George Lamb on game shows, green fields and the real future of food
From TV game shows to regenerative bread: George Lamb reveals why he swapped the spotlight for soil – and how wild farming could change the way we eat.
George Lamb is not your typical food entrepreneur. Once a familiar face on prime-time television, the former presenter has swapped the glare of the studio lights for muddy boots and fields alive with birdsong. But as he tells Good Food, this journey from game shows to grain fields is about more than personal reinvention – it’s about changing the way Britain eats.
Listen to the full episode of the Good Food podcast, then delve into the podcast archive for more culinary adventures.
A taste for change
George’s love of food runs deep, shaped by a childhood spent between London and Scotland, where family meals were the heartbeat of daily life. “My mum was a really good cook, and long before food was trendy in this country, she was drizzling and flaking and bringing interesting flavours to the table,” he recalls. His granny in Dundee, meanwhile, was the queen of soup – “She made soup pretty much every day of her life. The first thing you’d hear walking into her house was, ‘Do you want a wee bit soup?’”
Food for George was always about more than sustenance – it was about connection, care, and culture. But as his career took off in television, he found himself increasingly adrift from that grounding. Hosting game shows may have brought him recognition, but he admits, “I was a hundred percent confident that my star hadn’t been pulled out the ether to be a game show host… I felt complicit in selling distraction to a bunch of people who don’t need distraction.”
From burnout to Wildfarmed
A moment of reckoning came during a live broadcast, with producers barking instructions in his ear and the artificial tension of a studio bank vault swirling around him. “I was just having this kind of freak out on live television and I was just like, what am I doing? What am I doing with myself?” The answer, it turned out, lay far from the studio.
After a period of soul-searching, George’s path crossed with Andy Cato, the Groove Armada musician turned pioneering farmer. Andy had sold his music publishing rights to buy a run-down farm in Gascony, France, determined to prove that regenerative agriculture could revive dead soils and produce real, nourishing food. The farm was a revelation: “Once you’ve stood in a field where there’s life and vitality, and then stepped into a neighbouring field that’s an ecological dead zone, you get it. You just feel it.”
George threw himself into the project, using his storytelling skills to help bring Andy’s vision to a wider audience. Together with a third partner, they founded Wildfarmed – a collective championing wheat grown in harmony with nature, supplying flour and bread to artisan bakers and high street names alike.
Regenerating the future
At the heart of Wildfarmed is a simple but radical idea: food and nature should not be in opposition. “For the last hundred years, nature and food have been put in opposition. For millennia, that wasn’t the case,” George explains. The industrial food system, he argues, has stripped the land of life and the food of nutrients, leaving us with “a synthetic version” of what food should be.
The solution? Regenerative farming, where livestock, crops, and wildflowers coexist, restoring soil health and biodiversity. Andy’s breakthrough came after reading Sir Albert Howard’s ‘An Agricultural Testament’, which argued that plants and animals thrive together. Bringing cattle onto exhausted land, Andy watched the soil spring back to life: “Within a year or so, the vitality was back on the farm and there were birds and bees and butterflies.”
Wildfarmed’s approach is both ancient and modern, blending time-honoured practices with new technology. The business now connects with around 150 farmers across the UK, aiming to “democratise real food” and bring it to the high street. Their flour is used everywhere from artisan bakeries to leading chains like Shake Shack and Nando’s.
The taste of real food
For George, the proof is in the eating. “The best sales pitch I can give for Wildfarmed is not to sit here and wang on at you, but to take you to a field. Stand in a conventional field 10 metres away, then walk across. Just listen. Just watch. Just feel it. You’ll start seeing the thing’s alive.”
He’s quick to credit the bravery of bakers and chefs who have embraced Wildfarmed flour, often changing their methods to do so. “If you’re going to pay the farmer properly and everyone in the supply chain gets an equitable share, and you’re not going to rinse the planet, it costs a little bit more. That’s the reality.”
So what does George think the future of food should look like? “Food and nature being grown together. The Wildfarmed way.” He believes Britain’s food literacy is on the rise, and that we have a “massive opportunity to turn the ship around” in the face of environmental crisis. “Food’s our biggest point of agency. If we’re lucky enough to make food choices, we should be getting stuff that’s coming from better farming systems.”
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