Yet another wacko has popped up with a scheme to control on other people’s lives to make himself feel happy:
Chef Wants To Outlaw Out of Season Vegetables
Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay said restaurants should be fined if they serve out-of-season fruit and vegetables. "I don’t want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown," he said after raising his concerns with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
"Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they don’t have ingredients in season on their menu," he told the BBC on Friday. … "There should be stringent laws, licensing laws, to make sure produce is only used in season and season only," he added.
I’m not going to bother going on about how this would have killed my hardworking father’s business shipping produce had such a law been passed in America. I’m going to even devil’s advocate for a second. The outcome he wants … eating foods in season prepared locally … is actually a good thing. Eating foods that are in season creates variety. The "local foods" movement takes this further, reducing the cost to ship vegetables. For example, the excellent Hopland Inn serves food from only a hundred or so miles away, and Google’s Cafe 150 is named after the maximum radius of its ingredients.
But many other things we like to eat are NOT local, are NOT in season, and are NOT Gordon Ramsay’s business. Everything he is complaining about is phrased in terms of what he wants to see, and he wants us to pass a law, enforced by people with guns who will come to take your money, to enforce his whims in the presence of no concrete harm?
Ah-ah-ah. I don’t think so.
Tongue in cheek, what is it about Britain that breeds this kind of totalitarian control mindset? They don’t have a recent history of dictatorship, but everyone from Alan Moore to George Orwell to P.D. James keeps writing stories where England goes to hell in a totalitarian basket. But I guess if I had the experience of these English writers, with springloaded Gordon Ramsays popping up everywhere calling for stringent regulation of everything from seasonal fruits to the proper time for tea, I could see myself popping out a dystopia.
-Anthony
(ObDisclaimer: I have no evidence that Gordon Ramsay is not a nice, decent, humane person, nor do I know that England is populated by an army of springloaded Gordon Ramsay clones popping up everywhere with random totalitarian proposals. Those were jokes, in case you were wondering; almost all the people I’ve met from the British isles have been nice).
