The following is the pre-edit version of my article which appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Times. Those with a subscription can find the full article at www.thesundaytimes.co.uk
under the headline ‘Just Add Bloggers’.
Early last year, a random tweet led to an online Twitter conversation between a handful of Irish food bloggers based in different parts of the country. Lorraine Coppola (italianfoodies.ie) and Imen O’Donnell (marriedanirishfarmer.com) suggested meeting up for a dinner in Harry’s of Inishowen, a remote Donegal restaurant famed for sourcing everything on their menu from the direct locality of the Inishowen peninsula. Caroline Hennessy and Kristen Jensen of the Irish Food Bloggers Association got on board. They tweeted Donal Doherty, owner of Harry’s, to ask for accommodation recommendations for a half dozen bloggers and he offered to organise a food demo or two to make the trek worthwhile.
Word spread, in true Twitter fashion, and the idea grew legs. Hundreds of them. Within weeks the dinner for six had morphed into a full-blown skills-sharing food festival involving 140 hands-on participants and attracting mainstream media attention. Artisan food producers, chefs and restaurateurs joined journalists, broadcasters and bloggers to travel from all ends of the country for the two-night event, braving wintry conditions for what they suspected was going to be a unique experience.
“They proved to be a very noisy 140 people!” says Doherty, coordinator of the now-annual ‘Inishfood’, as the spontaneous festival became dubbed. “We had Ella McSweeney from RTE going round doing radio pieces; we had Sally McKenna interviewing people for the Bridgestone Guide; we had three dozen bloggers tweeting about it. There were 32 blog postings written about it within a few weeks.”
The weekend proved such a phenomenon that it is returning later this month as one of most hotly anticipated events on what is an ever-increasingly busy calender for Irish food festivals.
“Food festivals have become absolutely huge,” says Helen McDaid of Failte Ireland’s Destination Development & Food Tourism Division. “We have a list of about 40 festivals taking place in 2012 compared to just 20 two years ago, and it’s growing all the time.”
The volume of visitors being attracted to many of these festivals is impressive: last month’s inaugural Galway Food Festival saw some 30,000 hungry folk descend upon the city for a weekend of family-friendly events. While many of the scheduled events were free, the associated restaurant and accommodation bookings at such festivals generate a welcome revenue boost.
Besides the short-term benefits for their immediate local economies, collectively these festivals are having a positive long-term impact on Ireland’s reputation as a tourism destination. “Internationally, Ireland doesn’t register on the food tourism radar but we do register for the quality of our ingredients,” says McDaid. “We’re still very close to the land here because we’re such a small island and that feeds into the whole natural and green image of Ireland that visitors have.”
The challenge is to change our own thinking around food, explains McDaid. “The international visitor isn’t going to want to experience something if the domestic market isn’t buying into it. It has to be part of the culture, part of the core.”
While the celebration of indigenous food may not be an obvious part of our heritage or tradition here in Ireland, it has quickly become part of contemporary culture and a welcome respite from what are challenging times. “Festivals are a lovely way for people to celebrate food,” says Sally McKenna of the Bridgestone Guides, who joined her husband John in launching the Galway food festival. “And in Ireland at the moment food is the one positive story, so it’s very timely that it should be celebrated in this way.”
It helps that, through top-down funding and bottom-up volunteerism, these events tend to be pitched at very accessible price-points. “People can go along and really enjoy themselves and it doesn’t cost a fortune,” says McKenna.
But McKenna argues that the appeal goes deeper than affordable entertainment. “It’s sort of elemental. We’re all going back a little bit to finding out what’s really important in life.”
Considered in terms of expected visitor numbers, Inishfood is less than a blip on the food festival landscape. Saturday’s all-day skill-sharing event has a maximum capacity of about 200, and that evening’s no-menu dinner from Harry’s of Inishowen chef Raymond Moran with beer pairings from journalist and food blogger Caroline Hennessy can accommodate no more than 130 diners. Indeed, a fringe event of a Homecoming Dinner featuring Donegal chefs currently cooking in some of the country’s top kitchens has already sold out.
But in terms of that elemental appeal – of tapping into a community spirit and collective goodwill, of rediscovering lost skills, of sharing a knowledge of and celebrating a communal love for food – Inishfood punches well above its weight.
“No matter who I rang last year everybody said yes,” says Doherty. “Everybody wanted to get involved and nobody wanted to be paid. And yet everyone gets something out of it. It’s about sharing the skills and pushing Irish food on a little bit.”
And in terms of influencing our national thinking around food, its core appeal as a festival for food bloggers, writers and practitioners ensures that for many it is the one unmissable festival in the calendar.
“It is pitched to real food lovers. If you love food and you want to learn about it, it’s the festival for you,” says McKenna, who will be leading a foraging walk with chef Enda McEvoy of Galway’s Aniar Restaurant and Manus McGonagle of Quality Sea Vegetables on Sunday morning as just one part of that day’s busy outdoor schedule. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
While the focus of many Irish food festivals is on drinking and eating and enjoying yourself, Inishfood is as much about learning and sharing as well as having a great time. “I learnt more from Inishfood than from any other festival,” says McKenna. “It changed how I made coffee in the morning, it changed the way I tasted beer.”
