Last updated 11:36, Tuesday, 13 May 2008

When he finally stops swearing, Gordon Ramsay talks uncommonly good sense. But he’s taken rather a long time getting round to articulating it.

The hot-tempered top chef says British restaurants should be fined if they serve fruit and vegetables which are not locally-sourced and in season. Hurrah and hallelujah! At last the penny has dropped... for Gordon, anyway.

Ramsay insists he has already spoken to Prime Minister Gordon Brown about outlawing out-of-season produce – a move, he believes, would cut carbon emissions as less food would be imported and also lead to improved standards of cooking.

“There should be stringent laws, licensing laws, to make sure produce is only used in season,” he said. “If we don’t restrict our movements within this industry to seasonal-produce only, then the whole thing will spiral out of control.”

Tempting as another government ban must be to Gordon Brown, outlawing banana splits and pineapple sorbet in high summer might seem a tad extreme even to him – though Alistair Darling was last seen skipping a little morris dance with his hankie at the thought of another stealth tax.

But the general principle of professional chefs and indeed home cooks proudly and routinely making best creative use of home produced ingredients at their peak of high seasonal quality is a no-brainer that’s been begging for adoption decades.

Don’t think it, just do it. Finally allow local producers their opportunity to trade honestly in what they know to be fresh and nutritious – and local cooks the chance to celebrate the excellence of home-grown produce in truly regional cooking. Now, that’s what I call Fairtrade.

Nowhere else in Europe is pride in home produce so rudely shunned as it is here in Britain. In fact, there are few countries anywhere in the world where foreign imports and processed foods are given priority over fresh, locally-sourced ingredients.

America is, of course, one of the exceptions. And it’s no coincidence that the sorry state of British cuisine leans towards those highly processed US kitchens.

We’ve surrendered all claim to culinary national and regional identity in our country’s slavish following of every American model from gas-guzzling and celebrity-obsession to burger-bingeing and obesity.

We could change all that at a stroke by shopping locally from trusted butchers’ shops and fruit and veg traders; buying what we know to be home-grown and high quality; learning again how to cook simple, traditionally regional meals... and all be a lot happier and better off for it.

Supermarkets might not like it much but hey, that’s the way the buy-one-get-one-free Argentine corned beef crumbles. We all have problems.

Soaring global food prices and looming shortages make self-sufficiency urgently logical, not only for countries such as our own but for farmers and producers in developing countries who – Fairtrade or no – do their own families no good at all if growing full-time for our middle class conscience refusal to accept that anything without a collection of air-miles on its back can’t be up to much. If foreign Fairtrade produce were as fair as it promised, why would it need to pay good money meant for growers to middle-men packing produce in fancy foil before hitting British shelves?

Gordon Ramsay states the blindingly obvious when he tells us good food and great eating starts at home.

Maybe we do need to stretch a point and look to continental Europe for some citrus fruits but when did it become an imperative to eat African strawberries in the middle of winter?