Clodagh McKenna's TV series on the Irish farmers' markets debuts on RTÉ next week, but the chef and food writer has set her sights on Italy, where she's now living, and learning from the masters of artisan food production, she tells Catherine Cleary
Early morning queues are a daily routine. Here they routinely involve train tickets, cups of coffee or traffic lights. But Clodagh McKenna experienced a different version when she left her apartment building in Turin in northern Italy at 7.30am recently. The residents around the piazza had crowded into the square, all with the single aim of getting their hands on the freshest vegetables.
"There is a daily fresh food market and the place was packed with people. Before they went to work, they were coming to buy food. They have a food culture here. Everybody has a knowledge of food in Italy."
The Cork-born food writer has been living in Italy, the birthplace of the Slow Food movement, since October. After three years of immersing herself in the Irish farmers' market scene, she has taken on a new challenge, to learn about food-making from the Italians.
"It's absolutely fantastic. For two to three days every two weeks I go and work with a producer. I've learned how to make olive oil and buffalo mozzarella. The producers let me stay with them and feed me and I work in return for lodgings. Though I probably learn more than I work."
The opportunity to learn from the masters has been organised with the help of her Italian boyfriend Sebastiano Sardo, a senior consultant with the Slow Food movement. The two met and became friends over food several years ago.
McKenna came home from college in New York in the 1990s with the idea of starting a coffee or bagel franchise. She took out a credit union loan to do a course at the Ballymaloe cookery school to hone her kitchen skills. But when Myrtle Allen asked her to take over her market stall, she found herself on a different path.
"I started running a stall in 2000 in Midleton market, when there was just a trickle of markets and I was still working in the kitchens in Ballymaloe. All of my business sense went out the window. I just fell in love with the whole connection between the producers and the people coming up to the stalls, and I thought this was the way to change Irish food culture, rather than setting up a restaurant or food business. So I started cooking for the farmers' markets, staying up late at night to get everything ready."
From cooking for the market stall she went on to organise farmers' markets around the country. A radio series and a book, The Irish Farmers' Market Cookbook, followed. Next Wednesday her new eight-part RTÉ series will bring the wicker-basket world of the farmers' market to tea-time TV audiences. Each episode will focus on one market and one kind of food, such as bread, meat or chocolate, with producers talking about their food and then a return to the kitchen to cook a dish with the market ingredients.
What does she make of the evolution of food markets since those mornings at Midleton, and the fact that one of the rarest commodities at an Irish farmers' market is a real live Irish farmer? "It might appear easy, but farmers are very proud and it's a completely different way of thinking that you can make a living setting up a stall and selling something. You do get a lot of wholesalers selling imported goods, but the thing is that gives you a choice. When I started organising markets I was very purist. It had to be farmers. It had to be producers. But a market is about choice and you're never going to stop wholesalers coming in and setting up."
One of the problems she saw as a stallholder was market-goers who got carried away, bought "stacks of stuff" and then had no idea what to do with it all when they got home. "To shop at the markets successfully you have to be market-savvy, make a shopping list before you go and only get things you're going to cook." She believes we still have a way to go to accept that spending money on good food is as important as spending it "in boutiques, or on face creams".
What emerged during filming of the series was the wide range of markets and their different personalities. "The character of the producers creates a different atmosphere in each market." But she worries that the future lies in the hands of these hardworking, labour-of-love producers, rather than successful businesses as such. Will the next generation be as interested in combining punishing schedules with modest incomes? "I would love to see it becoming a little bit more commercial. Very good producers need to be able to supply the supermarkets."
And what about the rise of the celebrity chef, whose ranks she may be about to join when she makes the leap to telly? "I remember somebody in London saying they'd done a report on the rise of celebrity chefs and glossy cookbooks. And as they were increasing, so was the demand for convenience foods. Less celebrity is probably better. It would be wonderful to see more importance being put on the producers and the food, and less on the presenter." u
• The first episode of Fresh from the Farmers' Markets will be shown on RTÉ1 on Wednesday, at 7.30pm