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Much excitement – I am told that the latest Fire and Knives has come out, with my article on Jack Drummond and Elizabeth David in it. I know it is available at Books for Cooks and Foyles, but I’m not sure who else stocks it. It hasn’t reached Youghal yet, so I shall have to wait till I’m home for the great excitement of seeing my name in print.

A jolly interesting trip to Mahon Point farmers market today. It got me thinking about the difference between the Irish markets we use regularly (Mahon Point and Midleton, often cited as one of the best in Ireland) and our regular London markets (Notting Hill and Queen’s Park, the latter voted best in the UK this year). I am approximately comparing like with like.

The main difference is the Irish markets are not so restrictive in what they permit to be sold, therefore the choice is much better. Today we bought tomatoes, olives and Parmesan all imported from Italy, as well as lemon and bananas. We also bought local pork, fish, beans, salad, spinach, apple juice, bread, and mozzarella from Ireland’s only buffalo herd. There is masses of local produce, and things that can be grown or raised or made here are generally (I think) given preference. But things that definitely can’t come from Ireland are still permitted and clearly labelled as such. It means you can buy pretty much everything you want in one place, helping the market compete with the nearby Tesco in one important respect.

In London, LFM stipulates that everything must come from within 100 miles of the M25. Now, as a definition of ‘local’ it’s pretty meaningless. As I’ve written before, it covers all of East Anglia, up to Loughborough, round to Cardiff, down to Bournemouth and over to Calais. At a guess, it’s about 50% of the land mass of England, discounting the bits of Wales and France. If it’s about promoting local or regional specialities, that certainly doesn’t happen, with such a wide area covered. If it’s about food miles, that argument is not clear-cut. Granted, the produce at a London farmers market certainly won’t have been airfreighted, but the impact of a dozen small vans driving 80 miles to London is likely to be greater than the equivalent amount of produce brought in on one large supermarket truck. So, what’s the point of the 100-miles rule?

I’ve heard stallholders at Notting Hill grumbling about LFM rules on various occasions. One man I spoke to last week is decamping to Maltby Street market in SE1, which seems to be run much more along the Irish lines. The emphasis is on quality, not geography. If you are a very ethical shopper, you can simply walk straight past the imported cheeses, and of course you will be ignoring the coffee too. I am rather envious, and wish we had something similar near us. Does LFM, a for-profit company, listen to its customers – the stallholders – and their end consumers, people like me?

The fact is, we don’t live in a small village on the fringes of the Mediterranean which boasts a unique goat’s cheese, the secret of which is only known to one peasant family, so the insistence on localism is silly. I for one want to have a kitchen stocked with rice, lemons, Parmesan, anchovies, and the odd banana. But equally I don’t want (or need) New Zealand lamb or king prawns from Thailand or Chilean apples or strawberries in December or green beans trimmed to a uniform 10cm and flown in from Kenya. There is room for a happy medium, along the Irish or Maltby Street model.

Surely the difference is obvious?

Hooray. Despite thick sea mist, we have been for the first swim of the year, and first tea on the beach, with flapjacks. I could post a picture, but really, mist is mist. At low tide this afternoon, there were people gathering winkles down on the rocks. Apparently these little black snails all get sold to France for inclusion in your standard plateau de fruits de mer; no-one in Ireland eats them. Also apparently, it’s only recently that people have started gathering them again. During the boom years, there were easier ways to make money. Now, it’s worth three people spending several hours in back-breaking work, filling huge plastic buckets full of winkles, then hauling them back up the beach.

I bought some mackerel which sadly wasn’t that fresh and got binned, and we’ve stocked up on Ballycotton Queen potatoes and McCambridge’s bread. The rest of the week is plotted out in markets: Mahon Point on Thursday and Midleton on Saturday. I’m already thinking about Frank Hederman’s smoked mackerel. Last year, Frank gave me half a side of smoked salmon as congratulations for the baby, who was just 9 weeks old at the time. I also can’t wait for Willie Scannell’s potatoes, Dan Ahern’s beef and Arbutus’s Grant loaves.

We’ve found some rock samphire, but we tasted a bit and it is too late: it had gone over to petrol. People say you have to get it before it flowers. Perhaps this year I will finally manage to dig up some cockles on the beach. Darina Allen says a muddy, sandy beach is best and we certainly have one of those. I’ve found some cockle shells which is encouraging. The elder is still in flower here, but I fear it is also too late to be of use for cordial or champagne, having already reached the smelling of wet knickers stage. And the borage is in flower too.

It’s lovely to be here.

Imagine you are a lone traveller in an uncharted land. You find yourself amongst a tribe who seem to be broadly friendly, though you do not speak each other’s languages and have no certain way of communicating. One day, the head of the tribe straps you down and starts to feed you something from a bowl. You’re scared – at best it might be disgusting, at worst poisonous. Perhaps they’re not so friendly and are going to kill you after all?

Now imagine a slightly different scenario. Night falls, and the tribe gathers to eat. Everyone takes food from the same pot, and everyone eats the same thing. You watch them for a bit. They seem to be enjoying it, and so far no-one had keeled over. You’re hungry. You take a risk. Perhaps you can eat this food too?

Well this is all very interesting. As I sat in Notting Hill Pret yesterday morning, gloomily surveying the scene, my eyes alighted on the corner building opposite. It used to be WHSmith but it has been under scaffolding for many months. My heart was sinking in anticipation of another coffee shop, but no: this week, smart new hoardings have gone up and it turns out it will become a branch of Jamie Oliver’s Recipease chain.

