When eating out really does mean eating out
Sitting in the fruit garden to the rear of the Ballymaloe Cookery School after a tasty organic lunch, Darina Allen shakes her head in dismay at the recent announcement that the Environmental Protection Agency has given permission to Teagasc to carry out trials on GM potato crops. Is a small-scale trial on a controlled 2.5-acre plot really going to make any difference to the agri-food industry? The reply is unequivocal:
“Oh yes. Lose our GM-free status? Who wants to eat genetically-modified potatoes, would you mind telling me? You put genetically-modified potatoes on the shelf and see who wants to buy them. Look at the big supermarkets in Europe; they don’t want genetically-modified produce on their shelves. The large beef exporters that are selling our beef around the world have to make contracts with farmers to ensure they don’t produce genetically-modified beef because otherwise it won’t sell. Who wants it?
“This kind of thing is always looked upon as progress in Ireland… We’re an organic farm here and we don’t use chemicals on our potatoes, so we must use blight-resistant varieties. Blight-resistant varieties already exist, so all we need to do is work on those as well. Now they are different and some of them are quite wet and not so good, but there are ones that are very good. Or why don’t they carry out these trials in the UK? They can find out what they want by doing that as well and they wouldn’t have to jeopardise our GM-free status, which is such a precious thing.
“Everybody is busting a gut to keep up this great reputation that we have; we must deliver on it. We’re really in trouble if we talk the talk and don’t walk the walk. Everybody from Diageo to Glanbia depend on this image. So what’s going on? Why is one department running with something and everybody else is spending millions on promoting this other image?”
Darina Allen knows about marketing. It was in the early 1990s that she was first inspired by a visit to California to get involved in the creation of a farmers’ market network in Ireland. At the time, she says, many farmers were being deeply affected by the change in policy amongst most supermarket chains where they had to buy products centrally. It was the effective bunging up of a conduit that allowed producers to sell to their markets and the creation of an old-fashioned market system was the answer. Elementary marketing, really.
But this is precisely what the success of the Ballymaloe brand has been. This is a 100-acre mixed farm that employs 45 people all year round (rising slightly up to 50 in high season). It has always been organic – since long before the word became a buzz word and it has done so because Darina and her husband have always had a feeling for what people wanted.
The farm that they inherited had been a thriving and highly innovative apple farm. Rising labour costs and fuel costs in the 1960s hit the business hard and the notion of a cookery school was born out of the conviction of using what they had and marketing it as best they possibly could.
Darina is also one to keep up with trends and it’s from USA that a lot of inspiration comes nowadays. The American experience, she says, unlike that of many European countries, mirrors in a more extreme way the manner in which people have become removed from the process of food creation. This has created a craving amongst the public to get closer to the source of their food – something that is felt more acutely in the US but which is clearly prevalent amongst the Irish populace too.
If you need any evidence of that desire, you need look no further than the recent “Long Table Dinner” on the grounds of Ballymaloe Cookery School. It is the third of such events, where both kitchen and enormous table were installed in the impressive green house complex. Diners paid €120 per head for an experience that started at 4pm with a tour of the cookery school and organic gardens and ended with a banquet amidst the silently-growing vegetables. The event was over-subscribed for some time beforehand.
“One of the growing movements in America is this thing called ‘agri-tainment’. It’s literally where farmers – usually smaller farmers – are finding that their farms can be viable if they do what’s called ‘agri-tainment’. In other words, they have dinners or they might be inviting people to a whole list of things like a farm fair. They often make more money out of that than they do out of farming. Or, they make enough money out of it to keep them in farming.
“People in America are even more far removed from how food is made than they are here, of course, and they’re thrilled to come to farms. People now want to have their weddings on farms. The chic-est thing now is to have your wedding on a farm.”
This is all very well in this niche market of organic farming and new trends with American names, but where does it all fit in with the agricultural industry in Ireland – an industry that’s really more about €9 billion worth of exports including industrial-scale output of milk powder and sides of beef being exported to the four corners of the world?
“I firmly believe that there’s room for both,” says Darina, “and there’s a need for both. In every parish in Ireland, there’s a love of the land and of wanting to stay on the land. They don’t necessarily want to be big and they desperately want to find something to make it economic. They’re often in a state of torment in trying to make it economically viable.”
Looking around the set-up at Ballymaloe Cookery School, you can see this spirit of innovation and of making the most out of the assets they possess everywhere. The breakfast room for the “non-corporate breakfasts” (ie breakfasts without processed cereals or fry-ups) becomes a pop-up pizza parlour at weekends for Darina’s son-in-law. Another son-in-law runs two farmers’ markets and is currently experimenting with producing smoked mackerel. These are just two of the more recent additions to a whole suite of activities around the school and farm that include self-guided farm tours and garden walks.
“There’s room for large and small in our agricultural industry… It’s not true that you can’t produce a lot of food on a small farm and we need to re-localise our food production and work on that before fuel prices go right up.
“They’re not mutually exclusive – they should be happening side by side. Every village should have a dairy farm that supplies the village with milk and yogurt and whatever else; like they have in Germany and France and elsewhere in Europe. I wonder if, in Ireland, we haven’t always suffered from an inferiority complex of sorts – that faraway hills were a bit greener and that bigger is better.
“All of the advice that was given to the farmers is of the sort that if you can’t increase your size and increase your yield, then you’re at nothing. Well I don’t believe that. I believe that there’s room for every size to be economic and it can’t be economic if you go through the ordinary retail system. You have to look at what you have and add value to your farm and sell your produce through the local farmers’ market.”
