Bloody truth about what we eat

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The latest in Channel 4's River Cottage series opens with a shot of the presenter, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, greeting the frosty winter morning from an open bedroom window and inviting his audience to join him, for the third year running, in discovering the joys of smallholding in west Dorset.

If you were one of the two million who switched on for Escape to River Cottage (1999) and Return to River Cottage (2000) you will certainly be there, curled up on the sofa on Sunday nights when the new series is screened.

There's just something about it. Those familiar cartoon credits draw you into a gingerbread world, a Wind in the Willows paradise that you can hardly dare to hope still exists, what with GM foods and suicidal farmers and post offices closing, and supermarkets blotting out the sun. And yet look, it does! As you pour yourself another glass of Merlot and settle down to watch Hugh compete in the Netherbury pancake race, or bargain for chickens with his neighbours, or prepare a stew made out of limpets, you can't help but feel all's right with the world.

On another, recent, winter morning, down the road from River Cottage at the farmhouse Hugh shares with his partner Marie, son Oscar and cocker spaniel, Dolly, the scene is not quite the bucolic vision we've come to expect. It's cold and wet and windy. The cows have got to be fed and the relentless rain has turned their field into a bog. The sheep need to be checked. The dog has gone AWOL with vital Wellington boots. Ray the butcher is in the garage, setting up tables under the rows of home-cured salamis, preparing to cut up the beef that's been hanging at the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse lorry arrives and the carcass is winched down on four hooks, the quartered remains of the Dexter you'll see in the new series grazing in front of the cottage ("He's the one we had to get therapy for," says Hugh cheerfully).

This is the start of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's real country life. There is barely room to swing an eel trap at River Cottage, so when the family decided to move to Dorset permanently, last summer, they had to find alternative accommodation. Now filming is at an end and rural life from here on is for real, not just colourful fodder for Channel 4.

"I'm aware that we've painted a rosier picture of life in the country than is currently experienced by people who are financially dependent on farming," says Hugh. "It isn't about self sufficiency and it isn't about the harsh economics of the countryside, but it is grounded in a kind of reality. I'm not financially dependent on farming but now I'm emotionally dependent on the way of life." And, of course, the series has lasted this long because there are enough would-be Hughs hankering after the good life.

Although it comes under the heading of factual entertainment, River Cottage is less about us learning how to smoke prawns or steam limpets (as if) than gazing slack jawed at the comings and goings of a genuine rural community, the members of which appear to be blissfully happy with their lot. "It's all about me not knowing and them knowing, and them showing me and then me making an arse of myself while I find out how it works. It's about people looking after each other, having common interests. There are small triumphs and occasional disasters throughout the year that give a natural structure to life in the country that doesn't exist in the same way in the town."

Fearnley-Whittingstall's contention is that all of us can benefit from getting more in touch with our food at source. "The series is partly about reminding people where our food actually comes from, that there is no beef without the death of a cow. Some people's response is, 'Did you see how he actually cut up that pig and made salamis?', as if that's somehow alarmingly in your face. In this series Ray comes over and we make black pudding with a bucket of pigs' blood fresh from the abattoir.

"It's quite a gory sequence, but when you order black pudding with purée of apples in a posh London restaurant, that's where it's come from." I suggest that he might also enjoy stirring the pot: back in the days of his series TV Dinners, there were complaints about a family tucking into a human placenta; he has had hate-mail from squirrel lovers having cooked one up in the woods. "I do like rattling people's cages. It makes people think about the broader philosophical issues that underlie the whole food issue."

I should declare at this point that I have known Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for some years - not quite since his days as a cook at the River Café in 1989, his first job after leaving Oxford, and his only "formal training" - but soon after that, when they and Hugh had realised that he didn't have the discipline required of an aspiring Jamie Oliver. Besides, he liked writing too much to commit to a life in the kitchen. In the early Nineties he was a freelance journalist covering everything from food to deep-sea fishing, occasionally working in tandem with a photographer friend, Andrew Palmer, whose main interest was film.

Together they made a couple of documentaries (their first big break was a feature about maggot farming) and then, in 1995, set up the TV production company, Keo Films, that went on to produce Cook on the Wild Side and River Cottage. Along the way he made TV Dinners, wrote a cookbook, and has hatched various schemes for a series on diving and fishing, his other two main passions. He is now 35 and throughout that time I have never known him to brush his hair.