A 24-carrot enthusiast

Gregg Wallace dismisses the obsession with organic produce

10 April 2012

For an oik from Peckham, as he often describes himself, Gregg Wallace eats in some fancy places. The foodie's Del Boy, who has presented Radio 4's Veg Talk for eight years, became a household name with Saturday Breakfast in 2002, and now has the nation hooked on BBC2's Masterchef Goes Large. He can get a booking at The Ivy any time he wants, and Gordon Ramsay will spend 10 minutes at his table.

Not bad for a boy who left school at 14, and worked as a scaffolder before stocking fridges at Covent Garden market with cocaine-sniffing barrow boys who cared less about veg than our nation's schoolchildren. Greg was sacked from Covent Garden for nicking Cheddar, which he sold to local pubs.

He now eats out five nights a week at London's top restaurants, supplying 200 of them with fresh vegetables which he grows mainly on his Godalming farm. It's a long way from Peckham, and an upbringing which included little in the way of fresh vegetables.

"I love my mum dearly," says the Masterchef judge, "but she's one of the most awful cooks you've ever seen. I knew absolutely nothing about food at all."

As a teenager, Wallace ran wild, went through a series of jobs - dry cleaning, Artexing - and collected a few tattoos, including a British bulldog and a Millwall FC lion. At 20 he took the job in Covent Garden, and there, among blokes whose vegetable vocabulary extended to "a beautiful bit of banana", he discovered the miracle of fresh food.

"Covent Garden was full of men with clashing leisurewear and awful cocaine habits," he says. "Those guys don't realise they're selling food. For them it's just a commodity. I've seen grown men sneering at bunched carrots. I was fascinated by the product. The first time I ate in a restaurant I was 23 years old, and a whole world opened up to me."

But just as he discovered his metier, Wallace was sacked for rustling Cheddar. "I used to hang out with burglars - I wasn't a hooligan, but you've got to remember I was brought up round the Old Kent Road, and that's how it is."

Because he took an almost unnatural interest in salad, and obviously knew his stuff, Wallace quickly got another job. A grocer saw his potential and sent him off to France with a van and a bag full of cash.

"I have him to thank for everything, because the hardest break when you're a blue-collar boy, a manual worker, is to find someone to trust you to work with your brain."

Wallace realised that the key to the business was making friends with chefs. He quickly started his own firm, loading up a van with fruit and veg, and charging around London, talking his way into restaurant kitchens. He built up a massive customer base and bought a big house in Richmond, where he lived with his wife and two children (they divorced three years ago).

He also started doing radio and TV with another buyer, Charlie Hicks, an old mate from Covent Garden market. The pair have made several programmes, including a series on Italian produce called Follow That Tomato, and, of course, Radio 4's Veg Talk.

Who knew vegetables would make great entertainment? The combination of Hicks, "the chinless wonder", and Wallace, "the oik", worked brilliantly. Wallace's passion for his subject is irresistible. When he warms to his argument, he sounds as though he is commentating a rugby game (rugby is another of his passions: he coaches under-12s at London Welsh).

He still sounds like a barrow boy, punctuating his sentences with gutteral squawks of assent ("Argh! Gagh! I love it!") and an awful lot of swearing.

"I'm a bit lucky, you know," he says. "Because I was brought up where I was brought up, and I obviously love food and know about food, I'm pretty rare - there aren't many blokes who know about food who sound like me. There are lots of middle-class ones, very few oiks. I'm as happy discussing rugby with a Comtes Lafon Mersault as I am discussing Millwall football club with a sausage sandwich."

Wallace is mounting a vigorous campaign for fresh food grown locally and in season, not imported from Zambia or Spain. "I'm interested in bringing to people's attention old heirloom British vegetables that we don't use any more. I want skirrit, I want shepherd's purse, I want Good King Henry. They're beautiful. Any vegetable is beautiful if you pick it from the ground and cook it."

His mission is to get vegetables from the ground to the plate in as little time as possible, and he dedicates his considerable energies to this end, supplying his London restaurants from 15 growers in the South-East.

After 20 years in the business, he is furious that restaurants are still not serving homegrown, seasonal produce, even importing asparagus in January. "Restaurants have to start buying British produce. At Mirabelle they've got Jersey potatoes on the menu all year, which is wrong. How many restaurants have got fresh tomatoes on the menu in March? And lamb. Where the f***'s that coming from?

"We used to think the French were better cooks than us," he says as he trots around his Godalming farm, picking off salad leaves for me to taste - land cress, dandelion, baby sorrel - and points out where courgette flowers are grown and harvested at 4.45am, just as the sun comes up. "It's absolute rubbish. We are one of the culinary cities in the world.

"What we are starting to develop again, which has been missing since the industrial revolution, is our own food culture. Chefs are only paying lip service to seasonality at the moment, but at least they recognise it is the way to go."

Wallace's passion for food bulldozes class barriers. He has no time for chefs who drizzle sauces from squeezy bottles, and his favourite contestants on Master Chef are the "mums who cook with love".

He worries that the midd le classes have hijacked food, channelling seasonal, locally grown produce into farmers markets instead of finding a way to get it into supermarkets, where people with backgrounds similar to his own might find it. He also dismisses the current middle-class preoccupation with organic produce.

"The idea that an organic carrot will taste better than a non-organic carrot quite frankly is laughable," he rants. "The thing that will affect flavour more than anything else is how fast you get it from the ground to your gob. I've got nothing against pesticides. If my beautiful opal plum trees look like they're going to get infested by pests, I'll tell you right now, those f***ers are going to get sprayed. As far as I'm concerned it's the insect or me."

With his big belly and sarf London accent, Gregg the Grocer is a great democratiser. What exasperates him even more than restaurants serving asparagus in January is the notion that only educated people appreciate good food.

"You show me someone who isn't a food lover and I'll show you a corpse," he says. "It's just terrible snobbery. Everybody loves food.

"We're not going to get our food culture back overnight. But we have to spend more on food. We have to be more ritualistic about food. Family meals! Agh! Gaah! Essential!"

Market Chef Goes Large, BBC2, Friday 25 April, 6.30pm

MORE ABOUT

Bars And Pubs

A 24-carrot enthusiast

Read More