I grew up in an ordinary, working-class home, where the diet was the basic, simple fare that Irish people have eaten since the invention of the potato. My Mum was great at cooking the basics, but stuck to them. (And her home baking was always excellent too.) But, I never got any introduction to the idea of "cuisine" or "quality food". Food could be tasty, but basically it was just fuel.
When I was a student, I had very little money. No, really. I had
to eat plain pizza, baked beans and chips in the university cafeteria
every day, because that was the cheapest meal on the menu. In
the evenings, I often bought something described as a "pie"
at the local chip shop. This being Scotland, the "pie" was
deep-fried. It contained a grey substance alleged to be meat. At the
time, no-one knew that mad cow disease was entering the food chain,
but I seem to have escaped it. Mooo.
So in my first job,
although I now had some money to spend, I had no idea what good food
was all about, and when travelling, I subsisted on burgers and the
like.
But then I got put on a project in Bristol with a
colleague, another Steve, Steve McKinty. Steve's parents were in the
restaurant business, and he had been brought up to appreciate food
and wine. He also like to take the opportunity to sample what the
restaurants had to offer when he travelled.
We tried a
different place in Bristol every night, and I got quite an education.
Fortunately we were both of the skinny metabolism type, which meant
that eating large meals every day didn't become a problem. Two large
meals a day, actually, because there was a pub near the office which
did a great carvery for lunch.
Thus it was that, in later
years, when I discovered Italy (well, if Columbus could "discover"
America when lots of people already knew where it was, then I can
discover Italy) I could appreciate the wonderful Italian cuisine. I
think the best meal I ever had was wild boar at La Mandragola
in San Gimignano.
My own home cooking gradually progressed as well. When I first got my own house, I was certainly able to fend for myself, unlike the majority of Irish males, who are passed directly from Mammy to Wife and don't know what a kitchen is for. But I suppose a lot of my diet was convenience food in the beginning, and only gradually did I start to buy actual "ingredients" and do things with them. In my earlier history of romantic relationships, I could rustle up a fair candle-lit dinner and turn-about meals became the rule; and by the time I was in a long-term relationship, I was probably the majority cook. After the break-up, I always found I was preparing too much food: cooking for two.
I began to think about food differently again in more recent years, in relation to the ecological cost of producing it. Perhaps my moment of illumination came in Tescos, when I was about to buy onions, and noticed the country of origin: Argentina. I thought, "If it makes economic sense to bring onions from Argentina to Ireland, then the world is fucking mad."
Then the issue of global warming and carbon dioxide production became more publicised. Clearly, the carbon footprint of an Irish onion is less than one flown round the world (or even sailed), and buying local produce has other good ecomomic and social benefits too, but the more I read about it, the more one factor stood out. Meat is a hugely inefficient food source, almost no matter how you produce it, but definitely under modern farming systems, when actual human food crops are fed to cattle, for example. By removing meat (and dairy products) from your diet, you cut your carbon emissions from food by half, and that's a sizeable proportion of your overall global warming impact. (Exactly how much depends on your lifestyle as a whole.)
It probably wasn't coincidence I had a vegetarian girlfriend, but in Autumn 2007, I stopped eating meat. I didn't become a vegetarian, because for me, it's not the moral issue of killing and eating animals (as long as their treatment is the most humane possible), it's the indefensible waste and inefficiency that I couldn't accept. I'll occasionally eat a small quantity of meat, and for my long stay in Italy in 2009, I included quite a bit more in my diet because of the inconvenience there of obtaining alternatives. But, in general, I'm happy to leave it out.
It may seem incongruous that the driver of two vehicles which are not the most efficient on the road should make such a big change in diet entirely for ecological reasons. But that's the whole point. My carbon footprint is now far lower than the average for Western Europe, and I can continue to drive happily with no guilt.