Writer and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, 62, raised livestock organically at his home farm for 13 years and founded the Bath Organic Farms (now something of a local legend with shoppers forming long queues at Bath Farmers' market for organic chicken) with his business partner Paul Robinson to promote local organic produce. He has been President of the Soil Association for ten years and lives near Totnes in Devon.

What’s in your kitchen?

A mini organic veg box from Riverford Farm, outside Totnes. This week it had potatoes, leeks, carrots, mushrooms, curly kale and red onions. Last night there was a small wild pheasant – which I also bought from Riverford Farm. The meat I buy is grown within about ten miles of my house. I don’t want to transport it unnecessary distances. I also eat organic porridge every day – I think I’m hooked! There is also some red wine, still talking of things I’m hooked on. It happens to be organic but I picked it up from Somerfield in Totnes. It’s interesting that you can now buy organic wine from supermarkets.

What's your food philosophy?

I like simple food that is beautifully prepared. My relationship with organic food started as a feeling that producing food by treating everything that you didn’t want to grow as a pest and zapping the soil wasn’t good. Meat that depended on growth promoters and antibiotics to protect animals reared in horrible conditions was not good. And my instinct has been demonstrated again and again to be consistent with scientific evidence.

Obviously, sometimes it’s not possible to eat organic but I try to buy local. I avoid food that has been round the world before it arrives on your plate because the environmental damage from air transport is so severe. I sound so holier than though, but I’m not really. I like flowers and it is very difficult at this time of year to buy them locally.

How have our attitudes changed to food?

It has come full circle because when I was a child people ate local food. Then we went through this dramatic shift to produce cheap food sold in the supermarkets. Now farming is in perpetual crisis because prices for farmers are low. But we have a new consumer movement that is increasingly concerned about the quality and origins of food.

What annoys you about food in Britain?

I think the thing that most frustrates me is the huge amount of money spent promoting and advertising food that is killing us – whether it is fatty fast food or killing us slowly by supporting unsustainable production methods. There is an aspect of cheap food that appalls me. We are still willing – retailers, restaurateurs - to use cheap food products. No one asks where it comes from or, in the case of livestock, how it has been fed. If we say that it is wrong to treat animals badly but we still serve up food from countries where animals are kept appallingly we are living in bad faith.

What's Britain’s best kept food secret?

My slow roasted guinea fowl! You can bung it in the oven for 12 hours at a very low heat so you are not using up much fuel, say 50 degrees. Then you don’t have to bother even looking at it and when you take it out it will taste absolutely wonderful. There are scientific reasons for this – like the breaking down of the structure of the meat. The only thing is that you have to remember in the morning that you want to eat it in the evening.

Do you prefer eating in or eating out?

I enjoy eating out but I prefer, with the right company, to eat in. It’s difficult to beat the intimacy of eating in – the feeling of well-being that you can achieve with lighting, good food, good friends and good talk. But I do like the fun of eating out. Particularly at the New Inn, in Morleigh near Totnes (01548 821326), my local pub, which by general consent produces simply the best beef steak in the world and people do come from long distances. It’s family run and they won’t tell anyone where they get the beef from. I’ve got a bias in this one because one of the owners is my nephew, Leon.

What’s the next big food trend?

People are going to go on demanding fast food but they are going to demand higher quality fast foods. London’s healthy fast-food chain Leon demonstrates far better than anywhere else that you can have cheap food that is well-sourced and delicious – take out or eat in. What is encouraging is that it is phenomenally successful.

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