Feasting on the festive spirit

VIEWPOINT Raymond Blanc

For many families, Christmas brings everyone together around one table to share the delights of a festive feast. In this week's Green Room, Michelin-starred chef and long-standing food campaigner Raymond Blanc urges us to embrace the seasonal spirit at every mealtime throughout the year.

The Christmas feast is a good time to step back and take a look at our food supply chain and the state of our farming

I'm a good French Republican, but at this time of year I become slightly monarchist, pleased that Cromwell's ban on Christmas was lifted with the Restoration.

Of course the clergy complain that Christmas has been robbed of its religious meaning - it's their metier - but for me, the season of Christmas has a meaning that goes beyond and deeper than that assigned to it by any particular religion.

Christmas has always been able to change people. Think about the British and German troops facing each other across their trenches in World War I, and how even this hideous carnage was calmed for a few hours on Christmas Eve 1914.

The festival has value for this alone but, in addition, it is an excuse for a feast.

A celebration at this time of year seems almost to be part of humankind's genetic code.

Even before the pagan Saturnalia, indeed as soon as human beings became pastoralists, midwinter was the time when livestock that could not be over-wintered was killed and feasted upon.

A time of feasts makes us more generous, even when it is not normally in our nature to be so; that is the essential truth Dickens captured in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Health and happiness

Religious or not, Christmas-tide (all 12 days of it) is heavily charged with emotion.

Food that has been grown for its quality, not its quantity, is in the end better for our enjoyment, our families and better for the environment

It is a time to connect with our families, a time when we recollect, honour and cherish our roots.

Of course, we take everything to excess; we eat too much and drink too much, but we also revel in companionship and the third legacy of the French trilogy, fraternity, even if we sometimes feel by Boxing Day or Twelfth Night (in the worst case) that we have also had a touch too much extended family contact.

So lucky us; we celebrate the time of year with a long meal that has a roast at its centre.

Every family has its own rules for the meal, but it always hooks into some tradition; the great thing now, something of which we can be proud, is that our traditional feasting is at last beginning to reconnect with our traditional agriculture.

Here in the UK and in France, the roast course is now usually a goose, a chapon or even a turkey.

Even if we weren't plunging headlong into a recession, we must admit that most of us would still buy a cheaper turkey, rather than a Kelly bronze, or a Norfolk black turkey.

But it is to our credit that we have revived these heirloom birds, these traditional breeds; and that, almost universally, they are reared and slaughtered in humane conditions.

It is no small thing, after all, that these birds are now available once again. If turkeys did have a vote as to whether we celebrate Christmas, they'd certainly be happier that some of them were at least being reared in accordance with higher animal welfare standards.

Food for thought

The Christmas feast is a good time to step back and take a look at our food supply chain and the state of our farming.

Understanding the importance of good food is a great gift

It's the one time of year when, even if we don't splash out on an organic turkey, we do ungrudgingly spend a little more than usual on our food.

If only it were possible for us to adopt this attitude for the rest of the year, what a difference it would make to our agriculture, to our regions, to our farmers and to our well-being.

Merely by dint of the fact that we allow ourselves a few food "luxuries" in our Christmas shopping, we trade up from our normal diet, and we try to buy food of a better quality than what we consume the rest of the year.

Admitting this to ourselves is the first step in improving our diet - and our relationship to the sources of our food.

Yes, we can tell the difference. Food that has been grown for its quality, not its quantity, is in the end better for our enjoyment, our families and better for the environment. I don't need to argue this - deep down, we all know it's true.

I have little time for those who patronise the poor by saying that they can't actually afford better food.

We can all afford better food - it is a question of priorities. Sadly, we in Britain choose to spend a lower proportion of our disposable income on our food than do other people in Europe.

Every British government since World War II has colluded in this skewed value system by pursuing a policy of cheap food.

We don't need cheap food any more than we need junk food. We need good, wholesome, nutritious, interesting food, sold at a realistic price, and grown in a way that does not damage the environment but enhances it.

And if that means saving a bit of money by spending less on the tinsel, why, what better time than Christmas to learn that lesson and teach it to our children?

Bon appetit et Joyeux Noel!

Raymond Blanc is proprietor of Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Oxfordshire, UK

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

---

Do you agree with Raymond Blanc? Do we pay more attention to food at Christmas time? Should we care more and pay more for the food we put on the table? Will your New Year's resolution be to pay more attention to what you put in your mouth?

Send us your comments using the form below:

Name

Your e-mail address

Town/city and country

Your comment

The BBC may edit your comments and not all emails will be published. Your comments may be published on any BBC media worldwide.

Terms & Conditions