Collecting Ireland’s Food Memories as a Resource for Food Tourism

An inventory by Teagasc’s National Food Centre, prepared for the Euroterroirs project in 1997, is a rare, if not the only, example of an attempt to recognise, document, and catalogue Irish traditional food and beverages. Even at that, given the brief provided by Euroterroirs, the inventory was limited to 100 local traditional products. But we know from Lucas (1960) that Irish food presents a remarkable continuity of traditions from the time of the earliest documentary evidence to the present. Food and beverages are such an integral part of Ireland’s cultural fabric that the threads, traces, and fragments are not only found in predictable sources like cookbooks, but also elsewhere. Examples include literature (prose, drama, and poetry), disparate fields of study (etymology, botany, history), and primary sources such as newspapers. This paper describes an attempt to collect some of Ireland’s food memories, traces, and fragments which, in turn, reveal where these residues might lie. Currently this collection has approximately 1,000 Irish food and beverages items collected from 350 different sources, and include the following: Bishop, Chinchard, Dining Clubs, Edwards’ Desiccated Soup, Egglers, Ether Drinking, Foosies, Gloria, Heather, Lilt, Loop Liner, Mountain Dew Girls, Ól, People’s Refreshment Rooms, Rasher, Staggering Bob, War Bread. The paper will use a selection of these items to demonstrate not only the diversity and variety of the items themselves, but also the variety of sources where these traces and fragments reside in plain sight

Relish, Condiment, “Kitchen”: Bastions of Irish Food Practice for Fourteen Hundred Years

In his 2016 book “Early Irish Farming”, Kelly notes that we are blessed with a large amount of information about the food eaten by the early Irish and how it was cooked. He relies on that which resides in the Old Irish texts, especially the law-texts and sagas. Kelly’s sources make it clear that our core staple diet was bread and milk, supplemented by \u27tarsunn\u27 or “annlann” (Irish for relish, condiment), later known as “kitchen”. But what constituted a relish not only varied over the centuries but also according to who was doing the eating, so that in a rigorous penitential diet demanded by the monasteries even milk was classed as a relish while during the famine it was dictated by whatever was available. Later on, evidence of “kitchen” demonstrates that no cuisine or foodway is isolated – there are continual influences, some obvious, some very subtle, but they are there, and should be recognized for the richness that they bring. This is an attempt to show how “kitchen” reflects the movement of people but yet is a constant in the Irish culinary psyche over hundreds of years

Recognising the Place of Food Tourism in Ireland: an Autoethnographic Perspective

This is an autoethnographic account, utilising prior publications, of my role in positioning food as a critical ingredient in Ireland’s tourism policy and strategy since 2009. As the architect and instigator of this project, my priorities were threefold: first, working from the ground up identifying local activists across the food tourism landscape to create an active and vibrant network; second, providing thought leadership for food tourism; and third, encouraging and funding others to conduct and disseminate similar research. I have chosen six book chapters, published as a result of my advocacy strategy, for this PhD by prior publication. They are a series of real-time reflections and reactions as food tourism developed in Ireland during the period 2009-2018. The publications demonstrate that there has been a consistency of approach based on a deep knowledge of, and familiarity with, the public service environment in which I was operating. Throughout this overarching critical document, I contend that the value of the publications is that they are a unique long-term case study of the practice and development of Food Tourism in a specific destination by a practitioner bureaucrat over ten years, and that they make a valuable theoretical contribution by tracking the evolution of shifts in perceptions, or ‘turns’, thus increasing the likelihood of paradigm change. Furthermore, I will show that the publications were very much in step with, and, in relation to the literature on food tourism in Ireland, ahead of, the wider discourse in the tourism literature. I will also show that the literature on food tourism and tourism policy in Ireland appears to be largely silent, and therefore a gap exists. My publications have populated this gap since 2014, by arguing for the importance of food in tourism, by showing that the proportion of food tourists is relatively small, by establishing that food is a motivator of satisfaction not of travel, and by demonstrating the importance of policy as relationship building

