's useless unless you've got quality food."
But back to his island venture. O'Doherty has been rowing over three nights a week with some light organic food for the islanders, whose 80-acre home is about a mile long (and has attracted requests from tourists who want to stay in the only house on it, surrounded by the wild pigs).
"The idea was to create a paradise for the pigs. They can't break out. Ninety nine per cent of pork that you eat comes from pigs who've never seen the light of day and can barely walk. These are all hairy pigs. They find their own nests, and it's amazing to see them tune into the natural physiology of pig society.
"What do pigs do at night? They all lie on top of each other, nose to tail, conserving heat as they sleep. It's an amazing sight. And the pork itself is a dark pink, almost like beef, and nothing like the grey colour you'll see from factory pork."
To make your own five-mile meal, you can get a list of local food producers from www.organicgreen guide.com. Good Hersdmen's websites are www.goodherdsmen.com www.ballybrado.com. Pat O'Doherty's website is www.blackbacon.com