The answer lies in my growing personal awareness of the damage to humans and to the environment by our increasingly globalised food supply chain. It’s also to do with Kerry-based artist and food activist Lisa Fingleton. Fingleton the founder of a growing movement called The 30-Day Local Food Challenge. Each September, she and others eat only food produced in Ireland to highlight issues of food sovereignty and provenance.
One of Fingleton’s bugbears is our food labelling system which allows products like freshly squeezed orange juice and sushi, and black pudding made with dried Chinese blood powder, to be labelled Irish. EU legislation means foods are labelled according to the country in which they “underwent their last, substantial, economically-justified processing”.
The volume of goods labelled Irish on supermarket shelves might make it look like we have a high level of food security. But how much is actually from Ireland?