There’s a Reason for Season
Hotheaded saucypants chef Gordon Ramsay is a man of many passions: food, discipline, Michelin stars and, it turns out, seasonal cooking. He told the BBC today that chefs who serve out-of-season produce ought to be fined. “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. There ought to be, he said, “stringent laws” to make sure that a Kenyan strawberry doesn’t pop up on this plate. And he’s serious: he took his case all the way up to British Prime Minster Gordon Brown.
Sound extreme? Ramsay, it turns out, is not alone. Many of the chefs that have rolled through Big Think’s studios have expressed their passion for seasonal food as something that’s not just delicious but of vital and, in legendary chef Jacques Pepin’s view, godly.
New York chef and pioneer of farm-to-table cuisine Dan Barber has built his restaurants and reputation on rigorously enforced seasonality. And if he doesn’t quite see the seasons as devine, Barber, like Ramsay, is not beyond taking up the issue in the halls of Washington and “voting with your fork.”
So what can we New Yorkers eat with a clear conscience? See below.
