Hotel And Restaurant Times met with the passionate founder of the Irish Food Writing Awards.
“I’m very into rural life, rural affairs, good food and drink and a very natural environment,” says food writer, television producer/director Suzanne Campbell. “When I was growing up, we had a whole market garden at home… and my aunt was a poultry advisor.”
From her basic agricultural grounding in rural Wicklow, her first brush with the more sophisticated side of nutrition was when she went to work as an au-pair in France at the age of 17 for a wealthy chateau-owning family in the Auvergne.
“I fell in love with French food after that experience,” she says.
She obtained a degree in journalism and a master’s in film but the lack of work opportunities in Ireland in the 1990s forced her hand somewhat and she followed an English-teacher friend to Japan, where she ended up staying for the next two years.
The experience opened her up to a very different cuisine and the experiences from her wider travels in South-east Asia opened her eyes to the evils of food globalisation and a drift towards mono-cultivation in places like Sumatra.
Her media training eventually came to bear on her career, bringing her on a path that would see her become producer of RTÉ agri-food television series Ear to the Ground. The highly popular show often dealt with environmental issues around food production and food sovereignty, including covering a number of food scandals during the early 2000s.
What’s Happening to Irish Food?
Becoming increasingly concerned with the hardening patterns of globalisation and the increasingly rapid destruction of traditional systems of food production; she took some time away from the world of television production to raise a young family. During this time, she was inspired to write a book, along with her husband, entitled “Basket Case: What’s Happening to Irish Food?” This led to her writing the RTÉ series “What Are You Eating?”
But while documenting all of these changes, she was also witnessing a rebirth in the Irish hospitality scene, based on a new-found appreciation for Irish food.
Night and Day
From her unique perspective of observing up and down the country while filming stories and staying overnight, Suzanne maintains that the difference in hospitality standards between now and the early 2000s is “like night and day”.
“We used to find it very hard to get a good meal back then,” says Suzanne. “There was no appreciation of Irish food, of Irish ingredients and doing something different with them. It was the lasagne-and-chips era… you might be able to find a nice steak, but the steak would be blackened and crucified to death. We had the right ingredients, but we managed to mess them up very badly because we didn’t really appreciate our ingredients.
“Now, Irish hotels and restaurants are doing a fabulous job with Irish ingredients, and the hotel offer overall is just amazing. It’s expensive because of the high cost of doing business in Ireland but it’s really good. I think that hotels and restaurants are struggling to make their food and drink operations turn a profit, however… a lot of hotels will tell you that they’re losing on restauration and making money on accommodation.”
Food writers face their own challenges
Apart from the challenges facing restaurants themselves, food writers face their own challenges, Suzanne says.
“There are big challenges for those who disseminate all the news in the whole food sector,” says Suzanne. “One of them is the dying circulation of newspapers. Where there used to be food writers employed full-time in newspapers up to very recently, I could now name only a handful that are in full-time work. Most people are freelance and are often juggling other jobs in food and drink. It’s very hard to get good rates of pay and it’s very hard to compete with free content on social media.”
The problem for the consumer, Suzanne points out, is that the free online content is rarely honest.
Many influencers are not totally honest about the restaurants or hotels they visit. And of course there’s a lot of paid-for content. Thankfully it hasn’t overtaken the place of the journalist but there are still a lot of people who don’t understand the difference between a journalist and an “influencer”
The Irish Food Writing Awards
During the pandemic Suzanne began an awards scheme – the Irish Food Writing Awards for food and drink journalists and photographers to improve their visibility in the sector. “The UK Guild of Food Writers helped us set it up, and the awards are now an annual event. It’s developed into a great night and a great community of writers, journalists, photographers with the wonderful Irish food and drink businesses who sponsor an award each. It’s a non-profit, the awards are free to enter and attend so the sponsorship from the sector here is vital. The sixth Irish Food Writing Awards takes place this October.”
The awards are judged by eminent food writers in the UK, US, and France such as Felicity Cloake, Tim Hayward, and wine writer Oz Clarke.
The awards themselves inhabit a world where award ceremonies constitute a business that attracts more and more profit-driven award set-ups.
“When I was setting up the Irish Food Writing Awards, I was thinking that I couldn’t believe I was setting up another award!” says Suzanne. “Ours is for journalists and writers, however – it’s not for businesses. I think that’s the key difference but there is huge pressure on businesses now from so many other awards schemes.”
Food-and-drink coverage needs to be proper coverage.
She gets invited to act as judge on various awards, she says. But she always responds by first asking them a series of questions – where is your company based? What is the ethos here? How is the judging conducted?
“I don’t get a lot of transparency a lot of the time (in reply) and I feel that it’s just looping in businesses and trying to make them feel as if they have to be there. They actually downgrade the good awards schemes that are out there.
“I would advise people to really do their research and look at the background, and they’ll probably conclude that they won’t get involved.”
“We need to get the message across to editors that food-and-drink coverage needs to be proper coverage. It needs investment, it needs journalists that are paid properly. Food and drink is such a big cultural space. If you look online, the amount of food, drink, and travel content there is absolutely enormous.”
Investment in proper paid journalism does pay off, she says. People buy weekend newspapers such as the Irish Times, Irish Examiner and Irish Independent because of their quality food and drink coverage.
Confidence in the Irish hospitality sector
Suzanne has confidence in the Irish hospitality sector and says that the aspect that she considers the most crucial for a hotel or restaurant is the welcome – something that Irish people are naturally good at. One can forgive a meal that doesn’t quite hit the mark but if the welcome is warm and genuine, then it can overcome any minor faults and leave the guest with a good experience.
“Once you welcome people and give them food with good Irish ingredients, you don’t have to be too concerned if your food offer is trendy or on point.
“I also don’t think that hotels and restaurants should necessarily chase social media. I know everybody is thinking that ‘likes’ are important and that the dissemination of information such as behind-the-scenes shots and all of that. But it can take up so much time and not yield results.”
What does yield results, she points out, are places that look after their customers so that they will come again and recommend it to others. Many restaurants are preoccupied with chasing trends.
Put more succinctly, they get caught up in creating fermented carrots, losing sight of the fact that carrots still taste best cooked in a steamer.
The awards website is www.irishfoodwritingawards.ie
