Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall believes that the animals we eat deserve respect, both for their sake and ours. Gully Wells visits his farm and learns to love the inner lambsweetbreads, kidneys, tongue, and even tripe

The wind howled, the lead-gray sky spat rain, and the leafless trees were bent over like rickety old men, but then again, what else would you expect in Dorset in February? I was sitting inside a stone barn near Beaminster, a good five hours southwest of London, watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall pull the "pluck" (liver, heart, lungs) from a freshly slaughtered lamb. Or, to be more precise, a hogget (a year-old lamb) from his own flock of Dorset Down sheep. "As soon as you take this out of the animal, you're thinking of haggis," he said, just a little too gleefully. "I call this the Frankenstein session. It's a bit grizzly, but you shouldn't be frightened of the stranger parts of an animal—they often have the best taste and texture." The walls of the barn were decorated with beautifully lit still-life photographs of animal body parts: a pair of silky, deep-red kidneys that looked like giant beans; a smiling pig's head, disconnected from its body; a skein of crocheted caul; and a mound of tripe that could just as easily have been a hunk of creamy coral. I heard the word volunteer, and then, before I could hide behind the guy in front of me, I found myself standing beside Hugh, knife in hand, slicing into a lamb's kidney while he swirled some butter, sherry, cayenne pepper, and Worcestershire sauce around in a cast-iron frying pan.

Among English foodaholics, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a certified star. But he doesn't own, or cook at, any fancy restaurants in London, or indeed anyplace else. Instead, he has his farm, his flock of sheep, his cows, and his stone barn in this remote corner of England, where his many fans are apparently more than happy to pay $400 to spend a day in his company, carving up, cooking, and eating an entire lamb or pig. With his Wellington boots, his old fleece vest, his shoulder-length hair as wild and scraggly as a bramble patch, his whole shtick seems to be about getting in touch with his inner yokel. What frazzled Kensington housewife or high-powered city banker hasn't dreamed of escaping the pressure cooker of London life and retreating to the slow simmer of an Aga range, hidden away in the grassy green hills of Hardy country? Well, Hugh did it.

Although born in London, he was brought up in rural Gloucestershire and was interested in food and cooking as far back as he can remember. After Oxford, he went to Africa to do conservation work, and when he came back, he found a job as a sous-chef at London's River Café, where Rose Gray, one of the chef-owners, introduced him to the sublime pleasures of… liver. "After I graduated in liver appreciation," he says, "I went on to discover sweetbreads, tongues, and brains. All of these had been firmly on my 'not right now, thanks—and probably never' list. But now I think of them as great treats—fun to prepare, exciting to cook, and an absolute delight to eat."

In 1997, he left London forever and moved with his family to the River Cottage in Dorset. And if you want to learn more, all you have to do is pick up a copy of The River Cottage Cookbook, The River Cottage Year, or his latest publication, The River Cottage Meat Book, all of which have sold like stone-ground organic hotcakes. Or you could always tune in to one of his television series and watch enviously as he forages for wild dandelion greens, picks blackberries with his little blond son, or throws together "a tipsy fruity roly-poly pudding," which sounds like something Peter Rabbit's mother might have cooked.

Both Elizabeth David, in England in the fifties, and Alice Waters, in California in the seventies, taught every serious cook to think in terms of fresh seasonal produce. And if food is fresh and in season, it almost certainly was produced by somebody local, and local usually means small. It isn't very complicated, but it does mean that you have to stop and think before you shop. And it isn't just a question of taste and nutrition. Ethics also enters into the equation. Why support huge supermarket chains and factory farming when you can spend your money keeping small local farmers and stores in business? And if we're talking about ethics and morality, then it is only logical to address the whole question of how the meat we eat is produced. Which leads us straight back to Hugh's stone barn in Beaminster.

In the introduction to his newest book, he writes, "I'd like to encourage you to think about the meat you eat. Is it good enough? Good enough to bring you pleasure every time you eat it? What about the animals it comes from? Have they lived well?"

Serious questions for every carnivorous cook. In 1996, when the whole mad cow horror show exploded, consumers were forced to confront the fact that the meat we eat comes from naturally herbivorous animals which were being fed the ground-up body parts of other animals. Not a pretty, or healthy, thought. And even though we've been assured that this particularly gruesome and dangerous practice has stopped, it is still in all our interests to pay close attention to the provenance of the meat we eat. Don't buy mass-produced meat at the supermarket; instead, seek out small local butchers and make sure that they know precisely which farms have raised their meat. Not the cheapest or easiest way to shop, but as Hugh points out, "Good meat is not supposed to be cheap, because cheap meat is usually ethically tainted, of untraceable origin and dubious quality."

After a morning spent learning all about lamb, hogget, and mutton—how long to hang it, how to cut it up, and the merits of homegrown versus New Zealand (no prize for guessing which side Hugh takes)—it was time to think about lunch. Deviled lamb's kidneys were passed around in the frying pan with toothpicks and hunks of bread, and a loin of lamb stuffed with pine nuts and apricots was already in the oven. While the barn was transformed into a rustic dining room, with a long trestle table in the middle and benches along the sides, we were all herded out into the bracing February air.

I stood shivering as the owner of an abattoir in Shropshire told me that he had had quite enough of "the bloody European Union. They keep changing the laws, and then these Spanish vets come round and tell us that we can't hang our meat for more than a week. I'm bloody well going to hang the next one who tells me that—for a lot longer than a week, believe me." Finally, Hugh emerged from the barn in his blue-and-white-striped butcher's apron and announced that lunch was served.

I sat down between a local sheep farmer and the master butcher who taught Hugh almost everything he knows about the profession. The conversation quite naturally turned to wethers, or castrated lambs. Both men seemed surprisingly eager to tell me all about "the elastic band thing" and how the testicles "just drop off" after a few weeks. By the time the silky pink rhubarb syllabub was passed around, they had moved on to the iniquities of keeping cattle indoors and feeding them nothing but pencils. I had to agree that a bucket of Venus 2HBs probably wasn't the best meal for a cow, but apparently "pencils" are not really pencils but pellets of ground up God-knows-what. For a lady who was born in Paris, grew up in London, and now lives in New York, I felt that I had a ways to go on my rural learning curve.

Hugh's message is fundamentally a serious, simple, and sensible one: When you buy food, you are supporting the system that produces it. To quote from the introduction to The River Cottage Meat Book, "Quality and ethics are inextricably linked in the production of good meat, and the point of contact is what we call 'good husbandry.' This resonant phrase describes the art and science of responsible livestock farming." Good husbandry is obviously Hugh's mission in life: His pigs are chubby, his lambs frisky, and his cows content. And by the way, his wife looks pretty happy too.