Country ways

AS THE supermarket gravy train merrily rattles on netting massive profits, fat directors' salaries and no doubt, trebles all round, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall must be a nasty thorn in monster food retailers' sides.

For into the debate on food production has confidently walked a floppy-haired chef with a passion for traditional farming methods - who honed his discussion skills studying philosophy and psychology at Oxford University.

With simple erudition he cuts through puffy clouds of marketing guff like cheese wire through particularly crumbly Wensleydale, detailing how the supermarket meat we eat may come from a tumour-ridden cow or a pig that was so stressed it tore the tail off another.

The many fans of his Channel 4 television programmes are well acquainted with HFW's knack of telling it as it is as he champions real food and honest home cooking, a combination which has tapped into a public shift away from filling their guts with additives at every meal - and made him a multi-award winner.

And his newly-published The River Cottage Meat Book sees him gnaw at length on the issue of how, he believes, the food-buying shoppers are conned by the big players.

So have they come back to him with their comments on phrases in the book such as "the supermarkets' appalling meat-ageing practices"?

"I haven't had any reaction from them. But they are all tarred with the same brush in the book," explains Hugh.

"They tend not to want to make a fuss. They don't want to be more open about what they are doing, that's the problem.

"Once things are done less and less in the public gaze they are open to all sorts of levels of abuse. That's particularly what has happened with meat production.

"Of all the books I've done it's the most political and critical of the status quo and calling for change.

"They (the supermarkets) are terrible, terrible bullies. You could say that the farmers who run intensive poultry farms deserve criticism for not looking after animals properly.

"After visiting large numbers of battery farms and talking to people who run them they say 'we would all love to farm less intensively, give more space to our chickens - but if we do that we will not hit the target prices set by the supermarkets.'"

He continues: "Supermarkets are thriving off the climate to cut prices, cut prices. Producers are forced to more and more desperate measures while supermarkets are able to squeeze them harder and harder. It's a very cynical exercise which results in the consumer being ripped off because they are not getting a good-quality product.

"That's why loads of farmers have turned away from that and said 'there's another way. We will produce meat in a civilised way, with plenty of space for our animals and finding a way of selling direct to the public.

"Let's go back to the way we know it ought to be done.'"

Anyone would think he was a patron of the National Association of Farmers' Markets.

Which, of course, he is.

The only food retail giant to be let partially off the hook is Waitrose with an "I can certainly state that it has an openness and a willingness to engage with both the media and its customers over welfare issues that put the other supermarkets to shame." It's important to stress that HFW (aka Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall for failing to quake at the concept of frying up everything from human placenta to lambs' testicles) doesn't live in some sort of fluffy farmyard fantasy, where happily nuzzling calves never make the mouth-watering transition to fillet steak.

In fact it's exactly this sort of myth, thriving now many shoppers' first contact with a joint of meat is when it's neatly encased in polystyrene and clingfilm, that he seeks to explode.

This is one of the reasons why his new book features a sequence of photographs showing what happened to some of his own cattle when they were slaughtered.

"There's no meat without animals dying," he maintains.

"Also it's important to focus on how animals lived. All animals have to die in one way or another.

"But if they eat well and meet an end which doesn't have any suffering it may be a better life than no life at all."

Bizarrely HFW never dreamed of the television stardom which has engulfed him, (obvious by his lack of obsessive personal grooming - "there isn't much point in going to spend an hour in make-up if you're going to get your hands dirty digging in the garden"),

No, he always wanted to write.

After Oxford the 39-year-old travelled and then thoroughly enjoyed working as a sous chef at the River Caf, in London where he was soon a victim of staff cuts.

"In a funny kind of way I think of myself as a writer and journalist first. Sooner or later my tv sell-by date will run out.

"I've always seen the writing and book side of things as somehow more enduring than the tv."

That said, he relishes life in front of the lens and particularly the fact that it's resulted in him moving from London to Dorset, where the River Cottage series are filmed.

Here Hugh's tapping into his childhood - he was largely brought up in a Gloucestershire village where a deep-rooted love of the country was born while playing on combine harvesters.

But the decision to quit London was one made with journalist wife Marie, largely because the couple thought Dorset would be an excellent place to raise their young sons Oscar and Freddie.

"What I enjoy about the present series I've done is it's all relatively relaxed.

"A lot of it is about me learning from a lot of people who have been doing what I'm starting to do for a long time.

"One of the things that has been nice is all the local people down here in Dorset - they are what makes it work really.

"Now I live in the country I feel I can enjoy London. I can go back and see my friends but I'm always happy when on the train heading back to Dorset."

And meat?

"It's a passion definitely. Because it's a passion it's something I like to see done right, both in the field and in the kitchen."

The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £25.