The knives were out for Gordon Ramsay yesterday after the celebrity chef called for legislation to ban restaurants from selling fruit and vegetables out of their proper season. If he ruled the land, hefty fines would be dished out to eateries serving South American asparagus at Christmas or African strawberries in March. The Scot was probably aiming to launch a discussion rather than make a direct appeal to lawmakers. Even so, his indignation is ill-conceived and badly directed.

Mr Ramsay has two objections to imported produce, neither of which concerns its taste. In recent years there has certainly been a loss of seasonal variety. So we no longer need to go without tomatoes and raspberries until Scottish-grown varieties arrive in the shops. Changing our intake to chime with the growing seasons for home-grown produce would be "more exciting for punters", he claims. If Gordon Ramsay wants us to revert to those long Scottish winters when our ancestors scraped through on increasingly wizened root vegetables and a few sprouts, his definition of excitement differs from ours.

His second concern is with the environmental cost of the globalisation of the fresh food market. This is a serious issue, though most imported fruit and vegetables are consumed at home, rather than in restaurants, and if Mr Ramsay is in earnest about cutting food miles, why does he keep bananas, pineapples and mango on his menus? On moral grounds, too, this is a complex issue, as supplying British consumers with year-round vegetables and soft fruit now sustains thousands of peasant farmers in the developing world. There is an inherent conflict between green consumerism and ethical consumerism.

Even on environmental grounds, this is a complex issue, when tomatoes forced in heated Scottish greenhouses reportedly have a larger carbon footprint than Spanish ones grown outside and flown to Britain.

If Mr Ramsay is keen to hone his green credentials he should attack the obscene level of food waste in Britain. A report this week estimated UK households throw away £10bn of edible food annually. Research from the Scottish Love Food, Hate Waste campaign, produced similar results. This is financially unsound, morally indefensible and environmentally damaging. Discarded food wastes the energy that goes into growing, harvesting, preparing, packing and transporting it. And when it goes to landfill, it emits harmful greenhouse gases such as methane. Eliminating this waste would be the equivalent of taking at least one car in five off the road.

We are in a state of denial about this issue because our consumerist culture does not value food. We have a moral responsibility to consume sustainably, especially at a time when rising food prices threaten a billion people with starvation. Many of them are already spending 80% of their income on food. What about fines for restaurants that waste food? Could Mr Ramsay lift the lid on his own kitchen waste with a clear conscience?