Ramsay's Recipe for Disaster
Gordon Ramsay wants to outlaw unseasonal food. He says restaurants that serve up fruit and veg that aren't in season should be fined. He's even trying to get the government involved. Yes, the government- as if they haven't got better things to do than penalise Pizza Hut for slapping a bit of pineapple on their Hawaiian pizza in the middle of November. Is there nowhere that Ramsay and his fellow members of the food police won't stop? Will Nigel Slater start coming round people's houses with a shotgun checking to see if they're eating asparagus that's been unethically harvested? Will Nigella take to roaming the streets tooled up with a razor and some nunchucks, threatening people for scoffing non-organic kababs at bus stops? Why don't they get off our bleeding backs? When you're hungry, you're hungry.
You haven't got time to start looking into the origins of where your grub comes from. You just open the bag of crisps and start shoveling them in. What season are we supposed to eat crisps in anyway? Ready salted in
spring, cheese and onion in summer, salt n vinegar in winter I suppose. They'll be telling us how many times we have to chew our food next.
Meanwhile, this obsession with locally produced, seasonal food is getting out of hand. We're not bleeding pagans! The fact thatwe can grow whatever food we want, whenever we want to, and fly it around the world to be sold at affordable prices to those who need it most is one of the great achievements of modern civilisation. A trendy, overpriced, seasonal restaurant is never going to make ordinary people's lives easier, let alone save the world. But Tescosjust might.