Schoold dinners

While I made the transition from student to gainfully employed a
little while ago, there are still moments in the calendar that deliver
a jolt of nostalgia for the days of homework and timetables and
rattling tin pencil cases. Christmas is such time, where what used to
be a two week mid-winter expanse of of holidays contracts to three or
four days of frenzied revelry and a bloated, woozy return to work
before year's end. The fresh bright sunshine of late May exam weather
is another. As every college campus evolves into a bijoux hedgeschool,
us latte labourers crank up the air-conditioner and undo our ties just
a fraction more.

September protrudes from memory most prominently, noteworthy for me as
it tended to mark a dramatic shift in diet. Gone were the lazy days of
summer grazing, of late breakfasts, lingering lunches, spontaneous
ice-cream runs and of revenous midnight snacking. In its place, food
became regimented, slotted into the day's schedule as fuel for
activitiy, rather than being the activity itself.

In retrospect, my school diet was at times diabetes-inducingly
appalling. But I ran around a bit, and I ate dinner at home, would
even cook myself by times, and there was often as not something green,
something starchy, and some protein on the plate; balancing my diet
between pizza and porridge, between ketchup and coriander.

Yet in the intervening years something of a critical mass appears to
have been reached. A whole sociology has emerged around the
balkanisation of the family meal, the industrialisation of food
production and the socio-economic fissures that increasingly define
what is on our plate as much as what is in our pocket; publicised and
politicised by the likes of Jamie Oliver. The problem of poor diet,
especially among the young, is by now a well established, even
laboured discourse, yet the facts bear repeating.

Obesity is considered to be at epidemic proportions across the island
of Ireland and continues to increase year on year. 1 in 5 children in
the 5-12 year age bracket are estimated to be overweight with half of
these obese. This leads to numerous poor health outcomes with, for
instance, a gain in weight of only a stone doubling a person's chances
of developing type 2 diabetes. Obesity is thought to cost the
exchequer €4 billion annually in morbidity related costs. All of this
has led to loud cries from the 'something must be done' brigade.

The default response, it would appear, is to turn to the schools. As
they throw open their doors once again this September, healthy eating
will be promoted through a smorgasbord of curricular initiatives and
resource packs beloved of the public health campaigners. One example
is the new subject, Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE),
taught now in our secondary schools and soon to be upgraded to a full
Leaving Cert subject, where healthy eating will be taught alongside so
many other 'life skills' in what has beomce a curricular dumping
ground for society's ills.

So can we all rest easy as the little tykes go back to school to learn
the difference between a carrot and a Crunchie? Well, not quite.

One problem is that the link between knowledge and health-behaviour is
ambiguous at best. This is well illustrated by an all-island study of
self-reported knowledge of healthy eating and actual eating habits
among Irish adolescents carried out by Safefood. The study found
knowledge of food nutrition and healthy eating practices were not
straightforwardly linked. Moreover, there was even some evidence to
show that information campaigns focusing on nutrition and obesity can
result in girls in particular filtering information to focus on
calorie content rather than nutritional value, which can actually lead
to very unbalanced eating habits.

Of course these are not pedagogical revelations. Lessons from sex
education should have taught us long ago that a frigid approach was
doomed from the outset. Just as the detailed knowledge of
contraceptive practice is so consumately overcome by hormonal revery,
so too the instant gratification and sugar induced arcadia of the fast
food hit will trump the squat earnestness of the food pyramid when the
progeny are peckish.

The education that is needed is not one of nutrition and health
warnings. This reduces food to chemistry, to biology, to life science.
It presents food without a cultural or emotional aspect. It misses the
fact that wheatgerm will never be a comfort food. If all we teach
about food is the granular facts of vitamins, calorie content and
RDAs, it's hard to get excited, it's hard to care. We loose sight of
its higher functions; the cooking, the the presentation, the social
practices that only we as humans bring to food. It will be by
exploring these latter elements with young people where our latter-day
battle of the bulge can be won.

Needless to say such an approach is unlikely to emerge from our
present education system, itself a pathetically malnourished waif. But
nor should it. Social poliy and education can help, but the fact is
that children's eating habits tend to follow that of their parents.
Parental repsonsibility seems an outmoded and pat solution to many
social issues but its influence in this instance is uncontestable.
It's an equation as robust as any theorum taught in maths. Fat mammy +
fat daddy = fat kid. Perhaps then, as with cooking, we need to stop
outsourcing the blame and the first lessons to be learned, are a
little closer to home.

