Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
BBC
4.4 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2009
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the food writer and cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Famous for making paté out of placenta and dining on such delicacies as squirrel and rook in his TV programmes, he has made a name for himself as a cook on the wild side. So perhaps it is not surprising that his first ambition was not to spend his life inside a kitchen but in the great outdoors because, he says, he 'wanted to be David Attenborough'.
A stint in the renowned River Cafe in London, however, set him on his way to establishing his own waterside haven for food lovers, his River Cottage in Dorset. From there, he has followed his passion for the environment by campaigning for ethically-produced food, including championing a creature not normally given time on our small screens - the humble supermarket chicken.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Love Reign O'er Me by The Who Book: Moby Dick by Herman Melville Luxury: Full set of Scuba gear.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, |
| 0:24.7 | history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. |
| 0:27.8 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.4 | Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:35.5 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:38.6 | The program was originally broadcast in 2009. |
| 1:02.4 | Music My castaway this week is the food writer and cook Hugh Fernley Whittingstall. |
| 1:06.5 | His nickname Hugh Fearlessly eats it all has been well earned. |
| 1:10.3 | 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. |
| 1:15.4 | He set up River Cottage more than a decade ago, and since then, his unsentimental approach to nature's larder has brought him his fair share of hate mail. |
| 1:23.8 | He is unrepentant, though. |
| 1:25.8 | It's all about understanding the balance of life around you, |
| 1:28.7 | seeing that the animals have healthy lives and stress-free deaths, |
| 1:31.7 | and then not wasting the food you've got. |
| 1:34.9 | If everything you eat is presented to you finished in a foil pack |
| 1:38.5 | with unrecognisable bits in it, he says, |
| 1:41.1 | that creates the inappropriate relationship with food. It is a trick that you |
| 1:45.9 | first pulled off you when you were at school with a duck. The duck. I'm perhaps a little |
| 1:51.8 | reluctant to agree that that was the first time I pulled it off because I think I'd probably |
| 1:55.2 | plucked a few carrots from the ground and eaten a few peas from the pod. but in carnivorous terms, yes, there was an |
| 2:01.6 | incident. A friend and I used to sneak up under the bridge over the River Thames at Windsor |
| 2:08.7 | to smoke cigarettes. And there was often a little parade of ducks going up and down underneath |
... |
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