Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Why I eat 30 types of plant a week

In popular science fiction, aliens live on Mars or, as in HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, they are hiding out in Woking, Surrey. Some people even believe their scrawny little bodies are bagged and refrigerated at a CIA black site in the New Mexico desert.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has some news though. They are living inside us. Trillions of them. And they decide whether we live or die.

“Gut bacteria are basically aliens in that we don’t make them; they visit and live inside us,” he says. “And so it’s our job to welcome them and provide nutritious things for them to eat because, in return, they do things like digest efficiently and strengthen our immune systems. Incredible, but true.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall isn’t on drugs. In fact he and his friend Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and nutrition guru, were discussing this with King Charles just the other day. Fearnley-Whittingstall and Spector spoke at a conference organised by the King’s health adviser, Dr Michael Dixon, who oversees health matters for the entire royal household. Afterwards they had tea at Highgrove.

“HRH is very interested in nutrition,” Fearnley-Whittingstall says. “And very up on all the new science.”

Has the King had his microbes tested?

“I actually don’t know if he has given Tim a sample of his poo to test,” Fearnley-Whittingstall muses. “But it’s extraordinary to think that everyone has a different set of these aliens inside them. Thanks to Tim’s amazing work we are now realising that young or old, rich or poor, your biome diversity is what really matters.”

Spector has written the preface to Fearnley-Whittingstall’s new book, How to Eat 30 Plants a Week, in which he explains the complex role that microbes play in our health. If you manage to attract a lot of good ones, they will synthesise crucial feel-good neurotransmitters such as dopamine and oxytocin, not to mention boosting the immune system. I like the sound of a little fella called Lawsonibacter, which really likes coffee. In fact, without it Lawsonibacter will die. In return this microbe produces quinic acid, which reduces blood pressure and also promotes the production of insulin, which in turn reduces blood sugar levels.

“You help it, it helps you,” Fearnley-Whittingstall agrees.

By the same token, if you just eat crap, alternative microbes proliferate. You don’t want the bad guys like Fusobacterium nucleatum or Peptostreptococcus anaerobius paying you a visit — they are known to promote tumour proliferation and inflammation in colorectal cancer.

“You want as diverse a collection of good microbes as possible,” Fearnley-Whittingstall counsels. “And what science shows us is that 30 different plants a week is the optimum amount.”

Why 30? Well, Spector’s research with the American Gut Project and its British counterpart examined the relationship between a healthy gut biome and diet in 11,000 volunteers. The data shows that simply being vegan, veggie or omnivore does not dictate microbiome health. In all cases it is the variety of plants people eat that determines it. In the study, those who ate about 30 different types of plant a week had greater protection against diabetes, obesity, dementia and depression. They also enjoyed more resilient immune systems and, most unexpectedly, less antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance is an increasingly troubling global issue. More than 1 million people died of drug-resistant bacterial infections such as pneumonia and sepsis in 2019 alone. Eating meat treated with antibiotics is one cause.

“Eating plants obviously helps with that and 30 different types a week is optimum,” Fearnley-Whittingstall says. “No one is saying don’t eat more than that, but beyond 30 the benefits begin to plateau.”

He bites into a radish plucked from his garden. “Delicious,” he says. “Did you know that radishes and turnips are both from the brassica family?”

I am being bombarded with veg know-how at Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage HQ in rural Devon. He tells me there are 11,000 edible plants, so managing 30 should be within reach. And though I am comfortable handling a carrot or a potato, I need to be bold and consider seaweeds and shore veg.

“What are nori and dulse?” I ask. These are listed in his book under “shore veg”.

“Both are delicious and highly nutritious seaweeds, but don’t run before you can walk… We’re going to make a delicious veg-packed tart with produce from the garden.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall has picked me up in his electric car from his restaurant. We then drive to his River Cottage cookery school down a hill overlooking a stunning landscape. But clearly his immersion in the world of microbes is total. The car smells funny.

“That’ll be my sauerkraut in the boot,” he says. “Again, great for your microbes.”

