Professor Robert Winston

Robert Winston is Emiritus Professor of Fertility at Imperial College, London. Best known for his research into human reproduction, he is also famous for his love of egg and chips.

I got a lot of stick for supporting omega-3 fatty acids and I'm not sure why, because each week new research comes out that says I was right. There is clear evidence that it is needed for brain development in children and it seems to improve behaviour in adults too. A very interesting study from Oxford University shows that these fatty acids fed to young offenders in an Aylesbury institution improved their concentration and lowered instances of aggression. All I advocated was that omega 3 was likely to help some children if given as an additive in milk, for example. I don't think I did anything that was in the slightest bit untrustworthy.

I've never really eaten healthily ... no, that's not strictly true. There have been times in my life when I've made a serious attempt to lose weight and get fit and I've done that. For a few months at a time I've been eating fruit and not eating fats, being very religious about what I ate. But six months is the longest I've done it for. My feeling is that we've got genetic scars. We don't need a craving for fat: we shouldn't be eating crisps any more but we do. Why do we love them? I think it's deeply genetic. Right back in time, this love of salt, sweet things, high carbohydrate and high fat would have provided instant energy on the savannah. It might have been the difference between survival or not.

It can be really difficult, quite painful, to keep kosher. During my childhood and teens, I was completely observant and I remember that I spent a lot of time hungry. I went to a non-Jewish school and we used to have fairly miserable vegetarian portions, so by the end of the day on the tube back to Arnos Grove I would be ravenous. Then, for about 10 years in my twenties, I didn't really keep any Jewish laws - it was to do with my social life, with falling in love. I don't think I've ever eaten pork but that's not the point really. I came back to it because Jewishness is a part of my basic identity and I have kept kosher ever since.

Kaifeng is kosher Chinese - there's another place called Marcus's, also north London, a few in New York City, one or two in Jerusalem and at least one in Tel Aviv. The Jews of Kaifeng were a real entity in China. I'm a bit hazy about the details, but there has been a Jewish presence in mainland China for centuries. I'm not sure why they settled there but I imagine it was trading and the fact that the Chinese were quite tolerant of them. The restaurant opened about a dozen or so years ago and you will see there's a man floating around called a shomer who is basically the guy who ensures that all the dietary laws are being kept. Shomer means 'someone who guards or keeps'. They wear some form of head covering, most of them have beards and they always look hungry. They usually look dishevelled actually, but I will get myself into trouble now.

I've never been very big on traditional Jewish food, things like salt beef, chopped liver or cholent, a meat stew that is the traditional Sabbath meal. These things don't attract me at all; I can't stand them. Chicken soup is an exception, and we have that at home most Friday nights. But there's no doubt at all that my favourite meal is fried egg and chips - I love it. When I come into the cafeteria at the House of Lords they don't ask me what I want, they don't show me the menu, they just say, 'Do you want egg and chips?' They always look slightly upset really.

There's a lot of discussion about the fast-food culture, but to me the main harm is that families are not eating their food together in a domestic environment. And that is quite a Jewish activity, it's a Chinese activity too, and I think it's a very cohesive force. My kids are grown-up now but we will come quite often to somewhere like Kaifeng or I will do a barbecue at home at weekends.

My daughter, Tania, has been a vegetarian since she was four-and-a-half - I served her fish fingers and she turned around and said, 'I can't eat that. Fish swim' - and she is very strong-willed. So I will be barbecuing some meaty thing for the family and Tania will have her own vegetarian section. And she will come and be a shomer too, to make sure that I am handling her vegetables with different utensils. She really is very strict.

· Kaifeng, 51 Church Road, London NW4 (020 8203 7888)

Radha Jain, under-9 chess champion

Radha Jain is the English Girls Under-9 chess champion and is representing England at the World Youth Championships in Turkey this November. Discipline is her middle name.

It's really important to eat the right things before playing chess. I don't eat sugar, or sweets, and I don't eat just before my round, either, because that way you get sleepy. I don't even have sugar the day before a match. I drink a lot of water, because thinking really dehydrates you. Bananas are good for concentration, though, and I'll eat those between rounds.

I love Indian food, and that's what we mostly eat at home, though sometimes we have pasta and pizza. My favourite dish is dosa - a big Indian pancake, with all sorts of fillings, such as paneer or samba, and they do great ones at the Indian Kitchen. I love the ambience as well as the food here, especially the big red flowers on each table. The staff are also really polite and helpful. Generally we don't go out to eat, though, and Mum does most of the cooking. She's a very good cook. My dad has an office in the house, and he stays there most of the day; he doesn't do much cooking.

