Good news for pie eaters. Gordon Ramsay has called for unseasonable vegetables to be made illegal. There are, of course, great swathes of the west of Scotland where vegetables appear to have been outlawed for some considerable time. In 1993, the seminal report on Scots and food by Philip James discovered that, with the exception of the potato, one in five Scottish men and one in eight Scottish women never ate vegetables. In parts of Lanarkshire, the exhortation to “eat your greens” is understood to be a tacit sectarian call to arms.

Ramsay is not declaring war on all vegetables, however, just foreign ones. These days we don't just have to wash our greens, we have to ethnically cleanse them. The celebrity chef has said British restaurants should be fined if they serve fruit and vegetables which are not in season. All fruit and vegetables should be locally sourced, he believes.

He has already bent the prime minister's ear on this matter. It is not known whether Gordon Brown, who has problems aplenty in his own kailyard, told him where to stuff his artichokes but there has been enough of a public backlash against Ramsay's pronouncements to keep a Saudi Arabian executioner happy.

The gist of the outcry is that Ramsay is a foul-mouthed, publicity-seeker who needs cutting down to size and that you'd get more sense from a radish. It's a depressing response from a nation that still suffers from tall poppy syndrome. While I detest Ramsay's bullying style, he is clearly a man who knows his onions.

It's remarkable that a nation whose diet is only marginally superior to that of a hyena should have produced Britain's best-known, three-star Michelin chef. There is certainly no getting away from the influence that celebrity chefs have. Jamie Oliver may have had only a rudimentary education when it comes to economics, but his campaign against battery-farmed chicken had serious consequences for an entire industry. Delia need only mention an ingredient, no matter how outré, and there will be a run on it from Tillibody to Tunbridge Wells.

Ramsay's rantings cannot be dismissed out of hand, however. The growing local food movement, which he is buying into, has taken a more tenacious hold on British society than Japanese knotweed. The matter of whether your tomatoes are from Kent or Kenya has, if you'll excuse the pun, become a hot potato.

Loco-vores are an increasing phenomenon. In Fife, a group of families have vowed to eat only food produced in the town. The craze was inspired by the diet of a pair of Canadians who pledged only to eat food produced within 100 miles of their home. By their own admission, they ate a lot of potatoes.

Eating locally may sound like a sensible solution to environmental problems and I'm all in favour of championing small food producers but if you examine the economics behind the idea, you find only souped-up protectionism. There is a sinister, authoritarian flavour to much of what comes out of the environmental lobby and a creeping intolerance dished up as concern for the planet.

For the developing world, which is struggling to rise to the challenge of “trade, not aid”, the movement could prove disastrous. There is a complete lack of logic in advocating aid for Burma while refusing to buy Kenyan green beans.

Free market economics are the solution to Third World poverty, not the cause. Protectionism of the kind advocated by Ramsay is more damaging to Third World farmers than free trade. Just look at the Common Agricultural Policy. The opening up of markets and the dismantling of trade barriers have, according to statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, reduced starvation. In 1950, almost a quarter of the world's population went hungry; today the figure is 10%. That could change if the environmentalists get their way. Their promotion of biofuels is underpinning the rise in global food prices.

As for the so-called “food mile”, that concept is woollier than a Fair Isle sweater. It is a unit without definition. Adrian Williams, senior research fellow at Cranfield University, has published a study which shows that produce that has travelled long distances can still be more environmentally friendly than food produced locally. To do an accurate scientific study comparing the environmental impact of food produced in different places is possible but it is so costly and time-consuming that it is wholly impractical.

Ramsay's success is predicated on capitalism but he is exhibiting the same myopia that the left has always had for free markets. Free markets are environmentally sustainable because they seek maximum output for minimum input. As soon as you start putting up barriers and legislating against free trade, you sow the seeds of disaster.

In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere's Arusha Declaration in the 1960s called for national self-reliance and asserted the state's right to control the leading means of production and exchange. The result was widespread famine and the country is still dealing with the disastrous economic legacy.

At best Ramsay, with his jet-set lifestyle and international restaurant business, is guilty of hypocrisy. At worst he is throwing his weight behind a movement which could have economically disastrous consequences for the Third World. At the heart of much of the environmental movement is a fundamental misanthropy which sees people as the problem, not the answer.

It is an apocalyptic model which should be rejected. The idea that resources are finite and that humans are principally consumers is an argument that, while plausible, is entirely specious. It ignores the truism that people are the ultimate resource. The entire march of civilisation has been about manmade solutions to environmental problems; be they disease, natural disaster or famine. Far from simply consuming resources, mankind has devised increasingly ingenious ways of producing them. If Ramsay doesn't eat his words, his clientele will be eating a lot of turnips. It's an observation made more in sorrel than in anger.