Raymond Blanc first talked about sustainability 18 years ago; now, it’s all the rage. We caught up with the original ethical chef for an exclusive interview about the current trend for all things sustainable.

While other chefs are now jumping on the greenwash PR bandwagon, Blanc developed his passion for food and quality ingredients many years ago. Where does his enthusiasm come from?

“It’s my culture. I was born in a tiny little village in a very rural part of France where, basically, there were about 25 peasants – each with six or seven cows called Margarite, probably,” he reminisces.

“We would partake in the running of the house, at the age of five or six – getting the wood from the forest, helping at the time of the harvest. And of course lots of wild hunting, too. At the age of seven my father had already taught me to hold earth in my hand, he’d say, taste it, look at it, and tell me if it’s good earth or bad earth – ask a chef that now!”

“So there was a deep knowledge of food, not just on the aesthetic side but on the growing side.”

He laments the state British farming has plunged into over the past 60 years.

“I wanted to work with farmers 20 years ago but they’d completely lost their craft. Now, at last, farmers are reconnecting with their craft…but it’s going to take a long time. At the moment, the quality of produce we have is often much less than it would be in France or in Italy because, of course, over there they have kept their food culture.”

It seems intensive farming has lost about 90% of all food varieties, and we’ve lost any notion of seasonality or reagionality. And the varieties that have disappeared are often the ones with the most ‘character’ – but they simply don’t fit into the industrial mould.

It’s taken a long time for Le Manoir, Blanc’s signature restaurant, to become predominantly organic, and not for a lack of trying.

“Now, about 80% of our food is organic. It took me a year – a whole year’s work with my team to have everything tested. We tested about 80 butters before we decided to go for that one.”

“Every producer sent a complete technical sheet which tells me, exactly, the technique, any additives there would be, everything about that milk, about that cow. And of course, no producers want to do that, because often they’ve got something to hide.”

“I know, within five years, each consumer will demand some kind of proof of provenance. So, effectively, every one of our produce now on the breakfast menu – which is about 150 items – I know exactly where they come from.”

Within 6 months there’ll be a book available by the side of each table at Le Manoir if customers want to know exactly where their food came from. Blanc also hopes to include anecdotes about how each product was found – stories fraught with difficulties, no doubt.

“I had to change suppliers about 10 times because nobody, still today, wants to give this kind of element of traceability because a great deal of people are cheating or hiding something. The moment it’s written down you’re accountable – so, believe me, it has been a bloody nightmare.”

His aim is to make all his restaurants and training kitchens at least 50% organic by the start of next year. In fact, Blanc favours a more flexible attitude to farming, whereby ‘organic’ ethics are preserved while allowing some degree of treatment in some situations. He’s worked with the Animal Farm initiative – “a fantastic farm, very clever” – which translates the philosophy and values of the Soil Association into a commercial grant. Their methods are not totally organic but “as close to organic as they can be”.

He accepts that you can’t go the whole hog – “unless you’re a bistro serving turnips and parsnips to your guests for 8 months of the year”.

“Of course there are problems. I’m the first to talk about regionality – I’m a Frenchman – but here in England you’ve got only one and a half climate zone. In France, you’ve got 12, in Italy – 12.”

So, no more strawberries in the middle of winter, apples in May (because they’ll be coming from China), no seabass or cod, and many other endangered fish varieties. Accepting these values will have huge implications for what’s on the menu.

“Imagine if you were living only on local produce – what would you cook? It’d been a nightmare. So you’ve got to accept that. Our locality, effectively, is Europe.”

“I try to cut down the food miles as much as possible.”

But transforming Britain’s kitchens isn’t just about ingredients – it’s also about the chefs.

“We need to educate all these young chefs about taste and textures. Right now, they will most likely go for the more aesthetically-pleasing fruit or vegetable.”

“There will be a tremendous amount of workshops in our kitchens. There’s a huge education platform going on in these kitchens.”

“I think chefs now are going to get far more responsible, they’re going to get to know a bit more about their food because there’s been so much missing. I see it every day, the lack of knowledge of seasonality. Ask a chef which fish is in season now, and they say, “what bloody season, what are you talking about! I get oysters all year round, I get sole all year round, seabass…” So we’ve got a long way to go.”

“Lots of people will jump on the bandwagon of marketing. My first book was written 10 years ago, but a lot of chefs do it for the PR side of it. But there is a great deal of people who are doing it because they believe in it. And that’s exciting – you’ve got to start somewhere.”

“Jamie, at first, didn’t give a damn about health and so on, he didn’t mention it in any of his programmes, for the first years. But now he’s got two children, he has learned a great deal and now of course it’s at the core of his buying policy. And that’s good. That means people change, people get more knowledge and that’s exciting, that’s why at least it gives us hope.”

“And now he’s one of the very best advocates for sustainability, traceability, seasonality, regionality.”

“We need to put our house back in order, in a big way. Now that we’re reconnecting more deeply with our food I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for chefs to play a stronger media role in helping the whole population – whether it’s a TV programme, through writing, to reconnect with food.”

“The consumer is going to be far more aware and far more demanding. They’ll know we’ve behaved like hooligans these last 60 years. We’ve been separating food from our culture and reducing it to a commodity. So, what you see in restaurants are the first signs of revolution.”

“What chefs are doing at the moment, here at Le Manoir for example, is to work much more with our food farms. To achieve total purity of ingredients. And that’s where the new consumer is going to go.”

Blanc’s dream project is creating his own farm at Le Manoir – which is slowly becoming a reality. The 27-acre farm will take another year to finish, and will include some varieties Blanc has perfected over the years, with some surprising additions.

In a specially-built south-east Asian garden Blanc will try to grow high-altitude varieties of herbs and vegetables that are not indigenous to UK such as soya beans, Vietnamese mint, basilik and lemongrass. There will also be two orchards producing 60 tonnes of fruit and around 200 herb varieties.

Le Manoir is also hoping to become entirely energy efficient in the next 3 years by buying only green energy and embarking on a dedicated recycling programme.

Raymond Blanc’s tips for sustainable eateries: Club Gascon, Le Caprice, Quartier Vert, The River Café, The Square.

This month, sustainable food experts ‘London Food Link’ – who have worked with Raymond Blanc in the past – launch ‘Ethical Eats’, a network of the capital’s eateries brought together to champion the ethical approach to catering.

The Ethical Eats initiative follows on from London Food Link’s research into restaurants, which will soon be published in the One Planet Dining report. The network will meet several times each year to discuss issues affecting the restaurant trade such as ethical sourcing of ingredients, dealing responsibly with waste and putting sustainability at the heart of catering training.

You can find out more about the London Food Link here.