Nearby Spiral Galaxies at Low Frequencies

The low frequency regime (less that 300 MHz) of radio astronomy, while been its birthplace, has been neglected in the past several decades due to the challenges of calibration. External galaxies have hardly been observed at these frequencies with several exceptions. Such observations always suffered from poor angular resolution and therefore accurate flux measurements were nearly impossible. In addition virtually no research in polarization has been performed at these frequencies due to various physical and instrumental depolarization processes. Observing external galaxies at low frequencies would enable us to study the propagation of low energy electrons and in turn weak magnetic fields. Thankfully, a revival in low frequency radio astronomy is now in full force with interferometers such as the GMRT being constructed. This is especially so with the construction of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) which officially opened in 2012. This thesis took place during the commissioning phase of LOFAR and therefore contains many technical commissioning tasks mainly addressing the calibration of LOFAR data which were essential for the wider community. This includes developing software to interpolate gain solutions in frequency, enabling more bandwidth on the observational target and thus increasing sensitivity. This thesis presents the first arcsecond observations of nearby galaxies at low frequencies with LO- FAR. We mapped the face-on interacting galaxy M51 and the edge-on galaxy NGC891 to study the propagation of low energy cosmic ray electrons especially in the extended disk and halo. We also employ the novel method of RM synthesis to search for linear polarization in these galaxies and their surrounding fields for polarized background sources. In M51 we observe no break in the integrated spectrum but there are signs of thermal absorption in center of the galaxy. We observe a radial break of the radio continuum emission beyond M51’s star forming disk, demonstrating that detecting the extended disk in radio contiuum will still be difficult even at low frequencies. We have created a program to model the cosmic ray electron distribution for M51 and we find that a diffusion coefficent of approximately 7.5 × 1028 cm2 s-1 is needed to describe the radial spectral index of M51. From these models we can also determine the thermal fraction in the center of M51 and spiral arms at 151 MHz. We also see that the magnetic field in the outer disk obtained from observations are underestimated due to assumptions made using equipartition. Through this observation and model we conclude that diffusion is the dominate process in the cosmic ray electron propagation in M51. The observed frequency dependence of radial scalelengths and the radio-infrared correlation of M51 both confirm our diffusion model. In M51 and NGC891, no diffuse linear polarization was detected showing that detecting diffuse po- larization in star forming galaxies at low frequencies will be impossible at current sensitivities. In the M51 field, we detect six polarized extragalactic sources, resulting in a polarization detection for every 2.9 square degrees, making previous plans of using RM grids of background polarized sources to probe the weak magnetic fields of nearby galaxies quite unrealistic. We confirm the spectral break in NGC891 seen in previous studies and we observe significant signs of thermal absorption within the disk of NGC891. We argue that increased thermal absorption by classical HII regions due to the path length and hence inclination causes the flatting of the integrated spectral index at low frequencies. Also it is found that a low temperature ionized gas component as proposed by Israel & Mahoney (1990) is not needed to explain the thermal absorption. We detect the supernova SN1986J at 146 MHz with a peak flux of 8.8 mJy. We observe significant outflows in the halo via the spectral index map and also observe a new feature not seen in higher frequencies, possibly created via increased star formation in the disk. We see that the bulk velocity of the galactic wind speed is relatively constant for only one half of the galaxy making NGC891 different from NGC253. New observations of the nearly face on galaxy NGC628 were also taken with the Effelsberg 100m telescope and the Jansky Very Large Array in order to detect rotation measure gradients signifying outflows from the disk to the halo of the galaxy. Preliminary results do detect such RM gradients and reversals. Finally this thesis also contains work done on the calibration and processing of the MSSS (Multi Frequency Snapshot Survey) survey for which linear polarization was detected, thus opening up the first low frequency polarization survey of the entire northern sky

Resolved magnetic structures in the disk-halo interface of NGC 628

Magnetic fields are essential to fully understand the interstellar medium (ISM) and its role in the disk-halo interface of galaxies is still poorly understood. Star formation is known to expel hot gas vertically into the halo and these outflows have important consequences for mean-field dynamo theory in that they can be efficient in removing magnetic helicity. We perform new observations of the nearby face-on spiral galaxy NGC 628 with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) at S-band and the Effelsberg 100-m telescope at frequencies of 2.6 GHz and 8.35 GHz. We obtain some of the most sensitive radio continuum images in both total and linearly polarised intensity of any external galaxy observed so far in addition to high-quality images of Faraday depth and polarisation angle from which we obtained evidence for drivers of magnetic turbulence in the disk-halo connection. Such drivers include a superbubble detected via a significant Faraday depth gradient coinciding with a HI hole. We observe an azimuthal periodic pattern in Faraday depth with a pattern wavelength of 3.7$\pm$ 0.1 kpc, indicating Parker instabilities. The lack of a significant anti-correlation between Faraday depth and magnetic pitch angle indicates that these loops are vertical in nature with little helical twisting, unlike in IC 342. We find that the magnetic pitch angle is systematically larger than the morphological pitch angle of the polarisation arms which gives evidence for the action of a large-scale dynamo where the regular magnetic field is not coupled to the gas flow and obtains a significant radial component. We additionally discover a lone region of ordered magnetic field to the north of the galaxy with a high degree of polarisation and a small pitch angle, a feature that has not been observed in any other galaxy so far and is possibly caused by an asymmetric HI hole.Comment: 25 pages, Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Long-term high fat feeding of rats results in increased numbers of circulating microvesicles with pro-inflammatory effects on endothelial cells

Obesity and type 2 diabetes lead to dramatically increased risks of atherosclerosis and CHD. Multiple mechanisms converge to promote atherosclerosis by increasing endothelial oxidative stress and up-regulating expression of pro-inflammatory molecules. Microvesicles (MV) are small ( < 1 μm) circulating particles that transport proteins and genetic material, through which they are able to mediate cell–cell communication and influence gene expression. Since MV are increased in plasma of obese, insulin-resistant and diabetic individuals, who often exhibit chronic vascular inflammation, and long-term feeding of a high-fat diet (HFD) to rats is a well-described model of obesity and insulin resistance, we hypothesised that this may be a useful model to study the impact of MV on endothelial inflammation. The number and cellular origin of MV from HFD-fed obese rats were characterised by flow cytometry. Total MV were significantly increased after feeding HFD compared to feeding chow (P< 0·001), with significantly elevated numbers of MV derived from leucocyte, endothelial and platelet compartments (P< 0·01 for each cell type). MV were isolated from plasma and their ability to induce reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation and vascular cell adhesion molecule (VCAM)-1 expression was measured in primary rat cardiac endothelial cells in vitro. MV from HFD-fed rats induced significant ROS (P< 0·001) and VCAM-1 expression (P= 0·0275), indicative of a pro-inflammatory MV phenotype in this model of obesity. These findings confirm that this is a useful model to further study the mechanisms by which diet can influence MV release and subsequent effects on cardio-metabolic health