GORDON Ramsay may occasionally be highly irritating. You could even say without fear of contradiction that he can be bombastic, foul-mouthed, over-exposed and ridiculously self-satisfied, sometimes all at once. Yet last week, for one week only, he was completely right.
Not, of course, in his bald assertion that British restaurateurs who serve up unseasonal produce flown in from all four corners of the world should be clapped in irons and slapped with a fine. His proposed option of criminalising honest small busines
smen and women who generally work excessive hours in a cut-throat industry was just silly, and he almost certainly knows it. His outburst was typical of the sort of calculated hyperbole with which he chooses to make his point.
What he wants is a debate on the provenance of the food we eat, practical steps to cut down our carbon footprint and, above all, to promote the use of fresh local produce, primarily because it happens to taste better than food that has been super-chilled and transported halfway around the world. So what if he chooses to express it in sensationalist terms, if he opts for the tactics of the market trader who demands a price far higher than he could ever realistically achieve in the hope that the bargain struck is the one he originally hoped for?
We shouldn't be surprised at the tactics. Ramsay is nothing if not an enterprising self-publicist. But just because he knows how to play the media game doesn't mean that we should ignore the underlying message. After all, we clasped Jamie Oliver to our breasts when he tried to persuade schools to feed our kids lunches that were good for them when we knew our kids didn't want to eat them and the schools couldn't afford to pay for them.
Ramsay's basic point, when taken at face value, was an extremely sensible one. Just because he knows the value of a screaming headline and wall-to-wall coverage on the breakfast news doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Not that the indignant pundits who railed against the idea of restricting unfettered public choice would allow him a scintilla of credibility. In fact, the sheer variety of talking heads who wanted to slap down old craterface was staggering. In one corner were the free marketeers who saw someone trying to tinker with the movement of goods, and then there were trades unionists who saw how it might impact upon their members. Ramsay's fellow chefs, especially those struggling to turn a profit from their labour of love, didn't exactly rally to his cause either, and every charity that works in the rural third world immediately banged on about the devastating effects upon economies in developing countries which rely upon agricultural exports.
Actually, most of his many detractors had a point. Planned economies generally don't work, and the sort of proscriptive food provision Ramsay espoused sounded like a cross between Cuban-style protectionism and post-war rationing, and neither of those was the way to any sort of Epicurean Shangri-La. On a more straightforward level, many pointed out that Ramsay might be better off if he practised what he preached: bananas, pineapples and mangoes are just three ingredients that feature prominently on the menus of his collection of fancy restaurants, and none of those are grown in great numbers anywhere between John o' Groats and Land's End.
His detractors would have been well within their rights to also ask why Ramsay limited himself to fruit and veg. Why not insist that all restaurants serve English wine, Scottish venison, lamb from the rolling hills of Wales, fish caught only within British territorial waters? All of that is achievable.
Yet all of those micro-responses to a wider issue miss the point. For a start, there's a world food shortage created in large part by the effects of global warming, and the chances of it getting better are small to nonexistent. As the world produces less food while its population expands and becomes richer, the price of food will increase exponentially. As our economic stability will increasingly depend on our ability to reduce our reliance on outside sources of energy, so we must take steps to make ourselves more self-sufficient in food.
But at an even more basic and important level, Ramsay is raising the issue of our attitude towards food. It is an attitude that has to change, and he is trying, in his own way, to start a debate, much as Oliver did over school dinners. Statistics can be misleading, but it is surely no coincidence that we are the second fattest nation on earth and that Britons eat 40% of the ready meals and 52% of the crisps and savoury snacks eaten in Europe. Ramsay can bang on about vegetables all he wants but the sad truth is that one third of us don't eat veg. Ever.
And how many of us who do religiously eat our five portions of fruit and veg a day could even give a reasonable approximation of what is in season at the moment? Not me.
Ramsay's rant may be symbolic, but it is a potent symbolism. Every serious problem needs a sensible, achievable starting point, and even if it's only a gold standard for restaurants to aspire to, at least he has the chutzpah to stick his head above the parapet.
Ramsay, like Oliver, is a successful chef who has no vested interest in trying to change our eating habits. We have to assume that he's acting out of straightforward altruism, and applaud him for it. Every journey begins with a first step, and while he's undoubtedly irritating, he has at least had the courage to put on his hobnail boots and start walking. Now it's up to us to follow his lead.
