Foodies

Recent media has centred on a couple of food controversies from Richard Corrigan's poultry outbursts to La Stampa's bad review.

Maybe, just maybe, Ireland's dining has finally reached fully cosmopolitan levels of pretentiousness: a row between a restaurateur and a critic is deemed worthy of a prominent place in the main news pages of our best-selling Sunday paper.

Mind you, it's very much in keeping with the Sunday Independent's lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous form of populism that it should highlight a story about La Stampa, a restaurant few Sindo readers could hope to frequent, and the Dubliner, a magazine few Sindo readers should bother to read.

Meejit hoped the dispute might cut close to the media-studies sinew when the restaurateur, Louis Murray, accused the Dubliner of pique-ridden reviewing after he withdrew advertising from the magazine. Sadly, publisher Trevor White could reject that accusation confidently, saying Murray had never advertised there.

Fair play to White, who has hoisted his loss-making magazine on to the shoulders of its mediocre, pseudo-controversial reviewing of mediocre, pseudo-sophisticated restaurants. Whatever about his relationship with chefs, he gets plenty of help from his pals in other media: the Sunday Independent's two sizeable stories about La Foot-Stampa both contained plugs for the new edition of the magazine. This was White's profitable trade-off for giving the paper an early glimpse of it.

There was a more substantial food controversy offered to the media lately, but they largely shied away from it. It was striking, at a time when bird-flu worries caused TV news to dredge up file footage of chicken farms, that chef Richard Corrigan's attack on Irish poultry-rearing didn't send journalists out to those farms to investigate.

By the way, the emphasis on birds in most of the avian-flu stories is pertinent but somewhat misses the deadlier point. When the virus mutates into a human-to-human form, it's not going to be poultry we're worried about; chances are that mutation will happen elsewhere, and reach Ireland by boat or plane, not on feathered wings.

Anyway, Corrigan, you'll recall, told Ryan Tubridy Irish chickens were "muck". The reports in the next day's papers were standard on-the-one-hand boilerplate, with quotes from his interview and rejection of his views from the Irish Farmers Association. The version in The Irish Times came from a British wire-service report.

Irish media continue to lack the will and resources to take on the food industry. The recent Observer front-page, "Britain's organic food scam exposed", though it barely scratched the surface, is nonetheless crying out for an Irish equivalent. But journalists might have to get their hands dirty.

Back in the Sunday Independent, you'd hardly expect journalists to be scratching around chicken coops, looking for muck. Gawd no. That paper treated Corrigan's complaint as a chance for Emer O'Kelly, Irish journalism's grande dame (sans merci), to lament the awful meals she's been served in top Irish restaurants, and the awful eejits most of us are to put up with it.

O'Kelly made fair points. But the beauty of Corrigan's rant is that it wasn't aimed at overpriced eateries, but at the supermarket shelf; at an industry, not at a few jumped-up cooks. O'Kelly returned the story to the Sindo safety of the capital's upmarket haunts, where she – virtually alone among diners – can separate real quality from the many pretenders.

Lady that she is, she didn't dish the muck specifically, except against safe target Conrad Gallagher, though well-informed readers would have guessed where her wrath was directed, and thus enjoyed feeling in-the-know. (One wonders how most Sunday Independent readers feel about so often being left out-of-the-know.)

Sadly, for such a foodie, O'Kelly gazed adoringly at Michelin stars as the final arbiter of gastronomic excellence. Yes, of course they're a much better recommendation than the Dubliner, but when it comes to food there are always matters of taste, both personal and cultural. When we have a real food culture here, the likes of O'Kelly will know that, as in France, a Michelin endorsement only begins the argument, it doesn't settle it.