Features Buy local and seasonal, says Gordon Ramsay

Date Published:

07/09/2007

Why should we be buying fruit and veg in season?

For me, eating and cooking seasonally is one of the joys of life. Many chefs rely on seasonal ingredients to keep their creative juices flowing and invigorate their passion for cooking.

It’s always exciting to think of ways to use up the latest batch of rhubarb or gooseberries in the late spring/early summer. And things really hot up when the first box of wild mushrooms arrive in the kitchens, giving us a sign that autumn and the game season is approaching.

Using seasonal ingredients also makes shopping and cooking easier. We all know that English strawberries and cherries are best in the summer and they taste nothing like the bland and insipid ones lurking in the supermarket shelves all year round. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against imported fruit and vegetables (how else are we going to get our bananas, pineapples and mangoes?), but we should certainly try to use local produce as much as possible.

Do you think supermarkets, which stock everything all year round, have made us quite lazy and ignorant about what’s in season?

While it’s easy to blame the supermarkets for supplying us with tasteless fruit and vegetables, it is important to remember that, as consumers, we have the purchasing power to pressure the big players to source food responsibly. I have noticed that a few of the better top-end supermarkets have started to use local producers for seasonal ingredients. That’s a good thing, but more could be done to ensure that our food can be traced back to sustainable agriculture.

Why is it better to buy fruit and veg that’s in season over imported produce?

The most obvious answer is flavour. Local, seasonal food tastes far superior to the fruit and vegetables that have been picked long before they have had a chance to develop any flavour, just so they could travel thousands of miles.

Take tomatoes, for example. They always seem to taste better when you’re on holiday in the Mediterranean. The reason is that Mediterranean tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine and are generally served on the day of picking. The under-ripe, out-of-season tomatoes that we have in UK supermarkets have come all the way from South America, so it is no wonder that they taste of nothing.

The distance a particular food has to travel to reach our plate is commonly referred to as food miles. More transportation simply means higher emissions which contribute to climate change - something that affects us all. Hence, locally produced food is not only more nutritious, it helps to preserve our environment. iles to grace our supermarket shelves.