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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
VILLAGEApril/May
I
F anyone doubts the importance of food
they should examine the Environmental
Protection Agency’s breakdown of
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions
by sector in Ireland: agriculture ranks high-
est representing % of the total. Excessive
caloric consumption is also fuelling the
obesity pandemic, the biggest public health
challenge facing this country.
The increased media focus on food is
welcome as it may give people pause to ques-
tion what have been damaging choices, to
themselves and the wider environment.
Journalistic enquiry could counter the
intense advertising of iniquitously subsi-
dised foodstuffs such as beef. Alas in Ireland
investigation of the food chain is sporadic
at best.
There is no doubt that food writing can
exert a huge influence on consumer prefer-
ence. When the doyenne of English cookery
Elizabeth David began writing her first book
in , olive oil could only be found in
pharmacies; today the supermarket shelves
groan under every conceivable grade of vir-
gin purity, though Tom Mueller has latterly
detailed serious malpractices, in ‘Extra-
Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous
World of Olive Oil’.
Moreover, in the seven years following
the release of John Robbin’s ‘Diet for a New
America’ in US beef consumption
fell by %, a decline which the National
Cattlemen’s Beef Association attributed to
its publication. Even celebrity chef Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall has been instrumen-
tal in bringing about a change in EU fisheries
law on the discarding of by-catches.
Obviously times and media have changed,
but perhaps food writer Susan Jane White
can emerge as Ireland’s answer to Elizabeth
David, a devotee of Mediterranean cuisine
in the post-War period. David Kynaston in
‘Austerity Britain -’ asserts: that
“among those at the very vanguard of the
culinary broadening out, David was the
totemic figure”, even if not the most widely
read.
Indeed in ‘Spicing Up Britain – The
Multicultural History of British Food’, an
analysis of the evolution of British food
culture, Panikos Panayi likens her role to
that of Rousseau or Voltaire in a culinary
enlightenment, because of the number of
writers who followed in her wake.
David’s readership was not broad-based
but the mainstream success of Jamie Oliver
would have been impossible without her
pioneering work. Her legacy bears out the
theory that elite dining habits percolate
through to the rest of society. Thus in the
CULTURE
Also in this section:
In the sticks: Shirley Clerkin 58
Sugar-free, wheat-free and dairy-free eating.
Review by Frank Armstrong
Healthy food
dressed in
virgin white
The Extra Virgin Kitchen
Susan Jane White
Gill & Macmillan, 2014
€19.99
April/May VILLAGE
Middle Ages white bread, sugar and meat
were the preserve of elite classes, but once
they could be mass produced through the
industrial and agricultural revolutions
the lower orders began to lap them up.
Conversely, the traditional wholegrain,
sugar-free, mainly plant-based diet of most
European peasants is now increasingly de
rigueur for today’s upper classes.
Through a column in the Sunday
Independent, and now in an elegant recipe
book ‘The Extra Virgin Kitchen’, Susan Jane
White: ex-model, former Oxford University
PhD candidate in medical anthropology,
and wife of museum curator and man-about-
town, Trevor White, is undoubtedly exer ting
a considerable influence on Irish consumer
preferences and may be capable of shifting
Ireland towards healthier and more ethi-
cal choices. The book promotes sugar-free,
wheat-free and dairy-free eating.
Health-food shops celebrate her Sunday
articles with glee, and the release of her
recipe book will be manna for these often
over-priced emporia.
White’s own food journey is interesting,
and not entirely glamorous. She recalls that
in her busy life as a scholar and model, time
was not allocated to food preparation. She
relied on Irish staples like toast and crisps
which eventually wrought devastation on
her body. She recalls that: “Food was ruin-
ing my health … First came shakes, then
horrid urinary infections, constipation,
mouth ulcers and exhaustion”.
She found that: “ten years ago the medi-
cal community dismissed the idea of food
sensitivities like industry tycoons scoffing
at global warming”. Eventually she was
admitted to hospital as her white blood cell
count reached distressingly low levels. She
realised that dairy, wheat and sugar were
“lethal in my system”, and worked out a
whole-food, mainly plant-based diet which
has enhanced her vitality to a point where
she writes that people say her “energy lev-
els would rival Graham Norton on acid”, and
she has a gospel to evangelise.
Certainly it will be argued that many of
the exotic foodstuffs she advocates, such as
coconut oil, chia seeds and quinoa neces-
sitate gross carbon emissions but in fact
the transportation of food has far less of
an impact than production. Deriving Irish
butter from Irish cows fed on genetically-
modified soya beans grown in Argentina
tends to cause more emissions than say
coconut oil, a product consumed directly
by humans (not first by animals).
