End of the Trend

Who the hell ever claimed that local, seasonal produce tasted better? It doesn't taste better. It might sometimes, but so might an apple flown in from New Zealand at the height of British growing season. When it comes to food grown when the weather's right not too far from where it's eaten, taste really is beside the point.

The trend that local/seasonal has become is an example of good intentions being twisted by marketing hyperbole. The media's love of food trends as drivers for sales, viewing figures, restaurant traffic and flogging books is as negative for British eating as the Ministry of Food's systematic elimination of our food culture was, and it must end. The at least slightly obvious idea of eating food grown without too much mucking about and transported without too much mucking about has been buried beneath the shamelessly ill-informed advertising of countless formula pubs and hotels who wouldn't know a good ingredient from a Brake's meal solution.

Why must pubs and hotels proffering identikit menus composed via an intricate collaboration of flipchart and factory, reference ingredients they don't actually use? Because "foodies" don't really care about eating. Food, of course, is essential to their sense of self, so they do care about that, but only to the extent of what it says about them, not to the extent of what it tastes like or whether it's good value or whether it's seasoned properly or whether it's just ten, 50p-sized morsels served up for £95 in a country house hotel by uncomfortably suited Eastern Europeans brainwashed into believing that Chef is God (he isn't, he's an idiot who has lost touch with his vocation). The media know no better and, fed by PR and the need to follow the gravy train themselves, cycle trends that give the people what they better bloody well want.

So fine dining is on the way out, burgers are encountering a backlash, foraging is a cliche, and now local, seasonal food is about to be exposed as a great big swizz fit to join plate swipes, sun dried tomatoes and cocktails in a jam jar in the giant food trend landfill in the sky

There are innumerable reasons, though, why eating seasonally and locally is not a trend and why labeling it as one will only serve to suck what little variety is left out of our pitiably uniform food supply.

Supermarkets are horrible places to shop. They sell the same crap all year round. All of it is average and all of it exists in the place it does and in the way it does to drive profit for the supermarket. It doesn't exist for the grower or supplier and it doesn't exist for the buyer. Food grown on a small scale fundamentally excludes supermarkets, and, funnily enough, most of the food we might once have enthusiastically dubbed seasonal and local is grown on a small scale. Small scale production allows those of us who care to, to pack variety into our mealtimes at the behest of the weather and soil rather than at the behest of a vast food retail conglomerate or a man selling a recipe book. I like buying seasonally because it inspires me. It dictates my meals and has new ingredients keep me enthused all year round. Whether the same stuff tastes better is beside the point. It's fun, for goodness sake.

I don't need some buck-toothed, curly-haired toff off the telly to sell me a lifestyle concept as a reason to get down the farmers market in my Barbour and 4x4; I go automatically and without the overpriced coat and every middle class twit's favourite pollutant because I can't get unique, short-season ingredients anywhere else. And I certainly don't need the same idiot to dictate to me what I should do with my edibles once I've bought them because half the point of seasonal buying is food freedom. Unless you can't cook. Which, let's face it, is a sad fact of reality for 99.9% of the same brainwashed drones willing to enter a pub because of a blackboard containing the word "local".

Once at the market, I don't care who sells me this stuff. If he's a farmer, fine. Good for him. But I'm not going to chit chat with him about terroir because he'll think I'm a jumped up white-collar cunt who's never so much as sprouted cress from an egg shell. And he'd be right. But the point is, he grows kohlrabi and purple broccoli and all sorts of quirky chillies and multi-coloured aubergines; he sells chard, beetroot and radishes with the leaves and stems on; he has these tiny little celeriacs and swedes in winter with amazing flavour, watercress in huge, huge bunches for bugger all, and these bloated bags of tiny apples for kids that have more apple taste in one bite than there is in the whole of New Zealand. His mate sells me game for silly money, and her friend sells me raw milk from Jersey cows that lets me avoid the vilely exploitative, antibiotic-laced mess that is the UK dairy industry. I can get pheasants the size of chickens for £2.50 or a hulking great hare for a fiver. I can even get a bloody turkey egg for goodness sake. I cannot buy these things anywhere else and I love them and I don't want to lose them.

Of course, if one picks up a recipe book because one aspires to look like a model and raise the perfect child in the perfect house, all the while stuffing one's perfect face with perfect cakes and breads, and one writes a shopping list that enables one to do so, well then farmers markets are a really awful place to shop. They're going to suck the money out of you because you are shopping based on a lifestyle statement rather eating well, and only a supermarket is going to let you do that because it is designed to let you do that.

For those who can cook, though, farmers markets close to farmers farms are not overpriced money pits keen to snare the middle classes into paying 50% extra for the mud to be left on their vegetables. Come with an open mind. Select the best products. See what is good value. Buy those things and learn to cook them. You will quickly see your shopping bill drop vastly below the rigid, celebchef-dictated hell that was your supermarket shop. Cook every meal from scratch because you love cooking. Don't use a recipe book, just learn to work with ingredients. Visit a market because it gives you something unique that a supermarket never could. Strive for the media not to drive people away from buying locally and seasonally because, if they do, the arse will fall out of small, local supply chains that offer special varieties of fruit, vegetables or animals that we will never be able to buy from any other source, because all our other sources, from Waitrose to Lidl to Londis, are only interested in produce that can be grown on a large scale, look perfect and withstand transport requirements. All of them.

Creative eating should not depend on a TV show, a marketed lifestyle or a glossy book but on what one can buy that is at its best. A supermarket will never, ever tell you what is at its best. How do good chefs know what's at its best? Their suppliers tell them. These butchers, grocers, farmers and such-like take a proactive view of ensuring their customer knows which ingredients are about to hit peak. Not season; peak. And when an ingredient is at its peak, Chef will be notified. "Alright guv, I've got some of them nice radishes in from France, fancy a sample?", or perhaps, "mate, can you take these massive Dovers off me hands? They're spanking fresh but no other bastard knows what to do with 'em."

But Chef won't buy on a whim. He looks at the product. He pokes it, squeezes it; he might even taste it. He attempts to cost it into his menu. Consumers should follow his example, but without the link to what's-growing-best-now that farmers markets and all-to-rare local veg box schemes offer we are left roundly in the dark. And even if by some miracle we do know what's in season when and have been following the local farming news channel to check everything's on schedule this year (put the SkyPlus remote down you moron, there's no such thing), our supermarket overlords will still be flogging Peruvian asparagus in a plastic tray from April to June because they don't care. They are entities not people and as entities strive only to ensure one thing: profit. Local, seasonal buying is our chance to buy food from people rather than entities, and we should avoid buggering it up by labeling it as a trend that has evilly fooled us all.

So learn to cook. Stop blindly following trends that you think say something about you and grasp the fundamental difference between good food and bad food. If you are a journalist stop making ridiculous generalisations that have a negative impact on something you know is good just because you think a book by Jay Rayner called The Single Biggest Crock of Shit Ever Written About Food gives you some sort of factual license to do so. Newsflash: it isn't, it's a sad, sad, misguided attempt to raise the profile of an author who is happy to proclaim his day job as "selling newspapers" among the sort of joyless, right on puritans who'd have us all eating ready meals of braised sackcloth were they ever given the chance.

Yes, local, seasonal eating has become an over-blown trend but don't let those responsible for making it one lead you into attacking it. Instead, attack the very idea that something we eat could become an over-blown trend; for trends, not vegetables and fruits and meats produced on a small scale close to your home, are absolutely at the root of this problem. Blame trends, blame journalists, blame PRs and blame supermarkets. But most of all, blame yourself for being completely and utterly unable to think about food for yourself.