Our Food, BBC Two, preview The advantage of cooking food into sludge is that it makes it microbiologically safe, and the low cooking temperature optimises fuel consumption. Like driving your car at 60 miles an hour on the motorway, cooking your peasant's pottage at "a slow burp" is very efficient. And, yet, I might as well be speaking a foreign language to anyone who eats microwave meals or dines out every night without a thought for the resources involved. Our series will appeal to anyone who, like me, feels divorced from, yet still interested in, what's on his or her plate. It celebrates all those who still beaver away to produce food that's rooted in Britain's various counties and landscapes. During the course of filming, I ate oysters straight out of the salty sea, milked a cow for the first time in my life and saw the awesome sight of a great big turkey beating its wings as it died for the cause of my Christmas dinner. Not bad for someone who usually hunts and gathers via Ocado. In Our Food, our leader Giles Coren is usually to be seen sailing a boat (or sometimes driving a train) through a region, while his troops pick out products that interest them. In Norfolk, where we start, James Wong grows some mint, Alys Fowler samples samphire, and Alex Langlands (fortunate man) gets to grips with turnips. And I begin to master the skill of herding turkeys. Historically, turkeys did particularly well in Norfolk as they gleaned the leftover grain from the flat arable fields. Once fattened, 16th-century turkeys were sent on a route march to the markets of London, walking three or four miles a day. Sadly we failed to prove, as we'd read, that they wore little leather shoes to protect their feet. If anyone has evidence of this, I beg you to write and tell me. Of course the march of the turkeys was replaced in due course by the railway, but if you want a fit and flavoursome Christmas bird, don't choose some bland, white, mass-produced species that can hardly waddle under the weight of its massive breast - you need the traditional, active "Norfolk Black," strong enough to walk to London, and the type of turkey closest to those introduced from Mexico into the England of Henry VIII. What does the future hold for the British stomach? In one sense, the business of "dressing victuals," as the Tudors described it, has gone global, and your food is as likely to have been prepared in Bolivia as it is in Bolton. And yet, if you care to take the trouble, you can buy British and eat British and be British from the inside out. We can support the heroic horticulturalists and cheese-makers and butchers in each county, and help maintain the types of farming that make the landscape of Kent different from Norfolk, and Wales different from Scotland. It's exactly this variety - in scenery, in history, and, if you're lucky, in local eateries - that makes Britain great. 'Our Food' starts on BBC Two at 8.00pm on Wednesday 4 April Click here to follow Telegraph TV on Twitter