So what do you do for a living? There aren’t many people in Ireland who have a job title like Regina Sexton’s: food and culinary historian. She runs the two-year master’s programme at University College Cork, which accepts some 10 mature students at a time. “The name of the course is a bit of a mouthful: food study and Irish food ways,” she says over lunch in Cork city centre.
The vast majority of the (mostly female) student cohort Sexton has had so far have had some previous connection with food. They have included food producers, food writers and those involved in food education through college or secondary schools.
Sexton grew up in Cork city, where her father came from a family of three generations of bakers.
“Growing up, we had a leg in the past, with our dad being a baker, and also a leg in modernity. Now I have to explain to students how things are made. Things like how butter is made. That to me should be almost intuitive knowledge, but it’s not. You give a students a jar of cream to shake and it turns into fat and buttermilk, and they are astounded. I suppose that’s an indication of how far away we have now come from food production and that connection with the land, as an island of farmers.”
She studied history at third level, and was particularly interested in a module on the social history of food, looking at ale, cheese and cattle. After her BA, in the 1980s, Sexton went to live and work in France for a period; an experience that had a significant influence on her.
“France was an eye-opener: coming from Ireland in the 1980s and seeing the difference in the food culture between the two countries,” she says. “You’d go to people’s houses for dinner, and they had conversations around the ingredients. This was all so strange to me. We never spoke about food like that at home. Or even if we did, the conversations were short ones. To them, it was like a food discourse that was very natural.
“You’d go to someone’s house and they might have chicken for the dinner, so they’d start talking not just about the chicken, but about the varieties of chicken and what kind of a poulet was the one being cooked. This was literally a foreign language to me. I didn’t know what was going on.”
En route to her job teaching English, she passed a cheese shop on a daily basis. “I thought it was crazy that there was a shop for cheese. How could you have a shop just for cheese? All of it was like a foreign exotic land coming from Ireland in the 1980s.”
Sexton decided to go back to Ireland and continue her studies at postgraduate level. She was a contributor to the Oxford Companion to Food, for the Irish food entries; an enormous enterprise edited by Alan Davidson, and originally published in 1999. Along the way, she also did the three-month cookery course at Ballymaloe House.
“Myrtle Allen was an advocate, and a voice, for small producers from rural Ireland. She reminded me of my dad,” she says. “My dad used to say that a lot of the small bakeries in Ireland would disappear. That was his experience of one element of small regional food production in Ireland, and he was dead right.”
From the perspective of a food historian whose focus is on Irish food, she says oats are the most interesting ingredient to her.
Why?
“Oats are one of those ingredients that changes as you go through time. It was one of the big cereals of Gaelic food culture, for bread and for oatcakes. It then got pushed out by the potato to some extent. It coexisted with the potato for a while. Then as wheat became cheaper after the Famine, oats got pushed out. Oats is one ingredient you can drag through time. Porridge is quite a Scottish and Irish thing, but oats is a thing in the rest of Europe that you tend to feed animals rather than to people.”
She talks about colonisation, and how the British empire affected Ireland’s role in the export of its food.
“When food assumed an export value, it became integral to the colonisation project, and Ireland produced so much beef and butter. The 1600s was the time the British empire was colonising other parts of the world, the big one being America. From the 17th century on, Ireland was treated like a big farm. Ireland became integral in supporting the empire from a beef and a butter perspective, and a lot of it was going to America; to the New World.”
In an era before refrigerators, beef was preserved by salting, thus producing corned beef. It’s the reason Americans still traditionally associate corned beef as an essential St Patrick’s Day Irish foodstuff. It’s fair to say most people living in Ireland would not seek out corned beef to eat on St Patrick’s Day.
“Cork became the centre of all that export activity back then; they built up a reputation for being particularly expert at preserving and salting beef. And we are close to the Golden Vale too, of course. You had cattle being reared in Munster, slaughtered in Cork, and then sent across the Atlantic. That beef fed the slaves in the plantations in America, and those slaves were there to produce sugar and cotton and coffee.
“Then that sugar was coming back into Europe, particularly in the 18th century, because of the huge and growing appetite for sugar in the Old World. It’s a commodity circulation of goods and people, with Ireland and Cork bang in the middle of it.”
This commodity circulation led to the introduction of chocolate, coffee, tomatoes and potatoes to Europe.
“And for Ireland, the most culturally significant commodity is the potato. Then this brings us to the whole complexity of what happens to the potato cultivation in the 18th century: the population explosion, land changes, the diet being debased for the rural poor, then Famine in the middle of the 19th century. You can tell this political, social and economic story through food. We think we have a choice in the way we build relationships with food, and we do, but so much of it is beyond our control as well. Cattle, beef and milk have been culturally embedded in Ireland for so long.”
Over time, Sexton has noticed various trends emerge, such as “the diversity of food in Irish supermarkets”. This summer, she went out of her way to visit a Walmart in Colorado, after not being in the US for several years. As on her former visit to a Walmart, Sexton was expecting to see a huge range of unfamiliar food, but was disappointed, describing it as being like a “big Tesco. Ireland has caught up with the US.”
Their quest or yearning to make a difference is kind of being hijacked by big businesses and by big food companies, who are giving them all this vegan food
Another trend she’s noticed emerging over time is that of wild food and foraging. “That definitely started with Noma”, the Copenhagen restaurant that became famous for serving up local and foraged foods to diners. “It made people start to think about the impact of their food choices. Veganism would be part of all that.
[ Mushroom hunting in Ireland: You really need to know what you’re doingOpens in new window ]
“A lot of young people are vegan now, and they are vegan for all sorts of different reasons. They are vegan because they might want to be healthy, or because they are motivated by social justice, or environmental justice for animals and people.”
The fact remains that when anything connected with food becomes a trend – whether for altruistic reasons or not – there is then an opportunity to commercialise that trend.
“I feel sorry for these young people,” says Sexton. “Their quest or yearning to make a difference is kind of being hijacked by big businesses and by big food companies, who are giving them all this vegan food. And it’s highly processed, pre-packaged stuff. So many food companies are moving into this space now ... It all always comes back to money in the end.”
