Produce & Provenance

People talk about provenance a lot these days. It’s become one of those words that gets sprinkled around menus like flaky sea salt — usually with good intentions, occasionally with a bit less substance.

For me it’s much simpler than that.

Provenance just means knowing where your food comes from.

Not in the vague, marketing-department sense. I mean actually knowing — the field it grew in, the boat it came off, the person who raised it, caught it, grew it or dug it up.

I grew up in the countryside and have always been drawn to the outdoors — farming, fishing, foraging and the general business of producing food. For a long time, working as a chef, I mostly cared about two things: freshness and quality. Those still matter enormously, but over the years I’ve come to realise that the story behind the ingredients matters just as much.

Sometimes more.

Working with producers — farmers, growers, fishers and small suppliers — changes the way you cook. When you know the effort that goes into producing something properly, you tend to treat it with a bit more respect in the kitchen. Waste less. Cook more thoughtfully. Let ingredients speak for themselves instead of bullying them into submission.

That’s usually where good food begins.

These days a good portion of the produce used in my cooking comes from my own small croft in Moray. It’s nothing grand — a polytunnel, a kitchen garden and a few hopeful experiments each year — but it produces herbs, vegetables and seasonal ingredients that sometimes travel only a few metres before they reach the pan.

Which is about as fresh as it gets.

The rest comes from people nearby who care about their work just as much — local farms, fishermen on the Moray Firth, growers, butchers and small producers who know their craft.

That’s provenance to me.

(Of course, sometimes the wholesale market must be relied upon for things not available locally, but every effort is made to find the right produce, close to home.)

It isn’t about being perfect or worthy. The food system is complicated and nobody gets everything right all the time — least of all chefs. But if you seek out the best, freshest and most sensible ingredients you can find, you usually land somewhere close to the right place.

And the happy side effect of paying attention to ingredients is that the food usually tastes far better too.

In the end that’s what matters most. Good ingredients, treated properly, shared around a table.

Everything else is just detail.