Nuts are a big deal here too. I’m sitting on half a dozen pistachio shells on the passenger seat.

“You know what made the biggest impact re stopping me snacking on Toffee Crisp or Crunchies and reaching for nuts?” he asks me as we motor along. “Getting an electric car. I no longer have to run the gauntlet of that incredible display of sweets when you pay at a petrol station. Everywhere we go in this country we get the message, ‘Eat! Eat!’ all the time. ‘Eat more of this irresistible sweet bad stuff.’ It’s incredibly seductive. But I now probably eat three Toffee Crisps a year instead of a week. Overall, with all the other changes I’ve made, I’m probably healthier than I was 20 years ago.”

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Fearnley-Whittingstall is indeed looking trim and healthy. Maybe that’s because, apart from healthy eating, he throws himself into a lake for a five-minute cold-water swim each morning and tries to fast until lunchtime.

“Actually it was just a cold shower today,” he admits. “I used to do the cold-water swim religiously between September and March but I don’t know who that person is any more.”

He didn’t fast this morning either. After the cold shower he had his “wolf from the door breakfast”: a slice of his wife Marie’s seedy sourdough, one half slathered with a nut butter and the other with homemade hummus.

“I ate because I knew you were coming and that’s a busy day requiring energy,” he asserts. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m ‘hangry’.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall’s conversion to veg is striking. The first book my wife bought of his (The River Cottage Cookbook, 2001) pictures him holding a piglet under each arm, not to mention a couple of dead rabbits tied to his front gate. And this is the guy who once trapped and ate a squirrel on TV (it was on a show called A Cook on the Wild Side) inspiring the tabloid headline “Fury as TV chef cooks Tufty” (Tufty was a much loved squirrel who featured in road safety ads in the Seventies). And Fearnley-Whittingstall also once made pâté out of a human placenta on a show called TV Dinners. That gave us “Placenta chef accused of cannibalism” and “Womb for dessert?” as well as attracting numerous complaints.

“We were ticked off for causing viewer distress,” he says. “But I’m glad we did it because I’ve always been interested in the ethics around how we get our food.”

We’re in the kitchen. Fearnley-Whittingstall is putting spinach, courgettes and edamame beans from his veg patch into what he calls a “smoked fish in the garden tart”. But he is still thinking about that placenta.

“I’m so walking into this, aren’t I?” he says, looking up suddenly. “But if science is bending over backwards to produce meat in labs that doesn’t harm animals, why don’t we just farm them and eat only their placentas?”

While we wait for the tart to bake, Fearnley-Whittingstall serves homemade wild garlic and cheese scones. They are served with butter containing fermented kefir (fermented food attracts microbes), lovage, thyme and wild garlic.

“This might attract a few aliens to visit,” he says as I munch.

The scones are extraordinarily tasty. But then again, he is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Can an average home cook throw this stuff together? Before meeting him, I made a few of the things in his book. The tomato and saffron baked rice was easy and by my reckoning contained eight different plants (you count all the herbs and spices — even black pepper and olive oil count towards your 30). However, my porridge loaf was less successful. This is supposed to be a hearty, healthy snack; it’s packed with dried fruit, nuts, seeds and oats. But crashing about in the kitchen at home I somehow left out the milk and it came out of the oven like a gritty slab you’d use to block-pave a driveway.

“But you tried,” Fearnley-Whittingstall enthuses. “And you didn’t just go and snack on a bag of crisps instead.”

His enthusiasm is infectious. And he has been both cooking and campaigning for healthier eating for a long time. But I wonder if he feels there is a widening gulf between the bien pensant middle class who send off their poo for analysis and eat well, and those who either can’t afford to or are simply impervious to his message?

“I do feel like I’m preaching to the converted sometimes, but I have to snap myself out of that because it is so important. Dig down into gut health and good eating and you soon intersect with issues like NHS funding.”

I note that McDonald’s sales were up 9 per cent last year (it enjoyed double-digit growth the two years before that) and Greggs recently overtook it as the country’s most popular place to buy breakfast.

