January 7th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Watch Escape to River Cottage - Episode 1 in Faith Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

 
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been living my dream life for over a decade. Tired of city life and the London rat race (where he was a celebrity chef and professional food critic) he fled to Dorset in 1997 and moved into a small country estate named River Cottage with the intention of living (as he calls it) a downsized life, where almost everything he consumes is either grown or bred in a natural setting. Since 1999, he’s put out several River Cottage TV series, books and has founded his own restaurant and grocery store in the UK.

The first of the TV series, Escape to River Cottage, documents his initial transition to rural living and features several instances of earnest ineptitude. It’s not that Fearnley-Whittingstall is incompetent, he just doesn’t know his way around country life and is enthusiastically determined to learn much of it in front of the camera—an attitude which has documented him falling flat on his face in a few different ventures. It is, however, much the same as if you or I headed to the countryside tomorrow, set in our mind that we were going to start raising pigs—we would quite possibly be able to do it, but we’d make perfect asses of ourselves while learning the proper techniques. (As a side note, I’m pretty sure no matter how much of a n00b I was I wouldn’t enlist a couple of hippies with crystals to try and drive away my mouse infestation using telepathy. I would, however, use fresh roadkill as he did in one episode. I mean, if you’re raising your own meat but turn up your nose at a wild animal carcass simply because it was already dead, well, that belies some weird double standards.)

His capacity to fearlessly dive in and do what needs to be done makes Fearnley-Whittingstall the perfect role-model for people seeking a downsized or greenpunk life. It’s exceptionally daunting to look at the vast amounts of information you are supposed to know to live a self-sufficient life, and option paralysis while trying to determine where to begin could stop you before you start. Fearnley-Whittinstall takes the opposite tack, however, and simply jumps in with both feet. Anything I need to know, he seems to say, I can just pick up along the way.

Still, it can’t help but be noted (both through his general demeanor and ostentatious last name), that Fearnley-Whittingstall belongs to the upper class. He also had the privilege of being a celebrity chef before moving to the country, and as a result one wonders how much of a factor his affluence played on his ability to “downsize.” It’s easy to take risks and jump in with both feet when the only major potential consequence is you’ll have to spend more money. If you screw up a year’s worth of crops (which he doesn’t), all you have to do is go out and buy some groceries and wait for the next season. People in lesser situations would be forced to work around that fact or go without, rather than simply picking up whatever was needed.

But at the end of the day, his ability to not worry about risk or cost or making a fool of himself is what makes Escape to River Cottage so endearing and inspiring. He walks into nearly every situation completely enthusiastically and possibly unprepared. I don’t have any illusions that when I finally secure my own piece of property, I’m going to walk onto it like some seasoned farmhand and set about cementing my new life with an Errol Flynn-like swagger. *cough* No. It’s gonna be a lot of trial and error and making a complete ass of myself, and that’s why I’ll keep looking to Fearnley-Whittingstall for guidance on immersing myself in a new (and yet utterly old) way of life.

(The video at the top is of episode one. If you want to buy the DVDs—bearing in mind they won’t work with most North American systems—you can do so here.)