For two decades, Derek Cooper has presented The Food Programme. Andrew Purvis meets the prolific journalist and warns, call him a foodie at your peril.
In a book-lined study the size of half a tennis court, Derek Cooper, 74, is trying to plug in an electric fan. "Here, let me do that," says his wife Janet, burrowing her way behind a bookcase on the sunny upper storey of their riverside villa in Richmond, Surrey. As Derek shuffles out of her way, the handle of a carrier bag full of old newspapers loops itself around his ankle. "Ha!" the grand old man of food broadcasting exclaims, "trapped by my own press cuttings."
As one of the most prolific journalists of his generation, Derek Cooper has plenty of carrier bags to ensnare him. Though best known as the actorly voice of Radio 4's The Food Programme ("a deep, beery, or maybe whisky voice," according to Hilary Rubinstein, his one-time literary agent), he has written 17 books (ranging from The Bad Food Guide and The Beverage Report to a bestselling book about Skye), plus hundreds of articles for The Guardian, Scotland on Sunday, The Listener and A La Carte, and still writes a column for Saga magazine. As a radio broadcaster, he has presented and written for Today, PM, Town and Country, You and Yours and Conversations with Cooper, while television landmarks include World in Action, Tomorrow's World and World About Us, in addition to A Taste of Britain, Scotland's Larder and other foodie favourites.
"I hate the word 'foodie'," Cooper explodes, as soon as I utter it. "I think it is depraved. Those people didn't exist when The Food Programme began all those years ago. It was always meant to be political with a small 'p', a current-affairs programme looking at the food industry - not telling people how to make meringues." This month, Radio 4's flagship food series celebrates its 20th anniversary, proving that there is an audience for serious investigative reporting as well as cookery programmes presented by celebrity chefs using only the most faddish ingredients.
"Masterchef and Let's Cook are light entertainment," says Cooper, "but there are one or two television programmes that encourage people to think about food. It strikes me that a food programme that doesn't talk about the problem of salmonella, the problems of bse or listeria, is failing in its job. It's no use saying, 'Take an egg...' if it's one of these mass-produced eggs which, sadly in 1999, can't be eaten by children, or pregnant women, or old people. I find it grotesque that, at the end of the 20th century, we cannot produce an egg that is edible without ruining it in the process."
Born in 1925 into an altogether more wholesome era, Derek Cooper obe says he enjoyed "three very happy childhoods." His parents lived in New Maldon, a suburb of London, but because his mother came from the Hebrides and had grown up in the Western Isles, the family spent most of their holidays in Skye. "My father worked on the railway," he says, "and every year he got a free pass to anywhere in Britain. His relations were farmers in and around Canterbury, so I used to spend other holidays there, before it was bombed - when it really was a kind of Trollope cathedral town and the fields came almost up to the houses."
In Kent and Skye, Derek Cooper learned the meaning of good food. "We used to go scrumping for apples," he says, "and we'd get up early in the morning and hunt for field mushrooms. My mother was a very good cook, and we didn't have a lot of processed food - though I do remember tinned peaches, and tinned salmon. I was no more interested in food than anyone else, but in Skye we used to go fishing a lot. Herrings were 13 for sixpence, and there was an abundance of things. There were always potatoes, there was always fish. I was very lucky."
After wartime service in the navy, a degree at Oxford and a decade as a broadcaster in Singapore, Cooper worked briefly as a television producer for ITN ("I was probably the worst one in the business") before becoming a freelance writer and presenter for radio. His experiences abroad had taught him a lot about life, but not much about cooking. Returning to live in London with his wife Janet - Europe's first woman architect - their daughter Penny (now 45 and living in America) and son Nicholas (42, a TV researcher and producer of Cooking in Five Minutes), domestic life was a challenge.
"In Malaysia, we'd had a Chinese servant to do all the cooking," says Cooper, "so we didn't go shopping much. We'd go to the market and buy crabs, and things like that. But we'd been given this pressure-cooker as a wedding present, so back in England I started to experiment. I'd buy bones from the butcher and make a kind of rustic soup - a meal in itself. We lived in a very small flat, and the kitchen was part of the bathroom, so in the mornings, I could sit in the bath and have my bacon and eggs which Janet had cooked for me. It probably contradicted every existing hygiene regulation."
