ETHICAL TRAVELLER: Catherine Mackon responsible tourism
YOU CAN HARDLY move without bumping into a food festival. It feels as if everyone is fattening up for winter. I have just returned from Co Leitrim's Harvest Feast, where I spent two days not only filling my face with local chocolates, cheeses and chutneys but also filling my head with food knowledge, from guided walks around an organic farm to cooking demonstrations with Kevin Dundon of Dunbrody Country House Hotel.
Food is worth travelling for. Ballymaloe put Ireland on the cooking map, and Darina Allen has inspired many others to set up cookery breaks. You can head to Dundon's cookery school or check out some of the smaller ones around.
At Hagal Farm (www.hagalholistichealth.com), a hobbitesque hideaway overlooking Bantry Bay, in Co Cork, you can spend a weekend cooking vegetarian food with the ever affable Fred Wieler, who grows most of the ingredients himself.
In Co Cavan you can do a one-day course in cheese- making at Corleggy Farm (www.corleggy.com). Silke Cropp, the owner, is so busy making her fine cheeses that these courses are few and far between, so book early.
Eunice Power is also spreading the good-food word around Waterford, giving demonstrations at her elegant bed-and-breakfast home and restaurant, Powersfield Guest House (www.powersfield.com).
So food is very much on the tourism menu, and it plays a vital role in any ethical holiday. Beware of the common greenwashing trap of a hotel serving organic sausages and calling itself green. The sausages may have been shipped in from the other side of the world, and the hotel might be ignoring all other ethical aspects of tourism.
In many countries the organic movement hasn't kicked in yet. In Morocco the food is all seasonal, local and to die for. To sample and cook your own tagines, take a cookery holiday with Ingrid Wagner Real World Journeys (www.ingridwagner.com), travelling to mountain villages and fishing towns.
Or drench yourself with olive oil in Andalusia, staying in a 150-year-old farmhouse, cooking with a local professional chef and exploring the sherry and olive producers of this sun-drenched land of plenty (www.golearnto.com).
Oxfam says that if we can only link agriculture and tourism we could break the poverty cycle. This doesn't just apply to countries such as those in the Caribbean, which import 70 per cent of tourists' food from US wholesalers. It applies to any country that produces its own food and where, as in Ireland, there are plentiful people just waiting to teach their skills and serve up some of the tastiest aspects of their cultural heritage for you.
Lovely Leitrim is so plenteous that it has another festival, over the last weekend in October, at the Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon. It is named the Future is Local. How right they are.