Smash hit

Furthermore, biodynamic animals not only enjoy a good quality of life but are highly resistant to disease, the movement’s fans claim.

After foot-and-mouth disease and BSE, the idea of small, ideally self-sufficient farms based on diversity and compassion is not one to be scorned. With food scare upon food scare, from salmonella to Sudan II, many people feel that we have lost our way. And Cook believes that she is offering us a road map.

“There is a terrible fear, particularly among men, of what can’t be seen or nailed down,” she says, musing on the difficulty of convincing disbelievers. Certainly, Peter Cook would mock some of her esoteric ideas. “He made fun of my more spiritual experiences. He’d use them in his sketches. That became very depressing and I stopped sharing them with him in the end,” she says, without rancour.

Peter Cook and Wendy Snowden met at Cambridge University, where she was studying art. They married in New York in 1963 and their first baby, Lucy, was born a year later. Wendy was born in 1940 and grew up in a market- gardening area of Bedfordshire. Her abiding memories are not of wartime rationing but of the fresh fruit and vegetables that abounded in the family’s cottage garden. Her respect for food, and for the social ritual of eating, was instilled in those formative years.

It was amazing to her, therefore, while living in New York, how cooking seemed to have been downgraded from a life-affirming craft to a chore. “We were there for nearly two years and were invited out to dinner maybe a hundred times, but only twice were we cooked for by our hosts. This was the beginning of the idea that cooking is something you don’t do if you can avoid it.”

Returning to London with baby Lucy, the Cooks bought a Georgian house in Hampstead, where Wendy loved to entertain, preparing dinner for the likes of John Lennon and Peter Ustinov. But their second daughter, Daisy, born in 1965, suffered terribly from eczema and asthma, for which conventional medicine seemed to have no cure, causing Cook to think more deeply about nutrition’s fundamental role in wellbeing.

“I became absolutely desperate because Daisy was having adrenalin shots, which were very violent in their effect. She was on steroids, which made her tremble. At worst, she would end up in an oxygen tent.”

In 1967, Cook bought a farmhouse on Majorca, as a “little haven” for Peter and the family. “That was my first step in the direction back to the land because I was brought up in the countryside, and Nature was my bible, really. Living in the city was fun, but I think that something in me needed to be growing. For the Majorcians, eating is not just about food, although that is terribly important. It’s also about encounter and socialising, gossiping and drinking wine.

They have marvellous markets, where you know the people who grow the produce.”

The Cooks divorced in 1971 and in 1975 Wendy took her daughters to visit Findhorn, an eco-project in Scotland, where vegetarianism underpins a spiritual and physical community life. And there, she says: “Daisy was free of asthma.” Fresh air and a good diet were to be the way forward. Their stay was brief but it was a turning point. At Findhorn, Cook met an environmental activist who told her how he had cured his asthma through macrobiotics. He put her in touch with Aveline Kushi, a renowned expert in the subject, with whom she subsequently studied for four years.

“Macrobiotics was originally a diet for Zen monks in Japan and I was fascinated by the wisdom, beauty and purity of this way of cooking,” she says. “I learnt a meditative approach to the preparation of food and about the importance of acid/alkaline balance.”

After this, while the girls attended Michael Hall, a Steiner school in Forest Row, East Sussex, Cook attended a year’s foundation course in catering and nutrition at nearby Emerson College, a Steiner centre for adult training in education, sculpture, biodynamic farming, music and painting.

She then went on to run the kitchen, cooking produce from the college kitchen garden and farm. Here she felt returned to her roots, and she came to realise that the happy bottom line of Steiner’s ideas was that if you don’t enjoy your food, it won’t do you much good.

So it is for this reason that you’ll find Cook out in all weather, gathering elderflowers and blackberries and plundering banks of nettles to make nettle dumplings. Mad she may appear to others but, one day, we might all follow suit.

The Biodynamic Food & Cookbook: Real Nutrition That Doesn’t Cost The Earth (Clairview, £18.99) is available from Times Books First at £17.09, p&p free.

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