What’s in your kitchen?

I make own absinthe because you can’t get the proper stuff anywhere. It’s just a tincture of wormwood, Melissa or lemon balm, angelica and fennel or anise. I have that as an aperitif quite often. I’m not an absinthe drunkard I’m an absinthe sipper.

Then we freeze stuff from the garden - mulberries, plums, burdock root and dandelion root which I shred and slip into stir frys. They’re fantastically nutritious and add a bitter note to flavours. I also make purees out of hawes and pickle beetroot.

We eat fish when it’s really fresh and buy it from the fishermen down on the Sussex shore. We get whitebait, mackerel and herring. We have chicken occasionally from Hen on the Gate – an award-winning farm up the road.

We have our own shop called Judges Bakery which makes life very easy. Before we eat we see what’s growing in the garden and then fill in the gaps from the shop. I have my own little woodland just outside Hastings where I gather nettles and wild garlic.

What’s your food philosophy?

What got me into food was macrobiotics. The easiest way to remain healthy and happy is through a diet based on whole grains and vegetables. Once you’ve got that at the centre of your diet it doesn’t matter that much what else you do. Then you can enjoy the other luxuries.

In America in 1965 when the first macrobiotic book came out it was so radical the macrobiotic bookshops were closed down and the books were taken away and burned.

The books said you might not get heart disease or cancer if you ate a macrobiotic diet and in those days people hadn’t really made the connection between the degeneration of people’s diet and the expansion of these diseases.

In 1966 Harvard’s top nutritionist wrote the cover story for Reader’s Digest calling macrobiotics “The Hippie diet that’s killing our kids”. Then about ten years ago his successor, Dr Walter Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health, said Americans should eat more grains and vegetables and an example of the ideal kind of diet is the macrobiotic diet. It took them 30 odd years to get there but they got there.

How have our attitudes to food changed?

Price is less of an issue. Quality is more of an issue. Everybody is much richer now but people spend a higher proportion of income on holidays and mobile phones than they do on food. There is plenty of wiggle room to divert money towards food expenditure. People do now realise that health is not just about avoiding heart disease, diabetes and cancer but also about feeling good.

There has been a big attitudinal change – people now connect food with health. We all still eat too much. We waste huge amounts of time, money and physical energy just eating and digesting food we don’t need. If we ate a diet that we were really satisfied by then we wouldn’t get the cravings.

What annoys you about food in Britain?

What really gets up my nose is bread. When I hear people saying they are allergic to wheat I want to strangle somebody because it is the food that has sustained us and led us to this point in our development. Here we are a civilisation that has been eating wheat for four or five thousand years and we’re suddenly allergic to it. You don’t just get allergic to something,
that’s not how evolution works.

The evolution of bread baking is the culprit. They now make bread in an hour – the flavour is developed quickly in bread but it doesn't break down the gluten. It’s known as the Chorleywood Process and it is cheap but the price we pay is irritable bowel syndrome, coeliac's disease and wheat and gluten allergies.

What’s Britain’s best-kept food secret?

Alexanders – it is like a giant parsley. You can eat the roots which taste like angelica, the shoots which need to be peeled taste a bit like celery and the leaves you can use like parsley. It was introduced into this country by the Romans and now grows all along the South Coast of England. I grow some on my allotment and I get a notice from the Council from time to time because they think I’m growing weeds. It has a long and glorious history of being eaten – it was popular in medieval times - but it is a forgotten food.

Do you prefer eating in or eating out?

Both – but if I do eat out it’s either in an Arabic or Thai restaurant. It’s for social reasons not for the food. In fact if I’m going to a restaurant I’ll often have a couple of slices of bread before I go so that when I get there I can just enjoy picking. I don’t trust the food in restaurants.

What’s the next big real food trend?

It’s local. It is also about less width and more depth. People are going to get into the foods of their region but also learn more about what food is - learning how to gut and fillet a fish or how to butcher a hog.

Getting to know the seed variety, origin and history of our food. We take all this stuff for granted but the history of food is just as important as the Kings and Queens of England. It is at the very heart of our cultural evolution and it is fun.

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