Cava

Cava
51 Lower Dominic Street, Galway City
Tel: 091 539 884
www.cavarestaurant.ie/ cavaspanishrestaurant.blogspot.com

Word of mouth and a host of gushing reviews drew me to Cava restaurant
on a recent tour west. The Galway restaurant, owned and run by chef JP
McMahon and his wife Drigín, serves excellent tapas and spanish
influenced food that adds a new culinary dimension to the city's long
standing links to the Iberian peninsula

Spanish cuisine has emerged from the shadow of its European bretheren
of late. With this bullish charge led by the mesmeric Ferrán Adria, of
El Bulli, a stampede of tapas style restaurants and menus have
followed on his coat-tails, each flying the flag with greater or
lesser authenticity. The scaled down portions and expanded choice of
tapas offer the perfect fuel for the cost conscious, attention deficit
appetites of the modern diner. Cava then is a restaurant very much of
and for its time.

The extensive menu reads like a tapas greatest hits with a B-side of
interesting and obscure regional dishes. Usual suspects of patatas
bravas and calamari sit alongside braised tongue, lambs heart and
kidneys in sherry and we were left to whittle down our choices over
warm bread and good oil. From a decently priced Spanish wine list we
chose two glasses of red, with the Rioja particulalry good, delivering
a flurry of red fruits that raced across the palette.

Potatoes with serrano ham and cherry tomatoes won plaudits from my
companion though I thought I picked up the acrid taste of burnt
garlic. Patatas bravas were served skin on, a little too rough and
ready for my taste, while Spanish tomato bread was simply toast,
cheese and tomato served pinchos style on a stick, but none the worse
for that. The grilled tomatoes were sweet and vibrant contrasting the
dense and unctious manchengo.

The rustic cooking continued with lamb heart, stuffed with pork and
chorizo. This was an ode to classic peaseant cooking, though let down
a little by arriving to the table lukewarm. The heart was slowly
cooked and kept remarkably tender, its visceral flavour abley matched
by the robust stuffing. A plate of cured tuna was simplicity itself,
the intensity if the opaque fishy slivers defused by sharp pickeld
cucumber.

At this point we were taken in an altogether different direction.
Where the previous dishes were rough around the edges, duck with plums
was a dish of poise and elegance that ate as well as it looked; the
duck cooked to the moment of medium rare perfection and the plums rich
and honeyed with just a little bite. It showcased not just the variety
of spanish cuisine but also the range that the kitchen was capable of.
For dessert, Creme Catalan was assuredly handled and daintily
presented. The accompanying biscotti were riotously good, baked
in-house with tantalising hints of orange peel and cinnamon.

I approached Cava with huge good will, and though it missed the mark
with one or two details, remain of that opinion. Cava owes nothing to
foody trends and everything to the knowledge and passion of its owners
for authentic, hearty spanish cooking. It proved the perfect choice of
venue to wile away an afternoon of conversation and reminisence,
punctuated by a steady procession of tasty tapas, brought as ready
from the kitchen. The length and breadth of the menu means that there
will be something for everyone's taste, and plenty left to come back
and try the next time.

We Loved: The extensive menu and obvious enthusiasm and passion of the
operation.

We Spent: €68 for two glasses of wine, seven tapas, one lemonade and a coffee.

This review appeared in Food and Wine Magazine

Plenty more fish in the sea

I was struck recently by the advertising approach taken by a newly
opened sushi restaurant in south Dublin. It's posters sought to entice
customers through the door with the slogan “Don't worry, it's not just
fish”. Now in marketing terms, this is roughly equivalent to Colonel
Sanders saying, “C'mon in, the coleslaw is great” but here in Ireland,
on reflection, it made a certain amount of sense.

Down through history, when it comes to eating fish, the Irish have
always had something of an ambivalent attitude. As the salmon of
knowledge lay sizzling in the pan before him, Fionn Mac Cumhaill never
showed the least interest in actually eating the thing. Similarly,
it's a frequent source of wonder to many why an island nation like
Ireland could experience famine while the oceans around teamed with
the food that has sustained so many other races.

