Posh Spices.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom Parker Bowles, son of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall)

The importance of eating seasonally and locally has become a guiding principle among the increasing number of Britons who take seriously the environmental impact and gustatory quality of their mealtimes; and it is reassuring to know that the principle is observed at the highest social levels. Consider the weekend house party held recently at Birkhall, the Prince of Wales's house on the Queen's Balmoral estate, before the sixtieth birthday of Camilla Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall. "It was all local--one day we had Aberdeen Angus beef from around the corner, and crab from Aberdeen; and the next day there were langoustines, and stuff from the garden," Camilla's son, Tom, said, a few days after returning from Scotland.

Since 2001, Tom Parker Bowles has been the food writer at Tatler, the British society magazine. He is also the author of a new book, "The Year of Eating Dangerously," in which he chronicles his global culinary adventures: fugu in Japan, ultra-hot sauces in New Mexico, ant-egg salad in Laos, dog soup in South Korea. "The thing about food writing is that there are only about fifteen adjectives you can use--'delicious,' 'delectable,' 'unctuous'--so that is why I moved to the disgusting side," Parker Bowles explained over lunch recently.

He had chosen to eat at Scott's, a new restaurant in Mayfair that serves, among other traditional British dishes, a variation of stargazy pie, a Cornish delicacy in which the cooked heads of pilchards poke through the piecrust. British food is, in Parker Bowles's view, wrongly maligned. "Potted shrimp, clotted cream, our scones and our baking--we have one of the richest food heritages in the world," he said, through mouthfuls of smoked sardines with soft-boiled duck's egg.

Parker Bowles, who is thirty-three, was tapped for Tatler after graduating from Oxford and setting up a concierge service called Quintessentially, which provided anything from opera tickets to restaurant reservations for its wellborn members. He is married to Sara Buys, a fashion-features editor at Harper's Bazaar, who is expecting their first child. The couple live in Notting Hill. "It's such a cliche, and everyone's a twat, but I love it," he said. "Mine's not the posh part but the back part, the All Saints Road. When you were young, you could buy anything you wanted there, and when you were sixteen that was very attractive, but you always got ripped off: a little white boy, very ...