“I don’t doubt it,” he says. “The tragedy is that even small changes to fast food would save lives. A little more roughage in a burger bun or a little more salad on the burger itself would feed through into stats around heart disease and diabetes.”

Sometimes Fearnley-Whittingstall will take on a passion project: a bad eater whose egregious diet he thinks he can turn around. In 2020 he made a programme called Easy Ways to Live Well with the broadcaster Steph McGovern for which they embarked on a UK road trip. Fearnley-Whittingstall brought along an apple and a homemade granola bar while McGovern got by on Monster Munch and Haribos. At the end of the show she even gifted Fearnley-Whittingstall a box of her favourite crisps as a present.

“That Monster Munch was distributed among others in a fair and responsible manner,” he tells me diplomatically. “Then I got Tim Spector to analyse Steph’s poo, which, surprise, surprise, wasn’t very microbially healthy. He then coached her on improving her gut biome and now she is in the top 25 per cent in terms of gut health in the country. She has almost as many good microbes as I have. It just goes to show, with a little effort, it can be done.”

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But his real beef is with those he is trying to convince at policy level. In 2018 he made a programme called Britain’s Fat Fight for the BBC in which he pursued Jeremy Hunt, then the health secretary, through the hallways of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. When he finally caught him, Hunt promised to halve UK child obesity by 2030.

“And since then the government has done next to nothing and that makes me so angry,” he says.

And so this March, despite the fact he says he finds live TV terrifying, he accepted an invitation to appear on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. The new health secretary, Victoria Atkins, was a guest. Even though she had only been in post for three months, Fearnley-Whittingstall went for her.

“Because it’s just so frustrating,” he says. “We know just before David Cameron resigned as prime minister that he had been talking to Jamie Oliver’s people and was planning to ban junk food ads aimed at children, to provide free school meals for all children on universal credit and to pressure supermarkets to stop doing deals on unhealthy food. That would have made a real impact on a wider food culture that creates a lot of human misery and costs the NHS billions.”

If it’s so straightforward, why do you think his successors didn’t do it?

“Because they’re f***ing Tories!” he cries. “I’m not saying all Conservatives think this way but the current iteration are completely ideologically opposed to interfering in people’s lives. They believe it constitutes an infringement of people’s freedom. And yet along comes Covid and they were ready to deprive us of our liberty to save lives. Now, I’m not one of those people complaining about that, but obesity is a much more serious crisis than Covid. It will kill many more people and cost more money, yet they won’t even nudge consumers or the food industry in the right direction. Boris Johnson almost saw the light when he nearly died of Covid and we currently have a PM who, I believe, understands the benefits of intermittent fasting, so they are nutritionally literate but they do nothing on ideological grounds. That to me smacks of deep cynicism.”

Funnily enough, three influential big-hitters from the world of food production met by chance at a concert by the Who in 2023. Fearnley-Whittingstall was there because he is a fan and there is also a strong family connection with the band: his mum, Jane, once ran the Who’s fan club and his dad, Robert, was close to their swashbuckling manager, Kit Lambert. Also present at that show in Gloucestershire were Jeremy Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper from Amazon’s hit TV show Clarkson’s Farm. Fearnley-Whittingstall met the duo for the first time.

“I met Kaleb. He is such a lovely man,” he reports.

What about Jeremy Clarkson?

“We briefly said hello,” he says somewhat less enthusiastically.

Clarkson’s Farm has made Clarkson something of a poster boy for British farming. But his evolution from motoring bad boy to a son of the soil who sometimes bemoans the UK’s lack of biodiversity and cries over the death of his piglets is odd for some. Let’s not forget that while Clarkson ploughs a field wonkily, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s defunct River Cottage series was one of the progenitors of shows about food production. I wonder if Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks Clarkson’s Farm is doing a good job of highlighting all the issues?

“I’ve never seen the programme, but I hear it is warm and funny,” he says.

Clarkson is now probably the most influential man in agriculture, I say.