White is a particular devotee of buck-
wheat and of quinoa, most of the global
supply of which is grown in Bolivia and
Peru. Here it is surprising that White lists
Joanna Blythman as one of her influences as
last year Blythman wrote a blistering attack
on vegans for consuming quinoa, arguing it
was forcing Bolivian peasants to consume
inferior staples, and that quinoa could not
be grown in the UK.
But it emerged that one variety of qui-
noa can actually be grown as far north
as Scotland (and so Ireland). Further,
Blythman’s fair trade argument against
quinoa was seriously undermined by a
documentary on quinoa in Bolivia. The film-
maker wrote: “I haven’t interviewed a single
farmer who has admitted to having given up
eating quinoa due to [unaffordability]’.
Needless to say there is no evidence of
Teagasc trialling a crop that contains a full
range of essential amino acids and which
the UN FAO viewed so favourably that
was declared the year of quinoa.
In bald economic terms, there is no doubt
that the occasionally high price of some of
the ingredients she advocates is less than
the cost of healthcare that the Standard
Irish Diet connotes. But further recipe
books and articles might explore more
affordable options emphasising local pro-
duce that could involve linking consumers
to farmers through Community Supported
Agriculture.
White does not include any dairy produce
in her recipes but is clearly not a vegan. She
includes one recipe for lamb, and a few for
chicken, although she does caution peo-
ple to reduce their meat intake for health
reasons and advocates a complete cessa-
tion of cured meat consumption due to its
incontrovertible connection to cancer of
the colon.
A large number of her recipes does how-
ever contain eggs. This is quite surprising
considering a study from Western
university in Canada showed that, as with
cigarettes, the more egg yolks people
consumed the thicker their artery walls
became, an indicator of elevated heart dis-
ease risk.
White includes many fish recipes which
provide an abundance of essential Omega
fatty acids (in the form of DHA and EPA).
But many deep-sea species including mack-
erel and tuna have been shown to contain
unhealthy levels of heavy metals such as
mercury, and there are question over the
health benefits of fish oil after an Ohio
State University study showed a correlation
between prostate cancer and high levels of
these oils in the bloodstream, although
the study did not distinguish between oil
coming from supplements and oil embod-
ied directly in fish.
Of far greater importance is the extent
to which over-fishing is devastating our
marine environment to a point where fish
consumption is increasingly unethical
whatever ones view on the sanctity of all
life. The Irish Wildlife Trust has adopted
a traffic light system which should inform
consumption. White includes recipes for
hake and herring which are given a green
light by the Trust, but in her recipes for
salmon she offers support to an egregious
farming industry.
There are few wild salmon left in Irish
waters, and it takes approximately four
kg of wild caught fish to generate one kg
of farmed fish. Farming salmon is the food
-chain equivalent of farming tiger, so high
are they in the hierarchy.
As alternative sources of Omega White
includes ingredients such as walnuts, chia
and linseed which contain plant-based, sus-
tainable Omega albeit in the form of ALA
which is converted to varying degrees to
DHA and EPA.
Perhaps it is the fault of the publishers
but, though it is clear that dietary health
is the author’s primary concern, it is a
pity White has not engaged a little further
with these ethical questions or provided
more systematic, less random, nutritional
analysis.
Overall, Susan Jane White’s first recipe
book amplifies her positive effect on Irish
eating habits. Many of her recipes facili-
tate protein reduction. A recent study from
the Longevity Institute at the University of
South California provides ample evidence
that a low-protein diet will significantly
diminish a person’s risk of cancer. The
author of the study Valter Longo said:
“People need to switch to a diet where only
around nine or ten percent of their calories
come from protein, and the ideal sources
are plant-based”. If quinoa and buckwheat
were to replace white pasta and white rice
it would be of great benefit to the health of
the nation.
Even if White’s appeal may now be lim-
ited to the higher social classes, in time her
approach to food may gain broader traction.
Her appeal may extend beyond these shores
if the tastefully designed recipe book gains
exposure in the UK.
Some might cringe at the family scenes in
the photos, but that is what sells as we see
from the exposure of the domestic lives of
many celebrity chefs across the water. And
the message is useless unless it is sold. The
only regret is that White’s scholarly ability
has not yet been fully harnessed to allow
definite parallels to be drawn with Elizabeth
David. •
