Where is River Cottage? And are you still living there?

River Cottage is in West Dorset, not far from Bridport. I wouldn’t want to give the exact location, for the sake of the person who is now living there, but it’s not so far from the village of Beaminster either, which features occasionally in the series.

I was at River Cottage for over 4 years altogether. For a couple of years it was a weekend cottage that I shared with some friends. We used to go down there for holidays and I used it as a place to write – that was even before I had the idea for the TV series. It was the series that really gave me the opportunity to see what life would be like if I could stay there full time and start my vegetable garden and keep animals. But River Cottage was only ever somewhere I could rent. I would have loved to buy it but in the end I decided to move down to Dorset with my family and live there full time. So we started looking for somewhere else and now we’ve found a little farm. The River Cottage livestock have come with us and so has the spirit of the place – so even if I don’t live at River Cottage any more I like to think that River Cottage lives with us.

You've inspired many people; who inspires or inspired you? Who do you watch on TV?

Probably my original inspiration, certainly as far as food on television is concerned, was Keith Floyd. I think he did a lot to take cookery out of the studio and into the real world, and he was curious about where food comes from. He was one of the first television cooks to get excited about the quality of ingredients and where they came from, and he was interested in meeting the people who produce good food in this country. That was very inspirational.

The River Cottage life seems idyllic. What do you miss most about your past life?

To be honest I don’t really miss anything about my so-called past life, about living in the city. I go up to London often enough and when I do it’s for a fairly intense mixture of business and pleasure. Once I’ve been up there for a couple of days I’m ready to come home. I’m always happy to be on the train heading back to Dorset. There’s not much happening in the city that I yearn for. I suppose going to the movies would be one thing but there are cinemas not a million miles away from here so in theory I could do that down here. I can’t think of anything that I really yearn for from the city.

What’s next for you? Where are you on the Road to River Cottage?

I guess for me, what I’m doing at the moment is more about consolidation than anything else. The farm we bought a couple of years ago has 40 acres, which is a little bit more than I bargained for but it’s such beautiful land that we decided we’d take it on. As a result of that, I’ve now got quite a lot more livestock than I had at River Cottage and I’d like to spend more time dealing with them directly. So I really don’t have any ambitions to expand at the moment. If anything, I’d just like to free up more time to be involved with the animals on the farm. In the area of the garden, my eyes are always bigger than my stomach and I can’t resist making new beds and trying to grow new crops every year. Last year I put in an asparagus bed, this year it’s fruit trees. There’s always more things, more exciting foods that one can grow, and if I have trouble knowing where to stop that’s probably in the area of the garden rather than the livestock, where I think we’re happy as we are.

Were you really living at River Cottage or was it just a film set?

I was pretty much living there, albeit I had a family living somewhere else. So I obviously took time out to get back to see them. My wife was still working in London, so sometimes she would come down to River Cottage with our son, Oscar, and sometimes I would go back to London. But I certainly lived at River Cottage as much as I possibly could and was there for a lot more than the filming days. The net result, of course, is that I now live in Dorset full-time. So in terms of the experiment that River Cottage was about – i.e. dipping my toe in the rural lifestyle – well, I dipped my toe in series one, in series two I went up to my waist and by the end of series three I was up to my neck. I guess now that I’m fully immersed, and that’s how it will stay.

You’ve eaten many strange things. What wouldn’t you eat?

I certainly wouldn’t eat the white on top of a fried egg if it was still transparent. I’d have to either flip the egg over or keep basting it with hot fat until it set.

What does your family think about eating your animals?

My family is very happy for me to be raising and eating my own animals. My relatives are first in the queue to take the excess of what I produce for their own freezers. They’re absolutely delighted. They’re enthusiastic meat eaters and very happy if what they eat comes from our farm.

Are you still in touch with the people you met in the series?

I’m still in touch with a lot of the people who were part of the series. Ray the butcher – every time I take an animal to slaughter, or rather bring it back from the abattoir, Ray comes round and we cut it up together. He always comes over for my pig weekends while we’re making black puddings and salami and curing our hams.

Paddy Rudd, who led me on a merry hunt for some mushrooms and other strange wild foods, is still someone I see around and occasionally go out mushrooming or shooting or fishing with. Barbara and Roy – I pop in to say hi to them from time to time. Barbara’s still making fine jam. Roy, as you’ll find out in the coming TV series, finally won the Vegetable Cup in the Beaminster show. So plenty of contact with old friends still.

What do the Dorset locals think of the show? Do they watch it or laugh at you?

Well, you’d have to ask the Dorset locals for an absolutely straight answer, but the impression they give me is that they like it. Sometimes they have a slightly laconic view perhaps, but for the most part I think they appreciate that at the very least we’ve tried to show rural life in a more open and honest way than some other programmes, and in particular we’ve tried to show people where food actually comes from. That it’s either grown or it comes from animals, that it doesn’t begin in the supermarket in a plastic package. I guess we’re probably a little bit guilty of making things slightly rosy tinted – it’s difficult because I’m not financially dependent on farming and it would be hypocritical to pretend that I am. For me, the exploration of River Cottage was about discovering a new way of life. That has certainly been very real for me and I think people round here can see that. When I began the series I still lived half in London but now I live completely in Dorset, so from that point of view what you see in the series is what’s happened in my life.

What food could you not live without?

I’ve just spent a couple of days without any butter in the fridge and I must say it did seem like a bit of a crisis. I didn’t realise quite how dependent I was on it and I was very busy, so it took me a while before I had a minute to nip down to the shops. When I got there I went into a bit of a frenzy and bought 3 pats of butter, came home and had a hot cross bun with about half a pat of butter on top of it. So I do seem to have a bit of a butter problem. I can’t have tea without milk and I’m partial to cream. So I guess you could sum that up and say dairy products are something … cheese as well I completely love. I ought to eat less of all of them but unfortunately I’m just a little bit hooked.

Many people remember you for eating placenta. Did you do that just for the publicity/are you glad you did it?

I don’t have any regrets. A lot of people who didn’t see the show seem to know about this but it really wasn’t about me, it was about a family who were celebrating the arrival of their newborn child in a somewhat unusual way. I’m glad we did the programme because I like the family very much. It rattled a lot of cages. It was quite interesting to see people getting very hot under collar without being able to put their finger on what it was exactly that they were upset about. It was the exploration of a food taboo and I think that’s a very interesting area. No regrets, but it does get a little bit trying when people label you as ‘the placenta guy’, because there was a little bit more to it than that.

What do you think of GM foods?

I may have a bit of a reputation for eating strange things but I draw the line at GM foods. We don’t know yet what the consequences of its mounting presence in our food will be, but Murphy’s law tells us that if something can go wrong it will. This may not sound like a very scientific reason for avoiding GM foods but Murphy’s law is no joke, as the BSE crisis grimly illustrates: start feeding dead animals to other animals, who are supposed to be vegetarians, and sooner or later something weird and unpleasant will happen. The same applies to GM experiments: if it’s theoretically possible that GM foods could leap the species barrier and produce superweeds, or inhibit human immune systems, or cause damage to internal organs or foetuses, then sooner or later one or all of these things will happen.

The other thing that worries me about GM technology is that it is motivated by the search for profit – which means that in all probability corners will be cut, and safety will not always come first.

So, I’m going to stick to organic foods where possible – all organic produce is GM free – and hope that consumers will turn to those in the business of honest, traditional food production in their search for safe food.