Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Glorious foodie

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, writer, presenter and rustic eccentric, really cares about cooking. He rears his own animals, makes a mean chutney (even if it did win only second prize in the local show) and also knows the ideal percentage of salt in salami. Mr F-W is a Very Good Thing

So, off to meet Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall, otherwise known as Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall, which is true. Bunnies, pigeons, rooks' brains and spleen, crows' placenta and even squirrels, which, as a former member of the Tufty Club, I would find upsetting if only squirrels weren't so rubbish at crossing the road, weren't always getting run over, and so had absolutely no business in founding their own road safety club. Squirrels, I think, rather had it coming to them.

Anyway, Hugh lives in west Dorset which, I can now tell you, is down from London and sort of left a bit via a choo-choo train from Waterloo. Then, from the teeny, tiny town of Crewkerne it's a taxi (the only taxi, which has to be pre-booked) to Hugh's rather remote smallholding, Lower Hewood Farm. No, Hugh no longer lives at nearby River Cottage. Hugh only ever rented River Cottage and did dearly wish to buy it but the owners, sadly, did not wish to sell. Hugh, of course, made lots of splendid part-cookery, part-lifestyle, part-barmy-rural-folk television programmes from River Cottage, including Escape to River Cottage, Return to River Cottage and River Cottage Forever but not River Cottage Rules, Hurrah for River Cottage, or even River Cottage Test Drives the Fiat Punto as, alas, he seemed to run out of time.

Ah, here is Lower Hewood Farm, with its wonderful 40 acres, and here is Hugh, standing in the doorway of the old farmhouse (18th century?) with his three-year-old son, Oscar, and their springer spaniel, Dolly, who may or may not be in the family way. "We introduced her to a couple of husbands last weekend and they entertained her royally," he says. Hugh has that rather bonkers Greystokes hairdo while Oscar has a similarly mad, vividly blond Boris Johnson one. Obviously, good hairdressers are hard to come by when you decide to live down from London and left a bit.

Is Hugh vain at all? He's said not to be, was once even spotted driving around town in his prescription diving mask because he couldn't find his glasses. Are you vain at all, Hugh? He insists he is. A little. "I'm vain enough to have started doing some exercise again. Just push-ups. I've got a little regime going as things were beginning to slide and action had to be taken." I think he's rather gorgeous. Plus I do so love a man who can kill a squirrel with his bare hands. Saves having to run them over.

In we go, where Marie, his French wife and a former World Service journalist, makes coffee. Marie is sublimely and naturally elegant, in the way French women always are. Marie appears, even, to be acquainted with that thing called A Hairbrush, which perhaps she keeps all to herself. Marie comes across as delightful and friendly, but she might have quite a selfish streak. I shall have to watch out for that. Hugh, Marie, Oscar. Such an enviably happy trio, and Hugh seems particularly chuffed. This, I later discover, may have something to do with his rather brilliant performance at the recent village show where, he says, his Tuscan kale "won first prize in the category of Any Vegetable Not Listed Above" and his chutney won second prize (presumably in the category of Chutney).

Well done, I say. Thanks, he says, "although I can't understand why my chutney didn't win". Who judges such things? "The local chutney dignitaries," he says. "You have to be trained to be a judge and quite often the judges also enter the show, but obviously don't enter their categories. It's, 'I'm afraid I have to step aside here because I have cooked a Victoria sponge myself.'" Marie thinks the whole thing might be fixed. Marie says the judges are always going: "And first prize goes to... oh look, it's me!" She suspects it might all be "terribly corrupt". I think the general feeling is that Hugh might have been robbed on the chutney front. But he can't know for sure "because I didn't taste the winner".

Now, Hugh asks, would I like to help feed the pigs? Yes please, I say, because I've seen Babe and think pigs are very sweet and extraordinarily clever, to talk as they do and pretend to be sheepdogs. Hugh has two pigs, un-named. It would be a mistake, he says, to get too sentimentally attached, as one is destined for his annual hog roast while the other will ultimately provide bacon, hams and salami. The secret of tip-top salami? "The proportion of salt must be exactly right, which is 2.2 per cent." The pigs are big, fat and noisy, but still kind of sweet and surprisingly dainty. "Look at that one," I say. "It's standing on tip-toe!"

