Growers and Grocers

First, an admission of guilt. I download television shows off the internet. Specifically, I download British shows off the internet, because other than stuff like Little Britain, they’re next to impossible to find in Canada. Recently, on the latest season of Gordon Ramsay’s series The F-Word, he featured UK food writer and television guy, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. If you’ve been a food network fan for the past decade, you’d remember Fearnley-Whittingstall from a fun show he hosted called TV Dinners. He also hosted a food series on Edwardian cookery to accompany the PBS series The Edwardian Manor House. So you know who I’m talking about now, yes?

In the UK, Fearnley-Whittingstall is most well known for his River Cottage series. Starting in 1999, he left London for the wilds of the Dorset countryside, where he rented a small cottage and lived close to the land. He gardened, raised pigs, hunted rabbits and trapped eels in the nearby river. With the locals offering assistance in their various specialties which ranged from jam-making to meat-curing to sheep-shearing, Fearnley-Whittingstall learned firsthand about life in the country. He enjoyed it so much he returned to shoot four years worth of the show, and finally bought a large farm for himself and his family nearby.

What is unique and very important about the series and the process is that, in an era when small farms are being bought out by giant corporations, Fearnley-Whittingstall has returned to the land with the notion of creating a sustainable farm. Both in the television series, the accompanying books, and in the very extensive website, he espouses eating locally and organically. And especially, seasonally.

I believe passionately that those who shop and cook in harmony with the seasons will get immeasurably more pleasure and satisfaction from their food than those who don’t. I’ve also observed, with mounting alarm, that our sense of seasonality is under threat. The supermarkets must take the lion’s share of the blame. For the most part, they seem not merely uninterested in seasonality but often keen to suppress it. They source produce throughout the world that homogenises their product range into a year-long display of cosy familiarity. Of necessity, the seasons still exert some influence on their stocking policy. Yet they will do everything possible to disguise this fact when presenting produce to their customers. They fear that seasonally driven marketing will result in inconsistent spending. They don’t want their customers to think seasonally, because they believe seasonality is not profitable.

The River Cottage website offers a wealth of information on eating seasonally and sustainably, including a list of what’s currently in season (in the UK, of course), seasonal recipes, info about events and competitions in the Dorset area, as well as a collection of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s essays on food production.

You can also shop on the River Cottage site, which offers all of the River Cottage books, DVDS (VAT format only, unfortunately), or vouchers to River Cottage events. Their line of seasonal products which includes the amusing “pig in a box” (“everything but the oink!), as well as a selection of soups, oils, and even stinging nettle beer are available through various UK retailers and farm markets.

The television series revels in the wonders of good food, from scallops fresh from the sea (caught by divers, not trawlers which cause environmental damage), to stinging nettle gnocchi, real mince pies, Hugh’s famous “bunny burgers”, local hard cider, and of course, the sausage and hams made from the River Cottage pigs, you get the feeling that this is truly what food is all about, not the chemical-ridden junk from the middle aisles of the fluorescent-lit supermarkets.

For anyone truly interested in where their food comes from, both the River Cottage series, as well as the website and cookbooks, are amazing resources. With a philosophy of seasonal, sustainable organic food where all parts of the plants and animals are used, Fearnley-Whittingstall is both a throwback to a more simple time, and shockingly progressive. By setting his own high standards, to the point of growing and raising his own food, he proves that we don’t have to be trapped by the chain supermarkets and giant food corporations.