Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My castaway this week is the Food Writer and Cook Hugh Fernie Whitting Store.

His nickname Hugh fearlessly eats it all has been well earned.

Impala, giraffe and crocodile found their way onto his plate in Africa, whilst in Britain

squirrels, baby rooks and pigeon have been on the menu.

He set up River Cottage more than a decade ago and since then his uncentimental approach

to nature's larder has brought him his fair share of hate mail. He is unrepentant though.

It's all about understanding the balance of life around you, seeing that the animals have

healthy lives and stress-free debts and then not wasting the food you've got.

If everything you eat is presented to you finished in a foil pack

with unrecognizable bits in it, he says,

that creates the inappropriate relationship with food. It is a trick that you first

pulled off you when you were at school with a duck. The duck. I'm perhaps a little reluctant to agree

that that was the first time I pulled it off because I think I'd probably plucked a few carrots from the ground and eaten a few peas from the pod. But in carnivorous terms, yes, there was an incident. A friend and I used to sneak up under the bridge over the

River Thames at Windsor to smoke cigarettes and there was often a little parade of ducks

going up and down underneath the bridge.

And one day we took a couple of half bricks in our overcoat pockets thinking we'd

nab ourselves a duck supper and we agreed our target duck and launched our bricks and to both

our astonishment and we made a direct hit. The duck went under and then bobbed up

ten yards further downstream stone dead.

We knew we had to do the right thing then, which was to even if we'd already done perhaps the wrong thing.

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