Hugh says: "That's not... um... strictly speaking... they have nicely turned ankles, I agree... um... they're sort of permanently on tip-toe."

You mean, that's just the way they stand? Always?

"Yes."

Hugh, can you tell I'm not a country girl?

"Um... yes."

Hugh also keeps sheep and cows, but I think he loves his pigs particularly. He says there isn't a part of the pig that you can't eat. The ears? He refers me to his recipe for Crispy Pig's Ears in his best-selling, rightly award-winning The River Cottage Cookbook which, actually, is as much an extremely readable essay on the horrors of modern food production as it is a collection of recipes. ("Crispy Pig's Ears, p.233. Ingredients: Two pig's ears, simmered gently with head, then removed and cooled, with any hairs removed...") OK, then. The tail? "Delicious, actually. Very toffee-ish." Hugh, is there anything you cannot eat, will not eat? He says he's not keen on the transparent film that you sometimes get on fried eggs. "I will never embrace that. I'll never say: 'Ohh, a transparent egg white, that's just what I want right now.'"

Hugh loves his animals when they're alive and Hugh loves his animals when they are dead, because that's meat, and meat is a wonderful, delicious thing (when it's not a cheap, mass produced £1.99 chicken from Budgens, that is). Hugh would kill his pigs himself, but it's illegal, so he takes them to the local abattoir, bringing the blood back in a bucket to make black pudding. Hugh says he has no problem raising animals to slaughter them, because that's what they are for, what meat is, for heaven's sake. If you consider it morally wrong, become a vegetarian. If, on the other hand, you think meat-eating is OK, then you still, he says, have a moral duty. Oh? He says the deal is this: "If there is any moral justification for eating meat at all, then there is a kind of contract. We'll eat you but until we do so we'll give you the best life possible. That has to be the deal." But it often isn't, is it? "No, we've welched on it, basically. But the better the food I can give these pigs, the more space, the more I can make sure they've got one another... that's keeping my side of the bargain." Has BSE taught us anything? "Do you think it's now illegal to feed dead animals to cows?" Yes? "No. Certain specified bovine offals are on the banned list, but others are not. There are still feed companies putting in blood and bone. Cows eat grass. Is it really asking too much that we should let them?"

I think Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a Very Good Thing: wholly committed to real food and honest cooking in a way that, say, Jamie Oliver and that lot are not. I can't imagine Hugh, for example, ever jumping into bed with Sainsbury's. Or any supermarket, for that matter. I ask Hugh what food legislation he would introduce, if he could. He says he'd love to see a star system on labels. "Why not have a scale of one to five, to show how horrible people have been to the animal? Five stars would mean they've lived at the Ritz whereas no stars would mean they'd been raised in horrific conditions. Shall we see the chickens now?" Yes please, I say, because I've seen Chicken Run and think chickens are very cute and very clever, to talk as they do and knit their own clothes.

So off we go, to see the chickens in the adjoining field, chit-chatting on our way. I wonder what Hugh's earliest food memories are. Well, he says, he was dispatched to boarding school at eight where the food was "atrocious, of course. Mashed potato from an ice-cream scoop, with lumps in it, no butter or milk. And the utter pointlessness of the meat we were served compared with what we get here. Most meat is criminally abused, not just when it's alive, but also when it's dead. School dinners, roast meats in canteens, those grey slabs. It's just astonishing something died for that, to become processed cardboard. Ah, this is chicken run number one, with the three cockerels in it."

Are these for eating?

"Yes."

"How do we kill them, daddy? How do we kill them?" cries an excited Oscar, who has joined us. Hugh later says that Oscar asked the same question when a journalist from the Daily Mail visited the previous week. And? "She said: 'Oh, what a horrible little boy.'" Actually, Oscar is only being raised to not be the hypocritical, squeamish carnivore which, let's face it, most of us are. How do you kill them, Hugh?

