Gordon Ramsay's worst recipes

Traded food, even “fair”-traded food, now carries the opprobrium in some quarters as a second best option. Similarly, there is increasing suspicion of “industrialised” organic food as major growers and distributors increase production to meet the heightened consumer demand for food labelled as organic.

The benefits of the locavore regime are touted as environmental, social and taste: the same benefits slow food claims for its recipe of regional specialities, heirloom varieties and eco-gastronomy. However, the rejection of trade, in addition to mass production, makes living the locavore lifestyle appreciably more difficult than enjoying a slow food one.

This ratcheting-up of righteousness is largely a function of the perceived mainstream nature of other political food choices and highlights the rejection of modernity inherent in the continuum. Food has always been tied up in taboos (often religious) now in a secular age of plenty, the taboos are political and becoming ever more extreme.

Why is knowing where food comes from important? If food is about nutrition, taste, smell and pleasure what is the link with where it comes from? Why does knowing (or imagining) food is local, or organic matter? Why do we want to believe in an agrarian fantasy of the small farmer, toiling away in our service?

Our standard of living depends for its very existence on not having cottage industries or subsistence farming yet increasingly the imagery used to sell food and to inform us of what is “good” food are bucolic images of rustic and pastoral scenes. Locavore is but the latest extreme in this powerful feeling that modernity must be rejected.

Certainly, many people are uneasy about many agricultural practices, particularly in relation to animal welfare and, to a growing extent, the increasing calorie denseness of much processed food.

And many more people, who have never heard of slow food or locavore make deliberate choices to restrict their own consumption of processed and fast food in favour of a diet largely based on fresh fruit and vegetables, meat from the butcher and basic staples from the supermarket. Considerable evidence exists to show that lower calorie diets high in fresh vegetables are better for your health.

But too often, the multiple food messages are mixed. As Richard Wilk of Indiana University has noted “consumers want food produced by hand which also meets industrial standards of quality, has no additives, and comes from happy animals and farmers”.

What is wrong with the locavore movement (or the “food miles” movement as it is also often known) evades analysis even as it causes unease. Every day consumers are bombarded with bad food stories - e.coli poisoning, agricultural herbicides in the water supply, obesity, trans-fats and type II diabetes - and it is easy to blame a monolithic industrialised agricultural and fast food industry. There is great comfort in retreating to the nostalgia of happy cows eating lush grass on a small family farm.

The story continues that if only we could all personally know the farmer who grows the food we eat, then none of these terrible practices would occur. Moreover, ecological degradation caused by transporting food will be eliminated if we all eat locally produced food. But as Tim Wilson explained in the July 2007 edition of the IPA Review, adopting a food miles approach to agriculture will increase CO2 production, not decrease it.

It is unromantic, yet nevertheless true, to note agricultural specialisation, increased farm size and modern farming methods have succeeded precisely because they are more efficient and use less resources than small holdings and labour intensive production. It is also true that food production is more important to poor nations, that have limited export alternatives.

When Gordon Ramsay called for legislation to mandate local, seasonal produce, Oxfam's Duncan Green summarised exactly what is wrong with the slow food and locavore movements: “I'm sure the million farmers in East Africa who rely on exporting their goods to scrape a living would see Gordon Ramsay's assertions as a recipe for disaster.”