Indulge in 'slowfood'

When I go to meet Zac Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist magazine, high-profile environmentalist, and the owner of a personal fortune estimated at anything from £10 million to £300 million, I am subconsciously prepared for a scrap. It's easy - isn't it? - to live a good, environmentally friendly life when you've got loads of money. You can afford to buy organic rather than pesticide-ridden, you can pay someone else to launder your washable nappies, and you can walk to work because - like Zac - you can choose to locate the office you own near your house in Fulham. Like lots of things in life, saving the planet requires a lot less effort the more ludicrous your bank balance at Coutts.

This attitude is called inverted snobbery, and 29-year-old Goldsmith is no stranger to it. "Look, I don't live a model life," he says calmly, sucking on an expertly constructed roll-up as if to prove the point. "But I do care passionately about these issues. I was involved in environmentalism long before I became a father, but now that I am, I look at my kids and I shudder at what they have in store for them. I don't see things getting any better before they get worse."

Goldsmith, son of the late Jimmy and younger brother of Jemima Khan, has three children between the ages of eight months and four years with his 29-year-old wife, Sheherazade, the daughter of Viviane Ventura (always described as a "socialite") and the businessman John Bentley.

So, do the Goldsmiths use washable nappies? "We use a combination of washable and organic biodegradable," he says, grinning.

Sheherazade does not spend her days up to her elbows in baby poo, then? "Look, it's fair to say that sometimes I'm a hypocrite on these issues - but to not be, you'd have to live like a monk in the depths of the countryside. I'm not a fingerwagging environmentalist, and I don't think we should blame people for not living the perfect green life, particularly in a dirty city like London."

Goldsmith doesn't want to talk about nappies. Instead, he is here to proselytise on behalf of the Slow Food movement - the subject of a special report in the latest issue of The Ecologist, and a trend, akin to the organic revolution, that shows every sign of catching on among both foodies and lay ecologists.

Slow Food, as opposed to its bastard cousin Fast Food, promotes the use of whole, locally farmed, environmentally sound, antibiotic-free produce. Its Italian founder, Carlo Petrini, describes it as an "ecogastronomic" movement, and essentially it's about good cooking, good ingredients, and traditional farming methods that don't pollute the land or damage human (or animal) health. Slow Food, says Goldsmith, sets itself up in direct opposition to the monolithic agricultural industry that currently produces the stuff we buy from supermarkets. "It's an answer to the whole food system that is causing so many problems across the board - obesity, the use of dangerous pesticides, foodrelated illness and so on."

Zac Goldsmith comes from a complicated family, but, he insists, a warm and loving one. His father was the head of three families, all existing concurrently and apparently happily in a way that seemed to confirm the ingrained eccentricity of the upper classes - or at least the power of the enormously rich patriarch. Zac and Jemima, the wife of cricketer Imran Khan, are the children of Lady Annabel Goldsmith, whose beauty they both share. He is close to his sister, and dismisses recent speculation regarding the state of her marriage as "absolute nonsense".

It was his mother's influence that stopped him dropping out of Eton at 16. "I wasn't very good at school," he says, "and I got expelled the next year anyway." (Apparently because a teacher found dope in his room.) "I used to be obsessed by David Attenborough as a boy. He was my hero, and it was his work that made me fall in love with the natural world. At the same time I was exposed to information - through The Ecologist, actually, which in those days was rather boring - that told me how that natural world was under siege more than at any other time in its history.

"I used to sit in school learning about how to use a calculator and so on, but learning nothing about the threat to the ground beneath our feet. Why was no one screaming and yelling about it?"

Zac took over the magazine from his Uncle Teddy in 1997, and redesigned it for a new generation. It's a pretty fearless read, unafraid to spoof and pillory the "villains" of the petrochemical and biotech industries. Soon he hopes to launch an American version, dividing his time between the US, London and his estate in Devon, where he lives a far more "ecologically correct" sort of life than he does in the city.

Goldsmith could talk for hours on the subject of food production. But it turns out that he is not merely a dabbler in green issues, but a committed campaigner, with a hundred facts and figures at his fingertips. If he's a little unfocused, with a tendency to swerve from one apocalyptic scenario to another in the space of a sentence, that's a common fault of the still-immature environmental movement as a whole.

How, I ask him, can the ordinary British family afford to buy whole, organic produce sourced from local farmers when it's twice as expensive as processed food from Sainsbury's? "You have to understand," he replies, "how uneven a playing field it is. Everything-we buy from the supermarkets has been subsidised. We subsidise the use of chemical pesticides, we subsidise research into things like GM.

"In this country, the bill for cleaning pesticides out of drinking water is about £100 million a year, and it's paid for by us through our taxes. If the playing field was level, if the Government subsidised other methods of production, organic food would be a lot less expensive.

"Organic food used to be a very middle-class thing, but now it's increasingly mainstream. The number of people buying organic for their children is huge, a majority I think."

To my surprise, 90 per cent of what Goldsmith says sounds like common sense. For example: "At the moment we import milk from eastern Germany even though we produce a surplus here. In my view, the price of that milk should be more expensive than British milk to reflect the cost to the environment of getting it here."

Like his father, Jimmy, the famous playboy and tycoon who (let's not forget) made at least a part of his £1 billion fortune from factory-produced foods sold in supermarkets, Zac is a fashionably apolitical campaigner. James Goldsmith's obsession was with "securing a nationwide vote on Britain's future in the EU", says Zac protectively, and his Referendum Party was a reflection of those beliefs. Zac says he is willing to talk to any colour or stripe of politician in an attempt to "infect" them with his green-ness. He's meeting the Tory leadership later this month. "I gave a speech to a Tory party green conference some time ago," he says, "and I thought I was going to be booed off the stage, but the blue-rinse brigade really seemed to love it."

As you might expect, Goldsmith reserves his harshest judgment for New Labour's love affair with the biotech industries. "Look at Lord Sainsbury," he says, pausing midtorrent. "The fact is, he's one of the biggest donors to the Labour Party, and he is one of the biggest investors in biotech."

The great supermarket empires, and their sponsorship of industrial food production, lie at the root of most evils, he says. Recent reports exposing the exploitation of illegal Chinese and Portuguese immigrant labour in meat-packing sweatshops for big supermarket chains merely confirm the unscrupulousness of our cheap-food culture. "There's a big difference between the cost of food production and the price of food," says Goldsmith. "If we're going to tackle these problems, we need to look at the industrial food system as a whole - and that means taking on the supermarkets."

I leave Zac Goldsmith almost entirely won over by his mild-mannered obsessiveness. It would, after all, be so easy not to get involved; to swan about town spending one's fortune on Prada and champagne like so many of his peers.

"People are getting interested in the Slow Food and organic movements," he says. "It's like an enormous tanker in the ocean, it takes a while to turn, but it is turning. The question is, are we going to be able to turn it in time to save the environment from the ravages of the agricultural industry? I still believe we can. If I didn't, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. I'd be building up the barricades, heading for the high ground and trying to protect my kids from a truly horrible future."