Today, my desert-island cheese would still be one of the English traditional cheeses. Perhaps an Appleby’s Cheshire or a Montgomery’s Cheddar, if pushed.

How would you sum up your food philosophy?

We don’t spend enough time thinking about ingredients. The way food is produced and farmed to me is the most important thing. Cooking it is about keeping all that in and not ruining it. Obviously, you have to know how to cook. There’s an awful lot of cooking where you take ingredients, whether they are in or out of season, ripe or not, and you assemble them, as though the art of it all is in the assembly. Yes, there is a huge amount of skill in doing that well, but that’s all that gets talked about. Whereas being able to create good ingredients in the first place is what it’s all about for me. I like cooking that makes the most of those ingredients.

How has British food and our attitudes to it changed in your lifetime?

I grew up in Hong Kong so my memory is based on a completely different food culture, which is far more centred around the idea of sourcing good ingredients. Going to the market there, you would encounter some very palpable foods, smells and tastes.

The thing that struck me when I came to England to study in the 1970s was that food was about packaging. Everything was very contained, not just in the obvious sense.

In Hong Kong, there was a woman who would come in from the new territories with two baskets on a bamboo pole over her shoulder on a back of a truck. She would squat on the floor selling what she had produced that day. You would make your selection, this would be weighed before being wrapped in some newspaper and tied with a bamboo twine. It was raw in that you were completely in contact with that product, knowing what you had just bought.

So in the late 1970s, when I first started buying food for myself, I couldn’t really tell a Cheshire from a Double Gloucester, from a Lancashire or Caerphilly. I laboured under the misapprehension, for a long time, that I just didn’t have a sophisticated enough palate to be able to discern the difference. It was only when I got into the business some ten years later that I realised that many of these cheeses would have been made in the one same factory. There just wasn’t that much difference between them, apart from slightly different shades of colouring. That’s what we had done to our cheeses.

I was told I would never make a living just selling British cheeses as nobody was interested. Everybody just wants French and Italian. I kept thinking why would they just want that?

People were reluctant to say it was simply because they just tasted better. While it was possible to get a good Stilton or Cheddar, you couldn’t get all these other cheeses and yet they were being made, they just weren’t getting to London.

What annoys you about Britain’s food culture?

I think we’ve reached a huge disconnect between food production and food consumption. I think we’re going somewhere to try and address that, with farmers’ markets and all the programmes currently on television that focus on production – that’s all helped – but I still think there’s a huge gap, where we’ve lost contact with food.