Local food: have you had your fill?

Bara brith: a Welsh classic. Photograph: Jonathan Gregson/Kyle Cathie

It's billed as Cardiff international food & drink festival, and, yes, you can pick up everything from samosas to Italian truffles at this weekend's Cardiff Bay event. However, scan the programme, and you're left in no doubt as to what is at the heart of the festival: Welsh food. From Caws Cenarth cheeses to various ways with west-coast crab, Welsh cream liqueurs to Blaengawney cider, Cardiff will be yet another showcase for the vibrant Welsh food scene.

As a visitor to the principality, I have been taken aback by just how Welsh, Welsh food currently is. Compared to other parts of Britain, the ethos of modern British cooking, of using local Welsh produce in Welsh dishes, seems to have penetrated way beyond the obvious foodist venues. Some of this, the presence of cawl, faggots, Bara Brith and Welsh cakes on menus, is a matter of long-standing tradition, perhaps. But the near ubiquity of Perl Las cheese, Pen-Lon and Tomos Watkins beers, the emphasis on Welsh beef and lamb on menus, seems like a newer phenomena – as if food is part of what, for the past two decades, has been a wider (soft, cultural) resurgence in Welsh national pride. Food, it seems, is just another way that the Welsh assert their national identity.

Even for an instinctive internationalist such as myself, it is difficult to deny Wales its moment. Ravaged by industrial decline and Thatcherism, you take your victories – and alternative income streams – where you can. Heavily supported and promoted by the Welsh government, Welsh food has been a relative success story and a major plank of the country's tourism push.

Perl Las, organic cheese made by small family enterprise in Potseli, Boncath, Dyfed, Wales.

Certainly, the Welsh are doing what foodists want people to do. Rather than letting the food-industrial complex steamroller their culture, the Welsh are fighting back and maintaining the regional specificity of their food – in a way that links into issues of collective memory and history. Traditional dishes, by their very nature, suggest a generational continuity and link you to not just a region but its past. All of which creates a potent, romantic story around Welsh food, or Lancashire hotpot served in Lancashire, or haggis in the Highlands.

But, at the same time, do foodists and journalists (guilty!) blithely evangelise for localism, when, perhaps, we should be pushing a far more nuanced agenda? It's certainly not the case that local sourcing automatically produces great food. I've eaten in many places across Britain for whom sourcing local ingredients is clearly a box-ticking exercise. Top regional ingredients ordered, a kitchen can often go about its business, competently, but with no great creative zeal. As if namedropping the right producers on the menu, in itself, justifies your existence and credibility. Yes, patently, there is a place for local dishes. Yes, obviously, it is better for cafes, pubs and restaurants to source high-quality ingredients from trusted local suppliers. But there is a fine line between localism and laziness.

Welsh lamb. Photograph: Steve Pope/Fotowales

And what about the wider world beyond lamb cawl and Lancashire hotpot? Wouldn't it be great if, simultaneously, a lot more chefs were using local ingredients in international dishes? There is only so much modern British or Welsh food we need or we can eat. There is only so far you can go in reviving traditional dishes, before that, in itself, becomes stifling. A bit boring. Which, I'd argue, it now is. Go into most British pubs and, while there may be regional variations in Aberdeen or Abergavenny, you can pretty much guess what will be on the menu before you sit down.

Where, in contrast, are the chefs using British ingredients (rather than those imported from halfway around the world) to explore Malay, Ethiopian or Scandinavian food? On a simpler level, why aren't we demanding – even if it limits us, in some ways – that British ingredients be used to produce cuisines, from Italian to Japanese that would otherwise rack up so many food miles? Local produce, international food, should that be the new foodist mantra?

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