I really don’t like the look of the nectarine Adam Wakeley is proffering. More specifically, I don’t like the feel of it, because it’s as hard as a bullet and, as any fool knows, that means it will taste disgusting. ‘It’s just right for eating, absolutely lovely,’ he insists, in a way that doesn’t invite dissent. So I have to take a bite. It is the nicest nectarine I’ve ever had in my life, juicy and sweet, which proves that, despite being a consumer of fruit for 30 years (although admittedly I’ve achieved the prescribed ‘five-a-day’ about twice), I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Adam Wakeley, on the other hand, knows everything about fruit. He is joint MD of Organic Farm Foods, the UK’s biggest organic-fruit wholesaler, a £26 million ($50 million) business, supplying the main UK supermarkets with imported organic produce which they sell as fast as he can supply it. Actually it’s in his blood - his father has a large apple farm in Kent (though unlike the fruit that Wakeley deals in, it’s not organic, but more on that later).
Adam is the first cousin of celebrated fashion designer Amanda Wakeley, and his early career also involved a foray into the fashion world - as a male model in the 1980s. In the Wakeleys’ 14th-century farmhouse in Ilmington, Gloucestershire - one of those ridiculously bucolic villages that make Richard Curtis films looks grittily realistic - there are only a couple of clues to this former life: photos of Adam in the downstairs bathroom. Taken by his wife, Melanie, a onetime professional photographer, they are of the slightly film noir, Athena man-holds-baby type, very popular in the 1980s, and actually now rather cool. ‘No, they are not cool,’ huffs Adam, ‘horrible, embarrassing.’ In fact, he claims the whole modelling thing was just useful to get Mel an audience with art directors who might then commission her.
It wasn’t long before he was drawn to the apple business, like his father before him. But while Mel was pregnant with Ned (now 11), something happened that was to change Adam’s whole outlook on farming and its future. Mel was on his father’s apple farm, walking through the yard, when she was inadvertently showered with pesticide; the type of pest inhibitor routinely sprayed on British fruit (the average apple is treated around 60 times before it reaches a supermarket shelf). Just weeks later the couple attended a wedding where the entire party was struck down by salmonella in a case that made the national press - the chef was later imprisoned. Heavily pregnant, Mel was rushed into hospital, and Ned was born by emergency Caesarean, underweight and with a seriously underdeveloped oesophagus. It was touch and go whether he’d survive.
In a house full of children, running between the small orchard and bouncing on a large trampoline, Ned holds his own. But his life has involved countless operations, complex rounds of visits to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, and a number of near-death experiences - he can only eat certain things, and only very, very slowly to avoid choking. There remains little conclusive evidence on the effects of pesticide. In Ned’s case, the salmonella incident didn’t help his chances, but there was little doubt in the minds of the Great Ormond Street specialists that the missing oesophagus was entirely consistent with the apple pesticides Mel had ingested.
In any case, there was absolutely no doubt in Adam Wakeley’s mind. It was a terribly cruel epiphany, but it made him adamant that the organic system, growing without recourse to a variety of agrichemicals, was the only way that farming should or could be carried out sustainably.
You will not find a more passionate advocate of the organic system than Wakeley, but you won’t find a more commercially motivated one either. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’m not a hemp-wearing, toe-wiggling hippy. I’m the managing director of a £26m ($50m) organic food company. My motivation is to make a profit for my shareholders. But I can do something idealistic, very green, commercially viable and actually, highly profitable.’
In fact, Adam Wakeley has a big apple plan. One he unfurls at the outside lunch table in the courtyard behind the house. Today the Wakeleys are relying on takeaway food. But this being millionaire-belt Gloucestershire, the pies, flans and unfeasibly large artichoke hearts just happen to be from nearby Daylesford Organic.
The outside table is useful, if only because it’s rather big and the Wakeleys are the sort of family who collect extra children at meal times, as their progeny appear with their friends from various corners of the gardens. Often Mel’s parents appear too - they live in a very fine house next door. Lily, dressed in Top Shop’s best, arrives with a couple of friends, Ned appears with a tall blonde (’Ned has a huge am