“Jeremy Clarkson is migrating from petrolhead to farmer. Really? Is that happening? Is he doing regenerative farming? No-plough farming?”

Fearnley-Whittingstall has previously campaigned alongside Jamie Oliver on overfishing and chicken welfare and he is clearly taken with Kaleb. Together with Clarkson they could form quite a potent healthy eating force, no?

“These are your ideas, not mine,” he says tersely. “We’d need quite a broad church to accommodate us all. I’m supporting the Green Party, so they know where they can find me. Did you know that 900,000 votes for the Greens won them one parliamentary seat? The same number of votes won the Tories 23 MPs. It’s ridiculous. We need proportional representation in this country. Just think how many more people would vote Green if they thought they’d actually have a say in how the country is governed.”

I get a bit carried away. I suggest that he should invite Clarkson down to his farm, bake him a tart and “turn” him.

“Stop it, Michael!” my host cries.

Stress has always been an issue for Fearnley-Whittingstall. The last time we met, the Bristol branch of his small River Cottage restaurant chain seemed to be thriving but it has since closed down. And the TV production company, KEO Films, which he co-founded in 1996 was declared insolvent in 2021 (it was bought out last year). Today he does less. He is focusing on his books and the idyllic little empire he has here in Devon.

“I choose sanity,” he says. “I’ve said no to a couple of recent TV projects on the climate and that was a real relief because I’m getting old, you know? Books, tours, TV, all at the same time. It’s knackering.”

Less stress means he is sleeping better. But he has stopped drinking alcohol too, except on special occasions.

“Like a lot of people, I did dry January and carried on. But what constitutes a special occasion? My wife is a child psychotherapist and she recently completed a chapter of a book she’s writing about parenting. It was a very good chapter so that, I’m afraid, became a special occasion.”

They seem to live an idyllic life just down the road from the cookery school. The older children have flown the nest. Only 14-year-old Louisa remains.

In nearby Axminster, the people I talk to appear to admire Fearnley-Whittingstall. But now he’s off the telly they don’t see him often and my cab driver talks about him rather like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

“I see him pop up on the box getting angry with the politicians but he’s a bit of a mystery otherwise,” he told me.

Actually you can sign up for a dining event with Hugh on his farm. He’ll welcome you at 11am with coffee, then you pick veg for lunch. Afterwards Fearnley-Whittingstall slips away for a rest and comes back later for dinner.

“I need that breather because I’m an old man,” he reiterates.

How much for an evening with Hugh?

“It’s £450, which I think is good value,” he says. “You hear about these tasting menus that last about four hours and yet cost the same.”

I’m eating a scone. I think he believes I’m balking at the price point.

“I’m throwing in booze too,” he adds.

Our “smoked fish in the garden tart” is ready. It’s a microbe-friendly feast cooked on a beautiful electric Aga-like thing made by Esse. This in turn is powered by Fearnley-Whittingstall’s own wind turbine.

How odd that he should be cooking microbe-friendly fare in this 16th-century kitchen with its flagstone floor and ancient beams. Fearnley-Whittingstall believes the wood is “ship salvage”, possibly from vessels that fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588. The cottage’s original occupants would have roasted mutton, crane or stork yet here we are, more than 400 years later, preparing food we hope might encourage tiny aliens to come and live inside us.

“The future of food will be driven by this incredible new science,” he says. “That’s why I hope it’s not just the same people who are already very good at eating healthily who make these recipes. One in four young children in this country is obese and that is an absolute tragedy. I feel like a broken record sometimes but when schools visit here and children see that growing and cooking veg is fun, it’s heartbreaking more of them don’t know it will also prolong their lives.”

Gut health probably won’t be an election issue, but who would the little aliens inside us vote for?

“They would vote for diversity in all its meanings: bio, people, ideas.” He laughs. “Like any sensible being, they would vote for the things that help them stay alive.”
How to Eat 30 Plants a Week: 100 Recipes to Boost your Health and Energy by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (Bloomsbury, £25). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK P&P on orders over £25. Discount for Times+ members