Last year’s skill-sharing sessions included workshops on making everything from farmhouse butter to fresh blood black pudding. “Seeing people queue up to taste blood was spectacular,” says Caroline Hennessy, co-founder with Kristen Jensen of the Irish Food Bloggers’ Association (IFBA), many of whose 274 members made up the festival-goers last year. “I was amazed at the amount of people who were interested in not just tasting the finished product but seeing what goes into it. The fact that we all got our hands dirty with blood made it something to really remember.”
Together with co-bloggers Imen O’Donnell and Lorraine Coppola, Hennessy and Jensen were key in getting Inishfood on its feet last year. And Doherty hopes that all this year’s attending bloggers will continue to spread the word. “I want Inishfood to be something that shapes what goes on elsewhere.”
So what can we expect to learn about this year, whether as attendees or the many more who will read about the event through social and mainstream media?
“I’m looking forward to the bread-making session from Thibault Peigne, and to getting back into making really good breads at home,” says McKenna. Other highlights will include wild Irish cocktail demonstrations with Oisin Davis of The Sugar Club, coffee-making workshops with Karl Purdy of Coffee Angel, a For Food’s Sake debate on the future of Irish fishing, a tour of local walled gardens lead by Trevor Sargent and a mini-agricultural show hosted by Ella McSweeney of Ear to the Ground featuring rare-breed cows.
The festival will culminate in Sunday’s Feile An Ghrianan Ailigh, a celebration of ancient history and culture at an ancient sun-worshipping fort which will be decked out in hundreds of Celtic flags. Involving hundreds of local volunteers including carnival groups and the GAA club, this Sunday afternoon element is expected to attract up to 2,000 visitors. As well as storytelling, ancient song, music and dance there will be demonstrations of everything from falconry to wattle-making and ancient armoury. Doherty is particularly excited about the chance to highlight the historic Fulacht Fiadh, ancient cooking pits in which festive feasts were prepared. Archaelogist Declan Moore believes they may have also been used as brewing sites, and he will re-enact an ancient beer brew on the day.
Doherty has big ambitions for Feile An Ghrianan Ailigh in future years. “There’s records of an old feast from the 7th century AD of exactly what they had to eat. If we got permission to cook up there next year and re-enact that feast, amazing things could happen.”
Doherty believes the idea “has got serious legs”, as certain ideas sometimes turn out to have. “And therein lies the key to Inishfood staying different from the other festivals. It’s fun, informative and historical, and it’s about learning about what went on and who we are.”
Inishfood takes place in Inishowen, Donegal from 18–20 May 2012.
For more information, see www.irishfoodbloggers.com or www.harrys.ie, or follow @inishfood on Twitter.
PANEL: A short history of Irish food blogging
“When I set up bibliocook.com in 2005 I was one of just a handful of Irish food bloggers. We launched the Irish Food Bloggers Association (IFBA) in October 2010 with 44 members. Today we’re getting three or four emails a week about people who want to be added to the blogroll, which currently lists 274 Irish food blogs. It’s been amazing to see the new surge in people’s interest in and engagement with food.” Caroline Hennessy, IFBA
“For a long time, food writing in Ireland was a closed shop and quite hard to get into, but now bloggers have channelled a way in and it’s a much more exciting world as a result. New writers coming along are able to build a platform for themselves.” Sally McKenna, Bridgestone Guides
See www.irishfoodbloggers.com for a full blogroll of members.
PANEL 2: Hungry for more Irish food festivals?
Some more delicious dates for this month’s diary
National Chowder Cook Off, Kinsale, Co Cork, 13 May: Festival-goers can taste entrants’ chowders and vote for their favourite one.
Burren Slow Food Festival, Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, 18–20 May: A celebration of sustainable approaches to producing quality food and conserving traditions packed with artisan food samplings, talks and cookery demonstrations.
So Sligo Food and Culture Festival, Co Sligo, 18–20 May: Featuring the World Irish Stew Championship, as well as foraging and farms walks, street entertainment and a junior cookery competition.
Baltimore Seafood Festival, Co Cork, 25–27 May: Coinciding with the Baltimore Wooden Boat Festival, festival-goers can indulge in the Atlantic’s finest fish and shellfish
A Taste of Carlingford, Co Louth, 26–27 May: A family-friendly shindig featuring crab fishing, kayaking, a kids cookery school and heritage walks – and of course the chance to feast on Carlingford oysters.
Sheridan’s Cheesemonger’s Irish Food Fair, Co Meath, 27 May: An action-packed and flavour-filled day of tastings, talks and demos hosted by Ireland’s leading cheesemongers and purveyors of home-grown gourmet food.
Bloom, Phoenix Park, Co Dublin, 31 May – 4 June: Ireland’s answer to the Chelsea Flower Show, but with a gathering of some of the finest food producers, brewers and distillers to boot.
See www.discoverireland.ie/Things-To-Do/food/Food-Festivals for more food festivals throughout the year.
