He’s the posterboy for home-grown produce, a Yorkshireman known for his fresh takes on national favourites. He is the face of a TV show that has become a weekend institution. He has even tried his luck as a dancer, a classic car racer and a world record holder (for the most carrots peeled in one minute).
But it was standing in an apple orchard filming for the Great British Food Revival that James Martin cemented his reputation as an ambassador for fresh produce.
“I have been talking about this in the UK for so long, about British produce,” he says. “It’s all about the food. The problem is that we don’t always appreciate it. We still look at food as a fuel, or think that a potato is just a potato. We look forward to Jersey Royal potatoes or English asparagus, but we still buy strawberries in the middle of December.”
Martin is worried. He has met growers, he has talked to them about their challenges and he has watched the high street fill with supermarkets that are pushing down the value of food. He fears, like his contemporary Jamie Oliver, for how the next generation will be taught about what to eat.
“Unfortunately, you haven’t taught the people who are parents now, at 25, 30, 35 years old,” says Martin. “They didn’t learn how to cook at school so now they can’t teach their kids how to cook, so they won’t know how to cook either. It’s a vicious circle. The problem is that we that are so far down the line. You have all these bloody supermarkets and all these fast food joints, so you’ve lost all the butchers, the fish shops, the greengrocers and they are not going to come back. They have gone and so has the knowledge that goes with it. With that, so have growers. So you’re kind of knackered.”
A “farmer’s kid”, Martin made his debut in the kitchen at the age of five. His father ran the catering at stately home Castle Howard and by the age of 12, the Yorkshire lad had already cooked for the Queen Mother. At 16, he went to Scarborough Technical College to learn his trade and it was there that he shone, as Student of the Year for three years running. His work was noticed by Anthony Worrall Thompson, who brought him to London before he toured France, cooking in the old chateaux.
At just 21, Martin was head chef at the Hotel and Bistro du Vin in Winchester, where he drummed up an eight-week waiting list for weekends.
He got his first TV gig in 1996 when he appeared on Ready Steady Cook and has since filmed a catalogue of TV shows including Saturday Kitchen and The Great British Food Revival right through to Strictly Come Dancing.
But food is his first love. “I have always loved it,” he says. “I got my first real taste of great food when I was a young kid and I used to visit my grandmother and granddad, who had a veg patch. Fast forward 20 years, they are no longer around but the first thing I did when I bought my house, the very first thing I did even before I built my kitchen, I built my veg garden and I got a greenhouse. The smell when I walk in, it’s what I used to smell as a young kid with my granddad. That, to me, is how you should learn about food.”
Martin now grows his own fruit and vegetables in a garden two minutes walk from his home in Hampshire, featuring 150 different lines including mulberry trees, 40 different varieties of tomatoes, watercress beds, radishes, melons and a selection of herbs. “My veg patch is my little oasis,” he says. “Growing your own produce, you realise that what tastes the best isn’t necessarily what looks the best. Nowadays, we are obsessed with the way things look. It’s like the old Closer magazine on the supermarkets’ fruit and veg shelves. Everything’s got to be perfect.
“But the supermarkets’ loss is another’s gain, if you’re willing to adapt. There has to be a lot of adaptation from suppliers because they are relying on supermarkets too much. It’s a brave person who can go away from that and decide to go it alone.
“But the situation is not going to change until the supermarkets realise that there is no such thing as free food. You’ve got to stop the monopoly and break the chain somewhere.”
He is fiercely protective of his home town, Malton, fearing that it “will go to shit” if Tesco gets the planning permission it wants for a store there. “They are going to put a Tesco where the market used to be,” he says. “They will wreck it.”
In fact, that’s one thing he is talking about with the BBC. He is interested in the alternative, in going back to basics. He wants to try his hand at bringing markets back to life. “Those ones that are still going are struggling and the ones that are successful are almost a gimmick, a one Sunday a month thing, a pop-up farmers’ market,” he says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be good to do a programme that takes on a market from a council and turns it around? That’s one thing I’m looking at. It could be a good thing because markets support the local economy and in most towns and villages, they are important.”
Martin is proactive. He is best known for his five years on Saturday Kitchen but recently, he is taking on projects that make people question what they know about food. One of his latest projects, TV show Operation Hospital Food, saw Martin on a mission to transform meals at Scarborough General Hospital in an initiative that has spread to two other hospitals.
“It’s so easy to throw dirt at hospital food, but you don’t realise what they have to go through,” he says. “Changing the food at a hospital takes two days, but you’re not going to change people’s attitudes in that time.
“It’s vital for me that patients eat properly in hospital, it’s vital to me that kids eat properly in school and that they look forward to it,” he stresses. “You can go round with as many clipboards as you want, you can draw me as many graphs as you want but unless you are actually going to do something about it, you can stuff your pie charts up your backside. Every institution is different and that’s the problem; no one looks at them individually so it’s not going to work.”
Martin is a busy man. So how does he unwind after a hard day? He has a thing for cars, owning “half a dozen or more - about eight I think”. His dream motor? He already has that one. “It’s a vintage Ferrari, it’s a 28 GTO built in 1984,” he says. “I’ll never sell. When I was 12 years old, my grandmother bought me a toy car and that toy car I now own. It took me a lot of bloody work but I got there in the end.”
“To keep your brain fresh, you’ve got to do something outside your day to day work, whatever you do,” he says of his hobby. “It’s something that gets me away from all the other stuff and recharges my brain. I’ll never stop doing that.”
FAST FACTS
Sorry James, we just had to - what’s your food hell?
Horseradish - I can’t stand it
Food heaven?
Crab meat
What have been your Saturday Kitchen best bits?
One of the highlights of the show was having Thomas Keller from The French Laundry. Joan Collins was probably the most surreal
What’s your favourite fruit?
Mulberries are my big thing, but tomatoes are my favourite
Who are your food heroes?
Chef-wise, Thomas Keller who was Saturday Kitchen last month. But my real food heroes are my granddad, my grandma and my uncle
Are you ever going to dance again?
I’m too old now, my legs are hurting
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