‘It’s time to tackle Britain’s weight problem’
Hugh Fearnley-whittingstall tells Rosa Silverman what lessons he learnt in lockdown
Hugh Fearnleywhittingstall has just been for a swim. Not in a heated indoor pool, of course – those are for wimps and, anyway, they’re still closed. Instead, the celebrity-chef-cum-television-starcum-campaigner has become one of those cold-water swimming people.
He started two years ago with the gateway drug of cold showers and has since graduated to the real deal.
“I’ve already been in the pond this morning, which is currently about seven degrees,” he tells me over Skype from his East Devon home. “It’s quite nippy.”
I am happy to take his word for this. He’s now wrapped in a chunky cardigan and thermals, thawing out near the wood-burning stove in his garden office, while evangelising about how his morning ritual provides a connection with nature as well as “this extraordinary buzz”.
He adds: “I’ll be shedding my thermals at some point shortly.”
Whether or not his brand of cold-water immersion appeals, the Fearnley-whittingstall pandemic set-up sounds enviable. Beneath beautiful big skies he’s been growing his own vegetables, rearing livestock and exploring wild flowers, while the rest of us were dragging ourselves around the local park before returning to our screens. He even makes homeschooling the youngest of his four children sound fun.
“It’s been great,’” he says. Sorry, what?
“I’m perhaps slightly guilty of tailoring lessons to some of my own passions and pleasures, but I got stuck into the maths homework as well.”
He’s been “good about the drinking”, too, avoiding alcohol two or three nights a week (“sometimes even more”), and has managed not to gain any lockdown weight (nor, he admits, lose any). But although on a personal level lockdown has been “rather amazing”, he admits there have been “heartbreaking” professional setbacks.
He and his team had already decided before the pandemic to close the River Cottage Kitchen in Bristol and, last summer, they decided not to reopen the Winchester branch – only the Axminster outpost will remain come May. During the pandemic, they have had to let staff go.
“It’s been devastating,” he says. “It’s been pretty tough. It was absolutely horrible [making that call]. The team we work with is itself like a family, so it’s been really hard.”
Many years before his face became familiar from Channel 4 television programmes such as A Cook on the Wild Side (1995-97) and multiple iterations of the River Cottage franchise (1999 onwards), the politically minded Fearnley-whittingstall was a contemporary of Boris Johnson at Eton and Oxford. He assures me they have no personal contact. How does he rate the support Johnson’s Government has offered his industry over the past year?
“I get that the resources aren’t infinite,” he begins diplomatically. “The difficulty has been around the mixed messages, the opening and closing, the inconsistency of having a very noisy campaign to get people back into restaurants and then having to shut them down again.”
But he isn’t what Johnson might call a doomster or gloomster, and believes hospitality will bounce back.
“Yes, some pubs and restaurants including ours haven’t been able to make it through, and that’s very sad, but there will be an extraordinary resurgence,” he says. “The public is waiting.”
Meanwhile, he’s been busy training up the next generation of chefs and restaurateurs via his 48-lesson River Cottage online cookery diploma, available on the Learning With Experts platform. Its mission: to inspire students to source and cook food in a sustainable, ethical way. It launched in late autumn and has, he says, “kept a lot of us focused and sane and excited”.
During the course, participants submit photos of their cooking assignments and receive feedback. “It’s another example of [how] my online life has become more intense and my outdoor life has become more intense,” says Fearnley-whittingstall, who also finally joined Instagram in December. His feed is heavy on the wholesome food and farm pictures, and refreshingly lacking in inspirational quotes.
More than two decades before the pandemic saw city dwellers flock to the countryside for a healthier existence, Fearnley-whittingstall decamped to River Cottage in Dorset to live off the fat of the land (and his television career). But he’s done far more in the years since than make the good life look very good indeed. Following the success of River Cottage, there have been campaigning TV shows: Hugh’s Chicken Run (2008), Hugh’s Fish Fight (2011) and Britain’s Fat Fight (2018-19), which tackled the obesity epidemic. Clearly, this had not been solved by the time Covid hit, and our high death toll has been attributed in part to the size of our waistlines.
“That’s an extremely compelling reason for the Government to respond to the challenges we’ve been laying in front of them for some time now, to really address the obesity crisis in the UK,” says Fearnley-whittingstall. “It’s a very bad situation in the UK. The Government has made some commitments… but we haven’t really seen the action yet.”
This month, it was reported that the Government was planning to reverse the proposed ban on online adverts for junk food, a move condemned by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, doctors and health charities.
“So much more of kids’ screentime is spent in front of their computers, rather than in front of the TV,” says Fearnleywhittingstall. “Just dealing with junk food advertising on primetime telly isn’t going to address the issue.”
When it comes to adults, the high number of Covid fatalities suggests Britain has paid a steep price for failing, year after year, to properly control its obesity problem. Fearnley-whittingstall points to the Government’s instinctive aversion to what critics call “nanny state” policies.
“We don’t do that, we don’t police people’s diets,” he says. “The pandemic is a very interesting potential catalyst for further and more rapid change. It’s more dangerous to be obese than it was before the pandemic.” There is also, he notes, the “ideological point that health intervention is not our thing – well, we’re in the middle of the biggest health intervention, not just in the UK but globally. Lockdown is the Government telling us how to behave for our health.
“If you give people that level of restriction and tell them how to behave, you can surely give them a bit more help with their diet… and stop them becoming overweight and obese. There’s never been a more urgent time.”
Getting it right would lift a huge burden from the NHS, he adds. “We have a problem with the shortsightedness of political thinking. Who’s going to reap the benefit if it’s going to take more than a few years to see really significant results?”
‘Just dealing with junk food adverts on telly isn’t going to address the issue’
He admits there is “some complexity to the question of how to stay well and eat well” and has tried to acknowledge as much in his latest book, Eat Better Forever, which is part healthy eating manual, part recipe collection. The book recognises the importance of fat in the diet and includes an entire chapter on healthy drinking – because “most drinks have a lot of stealth calories in them”.
As individuals we can only do so much in the face of “a bombardment of advertising” of “treat” food, he admits. “An obesity crisis is not a crisis of willpower,” he says. “People haven’t suddenly evolved to be much less in control of how they want to be.”
Still, there’s no time like the present to heave ourselves out of our lockdown-induced food torpor. A Fearnley-whittingstall yellow split pea soup or bashed beetroot wrap might not be a bad place to start.
Eat Better Forever by Hugh Fearnleywhittingstall (Bloomsbury, £26) is out now. Buy for £22 at books.telegraph. co.uk or call 0844 871 1514