NUTRITION
The Healthy Irishman Gavan Murphy Chef Gavan Murphy began his culinary adventure at Ballymaloe Cookery School in 1994. In 2000 his journey took him to Los Angeles, where his interest in health and nutrition flourished, naturally merging with his cooking experience. Gavan has worked as a consulting chef for a multi-national sports nutrition company, as well as a personal chef to the stars, often working in conjunction with celebrity trainers. He created The Healthy Irishman with the hope of educating the public about healthy eating. www.thehealthyirishman.com
His Philosophy My philosophy for how one should achieve a healthy balanced diet is simply to fuel the body with wholesome natural foods. Your body needs constant refueling to maintain a high metabolism thus enabling the body to burn any excess body fat. To achieve this, I not only advocate but practice eating smaller portioned meals more frequently throughout the day. This keeps your energy levels at a constant and prevents cravings, which ultimately leads to over-indulgence. I don’t use the word “diet” in terms of losing weight; to me it’s a lifestyle that involves making healthy choices based on eating whole foods that are nutritious and delicious.
Traditional Irish Food Facts Most traditional Irish foods use simple, basic and cheap ingredients, a reminder of the fact that they originated in a less affluent past. Many have been given a modern twist by a new generation of chefs or incorporated into dishes that better suit the tastes of a more widely traveled population. Traditional Irish recipes tend to be very simple, with just a few ingredients in most cases. This should be no surprise – it was the food of the poor and they did not have a huge range of exotic ingredients available to them. The main staples: meat, fish, dairy, potatoes, parsnips, cabbage, carrots, turnips, oats and barely.
30 - Life and Fitness Magazine - March 2009
Traditional Irish food: leek & potato soup, brown or white soda bread, Irish stew, colcannon, champ, barm brack, bacon & cabbage, mince pies. It was not a tradition to eat outside the home in Ireland other than at weddings or other special occasions until restaurants became common in the late 60’s or early 70’s. The offerings were dull – meat, vegetables and potatoes, stodgy flour & cream based sauces, with lots of frying. Anything that wasn’t fried to death was boiled to tastelessness. Vegetarians were offered an omelet. Traditional Irish food and diet, with a large emphasis on meat and butter, took the blame for the increasing obesity during this time.
The biggest revolution in Irish restaurant food began in the early 1990’s and two women must take a great deal of credit for it – Myrtle and Darina Allen, of Ballymaloe House in County Cork. What they did sounds simple – took the freshest and best of Irish ingredients and prepared them with a minimum of fuss. What a change! The quality of the ingredients were key – meat reared on grass, vegetables eaten the day they were picked, fish direct from the sea. Once the cookery school was established at Ballymaloe, this style of cooking spread throughout the country and is still a major influence on how the Irish eat today, both in restaurants and at home. This is where Gavan trained as a chef and where his plight in ‘healthifying’ foods began.