As a (semi) retired and garrulous media friendly chef I get asked to do a lot of surprising things.
I have helped launch “Happy Heart” eat out campaigns, spoken at culinary award ceremonies, been asked for sound bites by media people on stuff like GMOs and Salmon fishing and even advised our local festival on events surrounding food.
One of the most interesting has been to sit on an advisory board in the local Institute of Technology to help them design a proposed degree course in culinary arts.

One of my reactions to this is; why has it taken so long to recognise that cooking is an art?
In my humble and totally biased opinion it certainly ranks up there with music and the visual arts.
A good meal, or better still an excellent meal can nurture the soul in much the same way as piece by Mozart or a painting by Cézanne. That it is nurturing the body at the same time adds to its merit rather than reducing it to a humble craft.
Music and the visual Arts have long been taught with reference to the great masters of the past. It would be peculiar to learn to play the violin only by endlessly repeating scales, or to paint by just learning the mechanical and chemical skills involved in putting paint on canvas.
How peculiar then that our other great art has always been taught as a process of mechanical “tricks”, the ability to slice an onion in neat dice being deemed more important than trying to reproduce the masterpieces of cookery of which there is a long tradition.
The teachers of cookery should be bringing their students on constant pilgrimages to good restaurants to learn the finer points of their art from true masters.
The very fact that the culinary arts are still only taught in Institutes of Technology rather than in University speaks volumes.

In Sweden they now have Universities of Culinary Art where a student goes through a three year course without ever setting foot inside a kitchen or putting on an apron.
The only attempt at an intellectual discussion on the Art of Food that has been produced in these Islands, to my knowledge, was the late, and great Alan Davidson’s periodical Petites Propos Culinaires.

I am fervently hoping that the Degree in Culinary Art does come to pass in Waterford, and also that similar courses may in time become available in our Universities.
Without reference to the history and previous excellence of food and meal production we cannot hope to improve the standards of modern Irish cooking .