Recipease (Reci-peas? Reci-peasy?) is a food shop, cafe and place where you can take cooking lessons. I imagine it will be a bit like Carluccio’s, with a demo kitchen thrown in. There is already one near Clapham Junction, which is always heaving, apparently. But I’m fascinated by the price point: lessons start at £40, last an hour or two, and you learn to cook one or two dishes. Does that seem quite pricey to you? I think it’s a fantastic thing to teach everyone to cook, but Recipease is clearly aimed at a fairly well-off customer. The people who would benefit most from learning basic cooking skills – people who are young, broke, disadvantaged, lone parents – will probably never make it through the door.

Of course, if you have a business to run, that isn’t really your problem, and I’m pretty sure that rents on NHG are sky high. But could you take this model and make it work on a not-for-profit basis? How do you reach beyond the yummy mummies and desperate housewives to find the people who would really benefit from this kind of thing?

It’s been a quiet few weeks. Eating, cooking and writing about both has taken a back seat whilst I sit out waves of tiredness, queasiness and ravenous hunger than cannot be satisfied. It is very odd to feel hungry and sick at the same time. Still, only a few more weeks to go till the end of the first trimester and then, all being well and God willing, everything should improve.

Is there a sub-genre of food writing: what pregnancy does to your tastebuds? We know that most of what we think of as taste is actually smell, and your sense of smell changes significantly during pregnancy. The first thing that alerted me to this pregnancy was coming out of King’s Cross underground station and being almost overwhelmed by the stench of cigarette smoke and traffic fumes. It was probably no worse than your average London street, but I could hardly breathe. We went to a pub for lunch and my stomach turned at the smell of sweaty bodies of from the night before, thinly disguised by cleaning fluids. No-one else noticed. I have become acutely sensitive to bad smells, but good smells (cooking, flowers) remain about the same.

But then something weird happens when you put food in your mouth. No matter how delicious it smells, and how hungry I am, everything tastes very bland. Most people prefer bland food when they are suffering from nausea, but I am the opposite – I crave hot, spicy, salty, sweet food – anything with taste. Everything I cook and everything I eat in a restaurant I get someone else to check for me – does this taste of anything? And they say, yes, it’s fine, it’s just you.

Which is incredibly annoying as I’ve been looking forward to asparagus, broad beans, peas, new potatoes and strawberries for weeks, but now they are here they are very disappointing. I was going to take it up with the people I buy from in the market, but I stopped myself. It’s probably just me.

And then I thought, it must be jolly difficult to review restaurants, if this is your job, whilst pregnant. First, many of the most delicious things are off-limits. Wine, oysters, rare meat, runny cheeses, raw eggs, pâté and shellfish are all to be treated with caution. Incidentally, I was speaking to a French friend once who said that, in France, there is also a list of foods which pregnant women aren’t meant to eat, but it is very different from the English one. Apparently runny cheeses are OK over there. Does that tell you more about France than pregnancy?

Finally, once you have found something on the menu that you can happily order, it arrives and tastes of nothing. And you shovel it down, whilst feeling queasy, and afterwards you still feel hungry. O, the horror, the horror. Poor me.

So New York City has banned the sale of sugary drinks in sizes larger than 16oz – about one UK pint – in restaurants, cinemas and the like, though convenience stores can still sell larger sizes.

What’s so fascinating about this story, and all similar stories about fat taxes or restricting the availability of junk food, is what the people who are opposed to it say. It’s always couched in the language of personal freedom – “we don’t like being told what to do by the nanny state”, or “I am the best person to decide what’s right for me” or, in this case, “they do it [buy larger sizes] because they like to do it.”

These sound like fine principles, and as such I don’t really disagree with them. But when you look at the case of food and drink in particular, I think there is a counter-argument to be made. The soda-swilling, freedom-loving consumers are actually mugs. Sugar and caffeine are addictive. Bigger sizes mean increased profit margins, disproportionate to the increase costs of production. Someone, somewhere is getting richer whilst you get fatter and sicker. When you are seriously overweight and develop diabetes, how free do you feel?

In his book on Sicily, Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, Matthew Fort writes about the experience of shopping in a market:

“There was something so voluptuous about the sheer abundance, something seductive and playful. It made me feel slightly drunk. It reminded me why I fell in love with food in the first place. Why is it that you can spend 20 minutes and £75 in a supermarket and come out feeling depressed? Why is it you can spend twice that in a market, feel your arms being pulled out of their sockets and your fingers cut from your hands by the weight of the bags you are carrying, and still come out sunny and exalted? Well, I do anyway.”

And so do I. But the whole bag thing was a problem, even when we switched from the lethal plastic variety to Daunt Books bags with their wide canvas handles. No matter how many bags we took, we were always struggling and smacking children in the face every time we turned round. I began noticing the French and Spanish families who came to the market. Almost always calm and collected, they didn’t seem to mind towing a shopping trolley round with them, the kind we associate mostly with grannies. Even the men, with their loafers and cashmere sweaters tied round their shoulders, pulled them round happily. So we followed suit and acquired a Rolser.

I love my Rolser. It folds flat and hangs in the hall all week, till Saturday when it pops into life. I can fit a whole weekly shop into it and it takes just one hand to steer. We have worked out a route through the market, so the meat and heavy things are bought first, then fruit, salad and eggs last. It slots in the boot of the car and trundles into the kitchen when we get home. This is the highlight of my week: I unpack the Rolser and plan what I’m going to cook, for the next few days at least. Absolute heaven.

If you shop in markets a lot, you definitely need a Rolser. A cute basket is no good. They are a bit like picnic hampers: totally pointless. If you only ever picnic about two feet from your car, then a hamper is fine, but if you actually want to walk any distance to your picnic, a hamper is not your friend. What you need is a backpack. But that’s another story.