What's Ireland Eating?

This programme is part of the Heart|Land season

In an RTÉ season of radio and television documentaries, through poetry and music - live and broadcast, Heart|Land (8-15 May) rejoices in the land and the landscape of Ireland and explores rural life in the 21st Century.

In this new documentary Journalist Philip Boucher Hayes takes a look inside Ireland's shopping basket. Armed with information from a national nutrition survey and data from 3,000 households' food shopping receipts, Philip Boucher Hayes argues that we are damaging our health, our economy and our society by what we eat and the way we shop.

He believes that a lot of the food we eat is far removed from its origins. It is highly processed and globally produced - and this is neither healthy nor economic good sense. He delves into a number of Ireland's most popular foodstuffs, from chicken to processed pork, and reveals some unsavoury truths about where they come from and what they're doing to our health.

Boucher Hayes discusses how we have been weaned on to a diet of cheap food and the competition between retailers to hold market share is putting serious pressure on many of those that supply our food. He argues that greater regulation is needed to ensure that the food sector doesn't go the way of the banking sector.