Gordon Ramsay has told British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that fruit and vegetables should be locally-sourced and only on restaurants menus when in season. The chef has suggested to the UK leader that there should be an outlawing out-of-season produce. The BBC reports:
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay says British restaurants should be fined if they serve fruit and vegetables which are not in season.
The TV chef said it was “fundamentally important” for chefs to provide locally-sourced food.
“Fruit and veg should be seasonal,” he said. “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu. I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown.”
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worst idea ive heard in a while. guy should join communist party right away, start a kolhoz maybe?
May 10th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
This flows from Gordon’s overall philosophy that people who eat food should be in touch with where it comes from and how it’s cultivated. Which, to me, makes a lot of sense.
Banning out of season foods may sound a bit of a draconian measure - but it makes sense in terms of minimising the environmental impact of the food we eat.
And all the research I’ve seen about UK consumers’ attitudes to environmental issues suggest that the vast majority are concerned about the environment, but don’t want to have to make an effort to do anything about it themselves. They don’t want to sacrifice their quality of experience. And they do expect brands/ government to do all the hard work for them.
So government imposing a regulation on food suppliers that forces them to offer consumers an environmentally sound menu might not be such nonsense after all.
To cite a parallel example - the London borough of Hackney has made great strides forward in terms of the amount of waste being recycled recently. But only because all residents have been supplied with recycling bins, and face a potential £1000 fine if found not to be recycling. For a Hackney resident, recycling is now a low-effort no-brainer.
In order to change the mass of the population’s behaviour towards the environment as quickly as we need to if we want to save the planet, measures like this could be what we need.
Certainly they’re worthy of considered debate, at the very least.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am
McDonald’s–seasonal burgers?
August 15th, 2008 at 6:40 am