"I've tried a couple of methods. One is smacking them very hard on the head with a stick. The other is breaking their neck. I tend to go for the neck now. There is a lot of flapping involved with hitting them on the head and although they are unconscious, it is slightly disconcerting." I expect it would be. "And over there are the egg layers." Oscar dashes into the coop and returns with a pale brown, faintly speckled egg. I see Oscar with his egg and think I want to live in the country, with dainty-ankled pigs and salamis made with 2.2 per cent salt. But could I smack a chicken over the head with a stick? I'm not sure. Perhaps I could just run it over instead, squirrel-style. "Now," asks Hugh, "do you want to see my tomatoes?" Yes please, I say, even though, in this instance, I actually mean to say no-thank you. I've seen Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes and know that tomatoes are not cute and can, in fact, be murderously evil.

Still, into the greenhouse we go, trailed now by Isla, Oscar's Shetland pony. Oh, a pony, I say. How adorable. I give Isla a good pat, but get all this white yucky stuff over my hands. "Oops," says Hugh, "she's got a bit of a skin condition, horsy dandruff." How not so adorable, I say. "She has had one shampoo this summer, but it's a real palaver," he says. Thankfully, the tomatoes are not in a vengeful mood today because they are suffering from blight. "We weren't ruthless enough earlier in the year. What we have to do is strip all the leaves and leave the tomatoes. Some will ripen but some will get blight." He offers me an un-blighted one to taste. I say my hands are still covered in horsy dandruff. Shouldn't I wash them first? He says: "Contamination is the best kind of immunisation." I think Hugh and I might have graduated from the same school of hygiene. Certainly, I firmly believe that if you drop something, then blow on it, it becomes magically sterilised. I eat a tomato. It tastes terrific. I have yet to be ill.

Hugh was born in London, but moved to Gloucestershire with his parents (Robert, an advertising copywriter, and Jane, a landscape gardener) when he was six."The first thing I remember making are peppermint creams, which are really only edible Play-Doh, and other things followed fairly quickly. For a while I was only interested in sweet things. I made quite a lot of pear-and-almond tarts, and did have a sugar-spinning phase." After school (Eton), he went to Oxford (psychology and philosophy), travelled for a while, then got a job as a sous-chef at the River Café before becoming a food writer and restaurant critic. His first proper telly show was A Cook on the Wild Side, in which he drove round England in a Land Rover that converted into a kitchen, seeing what meals he could make. He's not sure what, telly-wise, he's going to do now. He doesn't want, he says, to turn Lower Hewood into another River Cottage. He might make a programme about food history, which would include Seventies suburbia. Ah, the melon boat, I say. Where did it sail to and why? "And don't forget," he says, "the grilled grapefruit with the cherry on top."

Back to the main house now, through the veg patch. He doesn't have a favourite veg as such. "One year I'm fixated on beetroot and the next I'm very excited about some new climbing bean I've found." He shows me one of the derelict outbuildings where he hopes, one day, to run a cooking school, teaching skills like ham-making, sausage-making, and smoking. I think I'm going to be sent home now but, as it turns out, Hugh and Marie and Oscar are off to the the Melplash Agricultural Show at Bridport. Would I like to come? What will I see? I ask.

"Lovingly pampered cows," says Hugh.

"And the prize carcass show," adds Marie.

Have you entered anything? I ask.

"No," says Hugh. "I gave the local my best shot."

I'm not sure I'm entirely tempted.

"Last week," adds Hugh, "at the Gillingham show, a bull tried to have sex with a Portaloo while a lady was in it."

Count me in! I cry.

So it's the Melplash show, which is very enjoyable. Hugh is very big in Bridport and gets an amazing amount of autograph requests. A bull does not try to have sex with a lady in a Portaloo. Unfortunately, I miss the thatching demonstration. I do learn, however, that show pigs are baby-oiled, which is a little spooky somehow. Then it's back on the choo-choo to London. Hugh's a terrific chap, writer, cook. I never found out what he has against that thing called The Hairbrush. Perhaps they are just not as free-range as popularly supposed.

'The River Cottage Cookbook' is published by HarperCollins at £19.99