Basket Case by Philip Boucher-Hayes, Suzanne Campbell

Basket Case

by Philip Boucher-Hayes and Suzanne Campbell

In the boom years, food became Flash Paddy's greatest status symbol. We loved to eat out, yet at the same time, the majority of us continued to throw a pre-cooked chicken and bagged salad into the trolley at the supermarket. Why? Why did food and where it came from matter so little?

When did the nation that was married to the land lose its inner culchie?

In our recent past food and eating were one of the ways in which we redefined ourselves. The spud went out the window. In came prosciutto and sushi. Irish cooking and Irish chefs flourished but the land it was produced on became something we didn't want to know about - wellies were for music festivals. Our connection with countryside and growing food disintegrated. We failed to relate what was on our plate to how we lived.

This is the first book in Ireland to talk about where food really comes from, who decides what we buy and why what we eat says so much about us. It encompasses everything from take away pizza to Irish farmhouse cheese and everything in between: the land, the farmers, producers, suppliers and supermarkets. The authors argue that in our rush to become urban, cosmopolitan and economically progressive, we have forgotten about what we are really good at. Food and farming have been good servants to Ireland - they could be something that make us truly great. `Basket Case' examines the seismic shifts taking place in this country and asks if we've lost touch with one of the few things we did better than everybody else.

Can food, farming and finding our inner culchie save Flash Paddy from himself?

Reviewed by wyvernfriend on

4 of 5 stars

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I've read some horror and thrillers in my time that gave me restless nights, nothing like this.

Like AnnaOok on Librarything I had issues with some of the sweeping generalities of this book and it mostly gets the stars for making me think about the issues at hand.

My father was a teacher and the son of a farmer. Around us was the family farm and I once (when my uncle was very ill) had to fill out the complex forms required of farmers for one of the payments he was entitled to. I also grew up with a lot of homegrown food, parents who usually shopped in smaller shops and still mostly do. I also live in Dublin, have no car, have a Lidl and Eurospar close, have to deal with Gluten-Free issues and that's been an eyeopener.

When you live gluten-free you learn how to read labels, obsessively. Unless it has a magic Gluten-Free label on front you can't trust it to be safe and sometimes the laundry list of ingredients have made me put things back. This made me think more about my choices and for that it gets 4 stars. I lost sleep last night about some of the issues it raised.

I was annoyed at the generalisations, apparently everyone can easily get to farmer's markets, there's no mentions of CSAs or food deliveries. No real solutions offered, only questions. No real how to deal with a dwindling budget, a situation where you're spending the bulk of your income on a mortgage on a property that has lost value. Where you never really spent huge amounts on the trivial stuff he talks about, but still find yourself trying to balance the books in your favour.

Food labelling in Ireland is a mess, farming is a mess and it all needs fixing, this book asks a lot of questions, gives very few answers and lost me some sleep thinking about it.

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  • Started reading
  • 24 January, 2013: Finished reading
  • 24 January, 2013: Reviewed