It's been a week for food awareness. The Green Party put together their conference on GM food, Global Vision has been involved with seminars on the same subject and just possibly Irish consumers are starting to think carefully about the ramifications of allowing our government to let loose the GM genie. As part of the Convergence week there was a Slow Food banquet in Dublin, attended by luminaries like J.P. Dunleavy, who has just announced that henceforth his farm will be GM free. These may all be no more than straws in the wind, but if enough people sit up and take notice of what big agri-business is trying to slip past us, perhaps we can make a difference.

A slow food banquet is an interesting event; Slow Food is more of an attitude than a set of recipes. The movement began in Italy in 1986 as a response to the opening in Rome's Spanish Steps of a Macdonald's. In a way that's not surprising. In Italy the idea of 'fast food' runs counter to the culture. The very idea that you don't have enough time in the day to sit down and enjoy a well-prepared meal can only mean you haven't organised your life properly. Good food and company around a table to enjoy it, is seen as one of civilisation's great gifts to mankind. From this point of view fast food is a heresy, an abomination. It's an ideological confrontation; do we want to retain control over what we ingest into our bodies? Do we really want all our food production and distribution in the hands of large international conglomerates, or should we make a stand and empower small producers and growers to give us food that's healthy and above all, natural?

At the banquet a couple of hundred people sat down to multiple courses of organic produce prepared by a committed team, headed by the wonderfully named Enrico Fantasia, whose normal place of work is in Sheridan's Cheesemongers. What a meal like this demonstrates, if it needed doing, is that there's a wealth of good raw materials out there, real food that comes with real tastes.

Being slowed down by the Slow Food banquet turned out to be a good preparation for a trip to Kerry. For someone who lived in Ireland for thirty years without ever having been to Kerry, the last couple of years has found me there almost frequently. And coinciding happily with this trip was the launch of Lucinda O'Sullivan's Little Black Book of Places to Stay in Ireland. Turn to the Kerry section in this little book and you'll find Carrig House, nestled up against the shores of Caragh Lake.

What I've found recently is that Kerry's not that far away if you make use of Aer Arann's flights to Faranfore. What can easily be a day's drive from the Wicklow Hills turns into just a couple of hours by plane. So from Faranfore it's but a short hop to Killorglin and then on towards Glenbeigh and Caragh Lake. Carrig House is an early Victorian house that sits in a wonderful four acre garden that runs right down to the lake shore. The original house now has a sensitively built wing that houses new bedrooms, which brings the total up to a still modest sixteen.

The sense of tranquillity is almost palpable. Across the lake the heights of the McGillicuddy Reeks break the skyline, in the distance you can just make out the Atlantic. When I got there, the only audible sound was birdsong. Inside the house is a happy mixture of new and old, there are nicely proportioned public rooms and more than anything else, a happy atmosphere.

But beautiful as all that abundant nature is, I was here for the food. The dining room overlooks the lake, but by dinner time the skies had darkened, the wind had begun to howl and the placid lake had become a white-horsed wildness in the raging sou'wester that came straight off the Atlantic. Thankfully the double glazing kept the gale outside, and inside the dining room all was peaceful.

The menu, under head chef Helen Vickers, changes with the seasons, but the one on offer this night caused me agonies of indecision, so much of it looked attractive. Pan-roasted quail, a salad with lambs' kidneys and chicken livers, fresh oysters, local smoked salmon and a confit of duck all took second place to my eventual choice of a goats' cheese soufflé. Most of the starters are priced between €8 and €10. Main courses included roast duck breast, loin of lamb, grilled salmon, John Dory, turbot, cod and breast of chicken, plus a vegetarian option. Apart from the turbot at €28, the main course were priced from €18.50 to €24.

It's not often that I get paroxysms of pleasure, but the goats' cheese soufflé was verging on the sublime. It was light, full of flavour and had the sort of texture that chefs spend years trying to achieve. This piece of gastronomic art put me in a perfect mood for my next course, which was the loin of lamb. Four or five slices of pink and succulent lamb were accompanied by an aubergine and potato moussaka, which reminded me of meals eaten in Greek islands. When aubergines are cooked like this they become exceptionally good, they become a vegetable that even confirmed carnivores will eat with pleasure.

After all of this, I still found room for as dessert and in fact got a taste of two of them, the wonderfully named Armagnac parfait with drunken prunes and a chocolate marquise with a raspberry sorbet. Both were very good and ended the meal very nicely for me. As a haven of peace and a place for re-acquainting yourself with nature, Carrig House makes a perfect hideaway.

www.carrighouse.com