Even in more contemporary times the 'fish on friday' tradition, though
belonging to a bygone age of devotion, has left an indelible cultural
mark on our collective culinary psyche. In my time in college in
Galway I could probably count on my fingers the number of times I ate
a fish meal, usually joining the long queues of ravenous and
frustrated carnivores outside McDonagh's Fish and Chip shop on Ash
Wednesday and Good Friday. Hethens and heretics to a man but
nevertheless they remained incapable of digesting meat on a holy day
of obligation. For the Irish, fish was not food, it was observance;
penance.

Recently this has been changing. We're eating more fish than ever and,
dare I say it, maybe even enjoying it. Growth in demand for seafood is
outpacing that of other protein products in the Irish food market, in
part through increasing awareness of the health and nutritional
benefits associated with fish and also because of a greater variety
and quality of product on offer. Yet, just like the reveller that
arrives late to the party to find the beer fridge empty, it seems the
fun will soon be over and all that will be left is the cleaning up.

Concern about the depletion of global fish stocks has been increasing
of late. It is generally accepted that the global fishing catch peaked
in the late 1980's and has been in steady decline since that time.
More recent estimates are have added urgency to these observations.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation some
75 per cent of wild marine fish are now said to be either or
overfished or fully-exploited. In parts of European waters, stocks of
cod are as low as 10% of what they were a century ago.

As looming environmental disasters go, depleting fish stocks have
received relativley few column inches thus far but now some watchdogs
claim that we could be looking at piscean genocide and empty oceans by
the middle of this century. Having lost lives, land and mythical
cities to the depths of the sea it seems we are now exacting our
revenge by unpicking the vast ecosystem that is submerged beneath its
surface. The removal of even one significant fish species from the
food chain can result in a simplified ecosystem that is vulnerable to
total collapse.

This years World Ocean's Day in June saw perhaps the beginning of the
effort to turn back the tide on this issue. The documentary End of the
Line premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, providing a compelling
insight into the impact of overfishing on the world's oceans, in
particular charting the plight of the blue fin tuna, a popular
delicacy at some of the worlds top dining tables, now perilously close
to extinction. The film is being accompanied by a global environmental
campaign with widespread green support for sustainable fishing
policies.

At the same time, Marks and Spencers has announced its plans to source
only pole and line-caught tuna for its meals and products. The chain
has never stocked blue fin tuna and this latest move sets a further
positive precedent for retailers and their suppliers. Greenpeace
recently criticised high profile tuna producers such as John West for
using unsustainable fishing techniques, frequently snaring other
species in their nets which are thrown back into the sea dead. Pole
and line-catching, such as that endorsed by M&S, avoids such waste.

Sadly there appears little political will as yet to delve down into
this problem. The European Common Fisheries Policy, for instance, was
revised in 2002 ostensibly to preserve European fish stocks. It's
stated objective is 'sustainable exploitation' and this oxymoronic
phrase is revealing. By any reasonable measure, it has failed in this
regard, consistently ignoring recommendations for sustainable fishing
quotas and prioritising the interests of the fishing industry over
conservation and environmental concerns. Such behaviour is recklessly
shortsighted in the face of startling evidence of the overexploitation
of our common waters and the urgent need to reduce our fishing fleet
and a reconfiguration of the interminable politics which decide the
current quota system.

Yet if we can take hopeful message from the End of the Line campaign
and M&S's new sustainable sourcing policies, it is that of consumer
power. Here in Ireland our consumption of fish remains modest by
international standards and the industry remains relatively
underdeveloped. There is significant scope for diverting some of
fisheries employment into diversified fish processing and in leading
the way for sustainable fishing practices in our waters. As with all
market developments, this is most likely if it is demand. When it
comes to fish our consumer behaviour is relatively newly formed, and
therefore amenable to change. Promoting a sustainable seafood culture
is vital and this can be a two-way process, providing information on
what fish to eat and when with consumers responding by eating and
shopping conscientiously. Quite what the response will look like in
places like Japan is another matter but for the moment it is clear
that action needs to be taken or else we may soon be saying sayonara
to sushi, catch you later cod.

Fishy Facts

The fishing industry in Ireland is worth €702 million per annum
It provides direct employemnt to 11,615 people
700,000 tonnes of fish are caught in Irish waters annually
38% of our fish is sourced from farming, below the EU average
The areas showing the highest proportions of fully-exploited stocks are
the Northeast Atlantic, the Western Indian Ocean and the Northwest Pacific.
www.endoftheline.com