The Great British Food Revival

Buying local, seasonal produce isn’t merely a charming notion. It’s a philosophy with the power to save our communities, our health and the environment, urges top chef Raymond Blanc

- Victoria Marston

For a Frenchman, it might sound wrong for me to be extolling the importance of buying local British food. Honestly, when I first came to England, I was frightened. The butchers here weren’t simply butchering the food— they were really murdering it twice. There was no interest whatsoever and we had completely lost our food culture. It had become irrelevant and, as a result, we saw the likes of foot-and-mouth and mad-cow disease: it was all caused by malpractice.

Britain was, for a long time, disconnected in this way because we had embraced an American system based on intensive farming and the heavy use of chemical pesticide. Of course, it was hailed a triumph because you could produce three or six times more volume per acre, but it became our shame when we began to understand the consequences: the erosion of soil, the chemicals going into the rivers and the sea.

Our food was full of these chemicals because it was all about looks and the marketer understood that. We have been buying all food, all things—a scarf, perhaps— without asking: ‘What colourings have been used? Is it biodegradable?’ We merely looked at the beautiful scarf, the colours and textures. It became all about appearance— nobody cared about the inside.

After intensive farming, heavy processing and marketing, you wrap it up beautifully and you reduce food to a mere commodity, the only virtue of which is cheapness. We embraced this culture—or anti-culture—but, at last, the consumer is starting to really understand what we’re creating: the effect it has on society, the ill health and misery that bad food can cause. There’s a revival of interest and an understanding that food links everything.