The Belling West Cork Artisan Food Awards

Welcome to the Belling Awards

Ireland's contemporary food culture, with all its richness and with all its critical acclaim over the last two decades, would be unthinkable without the intellectual and cultural impulse which West Cork artisans have given to the movement.

It was in West Cork that the first farmhouse cheeses of the modern generation were made, sparking an artisan food revival that has spread throughout the entire island of Ireland during the last 35 years. As part of that evolution a critical and culinary template for modern food was also created. A pattern of small scale, high-quality, intensely personal food production was established, so that today West Cork artisans exemplify the most respectful and sustainable ways of working the land and producing food.

The Belling West Cork Artisan Food Awards are designed to reward that creativity in the artisan community. The Awards recognise the powerful impact which artisans have had on the individual yet interacting cultures of our food, our agriculture, and our community. They are designed to recognise and reward quality, the patient world of farming and food production where people make a living making something that matters.

West Cork artisan foods carry with them not only a strong sense of place, but also of the character of the producer who makes that food, of their passion to create the most superb speciality food product.

Of course, it does help if they also have perseverance!

When the great American poet and farmer Wendell Berry wrote that, “Eating is an agricultural act,” he encapsulated the ambitions of many West Cork artisans: to use the land to produce the finest food for people's enjoyment, to enrich and enhance the eating experience.

"You can't eat the scenery," is what people have often said about West Cork, but the absence of any industry other than small-scale food businesses hasn't deterred West Cork people from making sure that you can eat everything else. A place can be impoverished because all it has is natural beauty, but West Cork artisans have proved that you can use the landscape which is characteristic of this most beautiful place to produce beautiful food.

What is the West Cork food signature? It is the individual flourish in an artisan's way of working that brings forth the best in everything, whether it’s the best loaf of bread, the best farmhouse cheese, the best potatoes, or the best beef.

This is the West Cork way: a way of life first, a business second.

The Belling West Cork Artisan Food Awards are cultural awards that respond to the creativity within the artisan community.