Conscious Dining | Eating Rooted in Place

Some weeks, a neighbour drops a box by the door. Apples, still cool from the tree. Tomatoes from a greenhouse two gardens over, still carrying that faint, unmistakable smell of the vine. Courgettes that, only a few hours earlier, were growing in soil I could walk to.

Nobody phones ahead. It just happens, in that wonderfully ordinary way that some things still happen when people live close enough to one another to share what they have. It took me a while to notice how unusual that actually is.

We live in a time when almost anything is available almost all of the time. Strawberries in December, asparagus long after spring has passed, herbs flown in from somewhere we couldn’t point to on a map. We have become so accustomed to abundance and convenience that the idea of food having a particular season, a particular landscape or a particular person attached to it can feel almost old fashioned.

But something is lost when food becomes entirely anonymous.

It isn’t only flavour, although that matters. It is the sense that food comes from somewhere. That it has travelled through a landscape, been grown or raised by someone, harvested at a particular moment and brought into our kitchens while that moment still exists.

That box by the door is a small reminder of the opposite. It has a place attached to it. A season. A person who grew it and thought of me while doing so.

I think there is something worth paying attention to in that.

Knowing where the food comes from

Local lamb in these parts comes from Willie Drohan, a sixth generation shepherd farming in the Comeragh Mountains. His lamb spends much of their life foraging across the hills, and when I cook it, I know something about where that meat came from before it arrived in my kitchen.

That knowledge changes the experience of eating it.

It would be easy to reduce the argument for buying locally produced food to food miles, as though the distance between farm and kitchen were the only thing that mattered. It isn’t. The environmental impact of food is shaped by much more than the journey it takes after it leaves the farm, including how it is produced in the first place.

For me, though, the most compelling reason to know where the lamb comes from is more personal than that. I know the person who raised it. I know the landscape. I can picture the hills.

That feels different from buying something whose entire history disappears somewhere between a label and a supermarket shelf.

The pleasure of season

The same is true of vegetables.

When you eat something in its season, there is a particular pleasure in knowing that you are eating it at the moment it is supposed to be there. The first strawberries of summer. Tomatoes when they are genuinely ripe. Apples when the trees are heavy with them. Asparagus for those few weeks when it seems to appear everywhere and then, almost as quickly, disappears again.

Seasonality gives food a rhythm.

It also gives us something we have become rather unused to: waiting.

We don’t have to wait for much anymore. We can have almost anything delivered tomorrow, or find almost any ingredient on a supermarket shelf regardless of the month. There is obvious convenience in that, and I am certainly not arguing for a return to a life in which every meal requires a relationship with a farmer.

But I do wonder whether having everything all the time has made some food less interesting.

When something is only here for a few weeks, you notice it.

You look forward to it. You cook it differently. You eat more of it while it is around. Then you let it go.

There is something rather lovely about food having an ending.

The person behind the plate

Our fish comes through Billy Burke’s in Ballybricken, a fishmonger who was doing this long before provenance became something restaurants printed on menus.

The crab, specifically, comes from a fisherman working the waters off Hook Head in Wexford, someone they know rather than a supplier several steps removed from the person who caught it.

I like that there is a person in that chain.

I like being able to imagine the boat, the water, the hands that brought the crab in. It doesn’t make the food more virtuous. It simply makes it more real.

So much of modern food has become invisible to us. We see the finished product, neatly packaged and ready to eat, but not the field, the farm, the sea, the weather, the season or the people involved in getting it there.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons food can sometimes feel strangely disconnected from the rest of our lives. I try to make and build those connections everywhere I can. My local salad and green leaves comes from Garrai Mara, Comeragh Mountain Farms and Paul at BareFoot in Dunhill. 

So often the culture we exist in, convinces us to eat food without knowing much about it. Lets change that.

Eating where you are

The sea salt is hand harvested on the Dingle Peninsula. The ketchup is made in Cork, with less sugar and more character than many of the versions we grew up with. The butter and cream come from Glenilen Farm in the Golden Vale. These are not exotic ingredients. They are Irish ingredients, made by people working within landscapes and food traditions that are much closer to home than we sometimes realise.

And there are places that make finding this kind of food easier. Ardkeen Quality Food Store in Waterford has long championed Irish producers, as does the Country Store in Dungarvan. You don’t have to become an obsessive label reader or drive from farm to farm every Saturday morning. Sometimes it is simply a matter of looking a little more closely at what is already around you.