Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Eat only local produce? I don't like the smell of that
The language in this debate is a proxy for anti-immigration sentiments
Monday, 12 May 2008
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On Saturday night I committed untold crimes – against the nation, the planet, my grandchildren, and theirs. I should feel contrite and shabby, but I don't. Fourteen dined at our table and were fed patties of cassava and sweet potatoes, spicy Kenyan beans with tindola – vegetables like cucumbers the size of a baby's fingers. Also tilapia, a freshwater fish from East Africa, and a gruellingly difficult dish made with eight kinds of lentils, meat, oats and cracked wheat. Finally, almond and orange cake and raspberries in saffron cream. None of the ingredients was produced locally. This unrepentant sinner even chose Spanish raspberries, so sweet and more concentrated than the English variety.
Please don't tell Gordon Ramsay, he might come over and shout obscenities, maybe throw foodstuff out in a testosterone surge. He has just called for the banning of imported, "unseasonal" produce from restaurants. Some diners at his fancy restaurants say that this would make him a hypocrite; it would also make him one of those crusader environmentalists whose organic piety promotes unwholesome nativism and conservatism.
Indigenous Britons are in a mighty sulk over strangers on their shores, our weird languages, strong colours and tastes, and "unBritish" ways. Keeping out Kenyan beans and Caribbean pineapples is a sop to cultural paranoia, rising nausea. The country can't stomach any more foreignness and wants old simplicities back again. The rightful inhabitants think they want nothing but turnips and potatoes through our long winters, and in the summer, asparagus of genetically proven Englishness.
For centuries, our island nation has been seafaring and roaming, restless and lusty, hedonistic and insatiably curious, mercantile and capitalist, unable ever to stay put. Through that history, the land periodically goes through cycles of self-pity and dread of the very things it seeks, withdrawing into itself, its cliffs becoming fortresses. Sybaritic excess is followed by puritanism; internationalism is pushed out by petty patriotism. One thing for sure, this zeal will not be followed through to its logical end for that would mean the closure of Carluccio's and tandoori houses, and even the most fundamentalist food purists would not dare tread that far.
OK, maybe I should take more seriously the green arguments. So I do, and the calculations make no sense. Take a typical middle-class, UK family. They go on Ryanair trips and weekends abroad many times a year; drive hideously big cars, have umpteen gadgets and limitless consumer goods. But being conscientious, they will not buy corn sugar snap beans from East Africa. Big deal. Really do their bit, don't they just?
Writing in Time Magazine, Joel Stein incisively questions "locavores" who are "deeply Luddite, part of the green lobby that measures improvement by self-denial more than by actual impact". Furthermore, he implies, the injunctions encourage isolationism in the USA: "I'm going to keep buying food from my foreign neighbours. Because that is the only way Americans learn about other countries, other than by bombing them." Extreme, I agree, but indicating a link between politics and food that has gone missing in this Age of Environment.
Should good people be party to a vociferous movement which wants to refuse entry to "alien" foods? Look at the language used and you realise it is a proxy for anti-immigration sentiments: these foods from elsewhere come and take over our diets, reduce national dishes to third-class status, compete unfairly with Scotch broth and haggis, both dying out, excite our senses beyond decorum, contaminate the identity of the country irreversibly.
Turn to the clamour for the west to cut imported foods and a further bitter taste spreads in the mouth. If we decide – as many of my friends have – not to buy foods that have been flown over, it only means further devastation for the poorest. These are the incredibly hard-working farmers in the developing world, already the victims of trade protectionism imposed by the wealthy blocs. It means saying no to Fair-trade producers too, because their products have to travel to our supermarkets. Are we now to say these livelihoods don't matter because we prefer virtue of a more fashionable kind? Shameful are the environmentalists who are able to be this cavalier. They could only believe what they do if those peasant lives do not matter at all.
The 18th-century politician and gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote: "Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are." Localists tell us what to eat and turn Britons into panicked introverts just when we need global mutuality. Go buy foreign, spite Gordon Ramsay, and save the world.
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111 Comments
One man (Gordon Ramsey) expresses his opinion on eating seasonal produce and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown turns this into a rant against 60 odd million people (the indigenous population). Well I am one of those indigenous people but I love foreign food, I have no objection to foreign people coming to live in Britain, I haven't flown anything for over fourteen years and the last foreign holiday I took was by ferry, and I'm a bit phobic when it come to 'gadgets'. So Yasmin, although you included me in your unpleasant article you don't actually know me at all. That's because I'm an individual and it is the act of the racist to lump together people by race and nationality and ascribe to them ficticious and improbable chratceristics. I was deeply disappointed. You need to research your articles and present evidence to support your arguments, not rely on prejudice, sterotypes and anecdotes. I grow some of my own veg and fruit, it never sees the inside of a plane. Are you suggesting I stop?
Anginsan.
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Posted by Anginsan | 13.05.08, 08:48 GMT
You need to get rid of those sick fanatical greenies over there ! they are nothing but scammers and it looks like the government is in with them .
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Posted by truthman | 12.05.08, 23:07 GMT
You had babies' fingers for dinner? That's an outrage. And so extravagant. You should spend a week eating beans on toast for penance.
You can donate the (likely vast) financial savings to the tax man or whichever charity you prefer. Just think of all the extra mouths you could feed.
Environmentalism is just the latest 'middle class' socially conscious real issue warping feel-good-about-your self-righteousness fad to be targeted by those over self-indulged media types who are either tired or too lazy of presenting serious issues in a constructive and informed light.
