Now is the season of plenty in England, time to indulge that great summer luxury of eating what’s in shouting distance. I’ve been in Sussex, lapping up the sweet, pale produce of the chalk downs, new peas and mangetouts, young broad beans (just poached for a minute, with a dressing of lemon, oil and pepper) and the last of the asparagus seared in a griddle pan.
There are the first globe artichokes for supper tonight. Yesterday I made a potato salad with wonderful waxy baby Anyas and raw new peas, both from the garden, sprinkled with chives from the herb patch. We ate it — only a little smug — with fresh elderflower cordial made from the fireworks of flowerheads, amazingly abundant this year.
Local, they say, is the new organic: British shoppers can see the sense in eating what grows near them, for the sake of the planet and for pleasure. Refrigeration and long-distance trucking are never going to make food taste better. But we don’t really get it in the way that the continentals revel in the concept of terroir, and of the satisfaction of marrying the tastes and ingredients of one coherent geographical area. Or that doing such things just seems right, in a way that’s almost moral.
The chef Giorgio Locatelli told me recently about a dish he serves in his Michelin-starred London restaurant, a simple red wine and cheese risotto from the Piedmont.
“The waiter asked me, ‘Why do we do this dish? What am I supposed to tell the customers?’ And I said, ‘Look, the Castelmagno cheese in the risotto comes from the top of the mountain. The wine — Barolo — comes from half way down it. And the vialone nano rice comes from the bottom. All from the same water, flowing down the mountain.’ The waiter said ‘OK, that’ll do’. That was enough of a story to get him a tip! But I think that telling these histories is very important to respecting food and its producers. It adds value to the customer. And that comes back in what we pay to the producer.”
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In a Sussex Sainsbury’s this week, I thought how alien these notions are from our shopping habits. For most people the toss-up between local and imported is just a matter of pricing.
We blithely pick up a pack of New Zealand lamb rather than English, Canadian cheddar or the grim Danish bacon from the farms with the worst reputation for welfare in Western Europe — all to save 50p. Sainsbury’s was plastered with crosses of St George, a billboard at the entrance shouting “Support England”. But the fruit and veg shelves are full of Kenyan beans and Spanish cherries, even though these things are gloriously in season in England.
If you want to get patriotic while doing the shopping, why not support a team of real British fighters? The farmers and small producers churn out results year after year, though the game gets harder and harder for them.
In Fife a group of farmers and foodies have set up a brilliant scheme they call the Fife diet. They decided to eat only produce from there, for a year. Now this isn’t as hard as it might sound — it’s one of the richest areas of Scotland, in land and fish. They decided from the start not to be too Spartan — chocolate, coffee, sugar, oranges and things you can’t get and like are permitted.
It’s up to you.
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“If you really like something, then have it!” says one of the Fife diet founders, Karen Small, who still keeps peanut butter, smoked paprika and soy sauce in her larder. At the last count 600 people had spent a year on diets that were, on average, 80 per cent Fife produce, and many have decided to stick with it.
Their pleasure at doing this, the money saved and the surprise at the ease is all told on the Fife diet website — as are the benefits to local farmers and producers. Now there is talk of launching the diet in Edinburgh, where I live, and the Lothians. I will have to sign up.
Eat more local? Learn to enjoy an avocado, a banana or some Parmesan cheese more, by making them a treat rather than something humdrum? The answer seems pretty obvious.
alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk
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Alex Renton is this year’s winner of the Guild of Food Writers Food Journalist of the Year award. Alex won for articles that appeared in The Times and The Observer. Read his column in The Table every week.