Cork-based food historian on the exploitation of young people’s good intentions, her home city’s food links to slavery and the importance of oats
Regina Sexton in UCC: 'Oats is a thing in the rest of Europe that you tend to feed animals rather than to people.' Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
“You’d go to someone’s house and they might have chicken for the dinner, so they’d start talking not just about the chicken, but about the varieties of chicken and what kind of a poulet was the one being cooked. This was literally a foreign language to me. I didn’t know what was going on.” She talks about colonisation, and how the British empire affected Ireland’s role in the export of its food.
“Cork became the centre of all that export activity back then; they built up a reputation for being particularly expert at preserving and salting beef. And we are close to the Golden Vale too, of course. You had cattle being reared in Munster, slaughtered in Cork, and then sent across the Atlantic. That beef fed the slaves in the plantations in America, and those slaves were there to produce sugar and cotton and coffee.
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