Well, yes, sorta.
But these seasons slip by unnoticed, while we gorge on a monolithic diet of white bread, potatoes and red meat. We steadfastly ignore the real beauty of the alimentary calendar. The unique landscape and growing conditions found in each UK region should allow a recognisable distinctiveness that local people can not only take pride in but also work to their advantage.
Why not attract a large crowd to the opening of the mackerel season in Newlyn? Or celebrate the onset of gooseberry season in Evesham with a well-publicised race to get the first punnet to London – as is done with Beaujolais nouveau?
Most wromantic but logically wrong. For we are here agreeing that there is to be trade in food across regions in the UK. Fine, excellent, nothing wrong with that.
But once you\’ve accepted the principle of trade, once even two adjoining households are to swap their surplus production, all you have left to argue about is the boundaries of that trade area. And why on earth should said boundary be anything less than the entire globe?
Something which, of course, means that the eating seasonally here proposed is somewhat redundant for of course everything is in season somewhere.
Foodies think everyone is competent in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, a huge percentage of the population haven’t a clue what to do with a punnet of gooseberries or a mackerel and have neither time nor inclination to learn, hence increasing sales of ready meals.
An obligatory cooking & home economics class in 5th form, for both boys and girls, would probably do a lot for their future health and finances, as well as for those regional farmers.
Some supermarkets do make a habit of promoting whatever is seasonal and local – displays of English strawberries, vegetables and salads, etc. Waitrose does it.
Of course, they also stock flow-in varities. Choice, what a revolutionary concept!
Trade at nearer and farther distances are not different things–are inextricably linked, if truth be known. The amounts produced locally in excess of local needs would make no sense whatever were it not for the existence of demand for those very things in other places–places that have their own specialties on offer.
Recognizing this enables us to perceive that local specialization and intensification of production is a result of the desire to obtain the products of distant locales and suggests quite strongly that, historically, the latter preceded the former. And that leads inescapably to the conclusion that measures and tendencies which restrict far-off trade lead just as inexorably to decrease in production of local “surpluses” and to their production less efficiently (i.e., at higher cost) and, ultimately, to a tendency toward autarky of the primitive household unit.
Barbarians were entirely incidental to the fall of ancient Roman civilization; they merely looted the wreckage caused by the accepted practice in which the prices of “necessities,” especially food and fuel, were rigidly controlled and even natural shortages exacerbated by attempts to encourage greater activity by producing more
money through debasement, with predictable result. The difference between then and now is only one of scale.
“An obligatory cooking & home economics class in 5th form, for both boys and girls, would probably do a lot for their future health and finances, as well as for those regional farmers.”
A lot of the people who are not cooking are in their late 30s/early 40s and had cookery classes at school.
A lot of recipes aren’t that difficult. Buy a Delia Smith book and follow what it tells you to do.
People cook when they feel it’s worth it. Either because of the pleasure of home-cooked food, or the because it makes more sense economically than the alternatives.
An obligatory cooking & home economics class in 5th form, for both boys and girls, would probably do a lot for their future health and finances, as well as for those regional farmers.
It probably wouldn’t. Tim posted on this subject a while back, and the recommended dishes which should be taught was a list of PC garbage full of trendy vegetarian dishes made from organic this that and the other without a pig product in sight.
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030217medieval0217p3.asp
It looks like local produce was being augmented with imports long before foodies and trendy chefs started laying down the law.