These days, Janet does all the cooking although her husband "can just about rustle up a salad when pushed." At a recent dinner party, the food writer Nigel Slater commented that the meal Janet had just prepared - Scottish lamb - would be his choice of last supper if he were about to be hanged. "I can quite imagine," says Cooper, "that going shopping at weekends, collecting the raw materials and preparing a meal would be very exciting. But I seem to have spent most of my weekends writing. I've been doing that every day now for 50 years, except on holiday - and if one doesn't write, I think one gets withdrawal symptoms."
With impressive single-mindedness, Cooper says he'd rather be writing than cooking - and gestures towards an ancient typewriter with a campaigning article about the plight of small producers half-composed upon it. This has always been a subject close to his heart. "Back in the Seventies," he says, "I did a series on BBC2 called A Taste of Britain. Even then an enormous number of food-makers were on the edge of going out of business. We'd film in some Welsh farmhouse, and then go back for some retakes and find that the old range had been ripped out and a microwave put in. Traditional life had vanished. A lot of us are victims of a supply system that cannot always cope with a small amount of produce. If you want a container-load, though, it's fine."
This year, Cooper won the Glenfiddich Lifetime Achievement Award for defending our right to eat what we want - whether savaging a manufacturer of agrochemicals, or lobbying a national chainstore to restock a discontinued product dear to one of his listeners. "Consumers do have a tremendous power," he says. "No supermarket wants people standing outside with placards, denouncing the way it slaughters ostriches, or whatever the issue at stake is. There is nothing we cannot get, if we ask long enough, and loudly enough, and with enough enthusiasm and passion."
This combative approach has endeared Cooper to Radio 4 listeners almost as much as his humanity. When I ask about his most memorable broadcast, his answer speaks volumes. "The most moving thing I ever did was the last interview with Caroline Walker, a campaigning nutritionist. Sadly, she contracted cancer of the colon and died at a very early age. She wanted to do one last interview with The Food Programme, so we went to her house and did this interview, three or four minutes at a time, and then she'd rest. And then another three or four minutes. When she decided she was ready to speak, her voice was firm. Nobody would have guessed. Her illness wasn't publicised, nobody wrote about it. When we put the interview out, I don't think we mentioned that she was dying."
On another occasion, Cooper was making a programme about cherries. "We went to this packing station in France," he recalls, in a characteristic moment of warmth and compassion, "which was run as a co-operative. An old Citroen 2CV drew up with two elderly people inside it, and they had just one box of cherries. It was assessed, and graded, and weighed, and they were given their money. They had this cherry tree in their garden, you see. That struck me as the way we ought to behave in this country."
Derek Cooper's concern for the elderly may be because he, too, is approaching what Ronald Reagan referred to as "the sunset years". Though still working one day a week as a presenter, his days in broadcasting are drawing to a close. "I'll stop doing The Food Programme when I can no longer do it as well as I've done it in the past," he says, apparently filtering a cup of tea through the snow-white comb of his walrus moustache. "It's a very fast-moving industry. Who would have thought, 20 years ago, when we first talked about organic farming, that now a day doesn't go by without a score of farmers phoning the Soil Association and asking how to do it. Things are moving very fast. You've got to have a nimble mind to cope with all that."
With a cup and saucer balanced in each hand, he walks down the steep stairs from his study, pauses three steps up from the bottom, and deftly presses down the door handle with his slippered foot. Leading me into another room - the converted boathouse - he introduces me to his two grand-daughters from America, who are staying for a couple of weeks. "What's that you're watching on TV?" he asks. "A chat show," one of the girls replies. "Well, you shouldn't be," her grandfather gently scolds. "You should be outside in the sunshine." As he shows me his tomato plants and idyllic garden, looking out over the weeping willows of the Thames, I ask whether food or family life is his greatest pleasure. "Sex, actually," he says, deadpan.
On the drive back to the railway station, I ask him about his immediate plans, and he tells me he is thinking of compiling a collection of his journalism. A completely new book, at this stage, would be too much of an endeavour. "The BBC has been very good to me as far as old age is concerned," he says, "but I think there might come a time, quite shortly, when I might say: "Well, I've done all that. I'm going to read a few books now, and sit in the garden and watch the boats go by".