No doubt this article's paid expenses will pay for many a future gourmet so presently no need to worry about doing some serious research. Stirring the proverbial is obviously a great and very lucrative talent these days though unfortunately this kind of manure doesn't reap much other than more vitriol, though not surprising judging by the amount of offence caused.
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Posted by local | 12.05.08, 22:43 GMT
that's fine, refuse to learn to grow & shop locally for the bulk of your foods - and when the hammer finally falls and no more food comes over the shores, for whatever of the myriad real reasons for such to occur within our lifetimes, you can starve to death with your nose suitably upturned.
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Posted by ptSF | 12.05.08, 22:02 GMT
Why is calling for more local, seasonal produce "a proxy for anti-immigration sentiment"? Why does it "promote wholesome nativism [what?] and conservatism"? No evidence is offered for any of this - it is just assertion (and, to my mind, silly assertion at that). There are reasonable arguments for trying to buy more local, seasonal produce. There are also counter-arguments. But this article doesn't discuss them in any depth, preferring to show off, deal in unpleasant stereotypes and brand people with whom the author disagrees as somehow morally reprehensible. It is quite shockingly bad.
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Posted by David | 12.05.08, 20:51 GMT
YA-B feels for the 'Hard working farmers of Africa' .Well, I've got news for you, the notion that each packet of snap peas that she obviously misses from her childhood is the end result of a worthy smallholder producing then along side his own patch of corn is a complete nonsense.
This is big agribusiness that the supermarkets are involved in. The "farmers" are labourers who work the fields, probably a high proportion of women and children on minimal wages. How many times have I heard representatives of Tesco defending their corner when accused of allowing low rates of pay and poor conditions in exotic food production abroad.
Bugger the air miles. This is exploitation of labour and land that should be used by and for the local population IN Africa. If YA-B had been aware recently of price escalation of food (doesn't much sound like with her ingredients) then it might have dawned on her that it behoves all of us wherever we live to work our land effectively and to the
benefit of local people for food they eat and can sell locally. And just a reminder as she carelessly discards turnips and potatoes, I could send her some really amazing recipes from Madhu Jaffrey using potatoes and cauliflower. Then there are umpteen varieties of potato,parsnips, carrots, swedes,onion,bok choy, chinese cabbage savoy cabbage, kale,brussels sprouts,leeks, beans that all can be obtained throughout the winter and early spring.
Get a copy of Ms Jaffreys excellent book, get all of them, learn something about doing with what you've got. But should you despair and have to have a fix of something exotic from Nairobi, check with the supermarket and find out much the field labour get paid a day from harvesting your twee pack of snap sugar peas.
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Posted by James Edwards | 12.05.08, 20:30 GMT
africa_morris
Hello. I don't believe I made 'snide' references to Alibhai's skin colour. That would be pretty strange as I'm happily married to someone with brown skin. I said that racism can come from people whatever their race.I'm saddened that you think I did, and I hope if you look back at my two previous posts you'll see that what maddened me (and so many others) was the divisive, nasty way in which Alibhai approached the whole subject. I did try to stay positive despite my anger.
I've since shown the article to eight people with darker skin tone than my own, and to a person they were angered at the way that Alibhai-Brown seems to think she can make racist remarks and slur an entire group of people, but it's OK because she's non white.
Try subsituting 'black' for 'middle class' in some of her diatribe, and see what brew of ill-informed prejudice most of it is.
Inverse racism is not the answer to racism - look at how we're at one another's throats, while global warming awareness has not advanced one jot. A nasty, negative article.
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Posted by loveitorloseit | 12.05.08, 19:56 GMT
Cheer up Ms Alibhai-brown, the more we loathsome exploiters eat our dismal kale and roots, the more you can enjoy your excessive and exotic feasting. You can have our leftover carbon footprint. I think it's bit hard to take your gastronomic boastfulness, your constant irritation with the country you call your home and your assertion that, basically, anything that endangers your way of life is a BAD THING all in one article. I'm not sure whether to sell my motorbike or boil a couple of owl's eggs for supper.
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Posted by Angharad | 12.05.08, 19:53 GMT
africa_morris
Come off it Morris!
Yasmin could have written a serious article about the consequences on the third world of us only buying local produce.
Instead, as usual, she turns an issue which has nothing to do with race into an excuse to attack this country and its people.
I don't condone the posters who resort to abuse but they have been deliberately and consciously provoked. Contrary to the poster who said Yasmin isn't one of us, I say she is and as such her work should recieve the same scrutiny and criticism as any other writer's work would (us being all equal and that).
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Posted by terry | 12.05.08, 19:51 GMT
Eating locally produced goods has nothing to do with xenophobia, so much as common sense. As oil prices go sky high, perhaps more shops will realise that there is a market for locally produced fruit which can readily grow here. It is no wonder this country has such a huge balance of payments deficit when apples, pears, strawberries, raspberries etc are all imported from the Eurozone instead of sourced from within Britain.
But then maybe Yasmin, what really hurts you is that you don't like to be reminded that as Britain is only 60% self-sufficient in food production, so as long as we keep importing people onto our overcrowded island, we will have to keep importing food. What Britain really needs is large scale net *emigration* to reduce the population level to below 40 million. Then we could live in a sustainable society which could support itself.
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Posted by Paul | 12.05.08, 19:46 GMT
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