I do cook a tiny bit at home - mostly chapatis, filled with sabjis and dhal. I prefer Indian food - I like its spiciness, and I think it's healthier than English food. There are also lots of vegetarian dishes, which is good because of my religion - I'm a Jain, and we do not believe in killing animals.

I started playing chess when I was seven. I like the way the game challenges you all the time. My dad and my brother [Akash Jain, 13, currently Under-13 British Champion] also play chess. I started beating my dad about one-and-a-half years ago. He didn't mind too much. I probably practise about an hour a day - either on the computer, or against my brother. My brother's three years older and thinks he's much better than me at chess. When he was my age, though, he wasn't as good as I am now. One day I'd like to be a Women's Grand Master.

I've played so much chess now that I don't really get nervous before matches. Sometimes playing against the clock can be stressful, though. Some games can go on a really long time; the longest one I ever played was four-and-a-half hours. I like the puzzle of chess. You have to stretch for tactics and chances to win. The person that plays the first move that comes into his head always loses. Normally I think about three moves ahead, sometimes more.

My schoolfriends aren't that into chess. We just talk, really. And we play netball, and rounders. My favourite thing of all is when a cocky boy comes up to me and thinks he can thrash me because I'm a girl, and I beat him easily. That's very satisfying.
Edward Marriott

· The Indian Kitchen, 73 Ryefield Parade, Northwood Hills, Middlesex (01923 842647)

Professor Steve Jones

Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College, London. His writing on evolution won him the prestigious Royal Society Michael Faraday prize, and his work as a biologist led to his becoming a vegetarian.

We live in a unique time in history from the point of view of diet because for the first time the poor are fat and the rich are thin. It's quite arguable that my generation is going to be the longest-living in history because the next generation is suffering from the plague of obesity, which is going to shorten life expectancy by a lot. There are thousands of scientists working on obesity and there's a thing called the Human Obesity Gene Map. The last time I looked at it there were 560 candidate genes for obesity which means everybody has got some of them. What causes obesity? Overeating. I was talking to Sydney Brenner, who won the Nobel Prize in 2002, and he said, 'Steve, we discovered the gene for obesity years ago: it's the one that makes you open your mouth'.

I'm always asked, 'Do you eat snails?' I started collecting them as a biology undergraduate in the Sixties and, the last time I looked, I had killed about 400,000, so when I'm asked the question I know the answer in about 15 different languages. In fact, I haven't eaten snails since about 1985. For one thing, I find them really quite beautiful and elegant, but I just don't like the taste and I know what they eat, which can be pretty disgusting.

I'm also a vegetarian now and have been pretty much since I went to teach at the University of Botswana in the mid-Seventies. On my first day in the country I ended up with a group of students at the largest slaughterhouse in the southern hemisphere. Botswana is a very big cattle-rearing country and we went to this very well-run place - these poor cows going 'Moo' and getting shot and then opening them up to look for gut parasites. I am a biologist, I've cut up plenty of animals, so it doesn't really worry me - I was splitting them open, pulling out tapeworms. But I kept hearing these heavy thumps and, I turned around, it was the students fainting: donk, donk, donk. I suddenly thought, 'You know something, I don't think I'm going to eat meat again', and I never have.

I eat lunch every day at the student cafeteria at UCL, and have done for almost 30 years. I always have the same thing, a boring vegetarian salad. When I'm working I want lunch to be as simple as possible. The mathematical philosopher Wittgenstein came up with a phrase I often think of: 'I don't mind what I eat, so long as it's always the same thing.' What people fail to understand about science, particularly biology, is that it is tremendously repetitive. If you are studying DNA variation, it involves coming in every morning, putting on the same goddamn lab coat, doing the same complicated, linear series of things, often 40 or 50 steps, and if any one goes wrong, that's it, the day's wasted. You do this for hundreds if not thousands of days, one after another. So when it comes to lunch, you don't want to think too hard.

I come from a very ordinary lower-middle-class Welsh family, and growing up, I never thought too much about what I ate. When I was an undergraduate in Edinburgh, I began the Scottish Suicide Diet. I would get up at noon and have a pork pie and four cups of coffee, then I would have fish and chips for lunch and a Mars bar at 3am. After 10 years of that I thought, 'Maybe this isn't wise'.

The reason I enjoy cooking now is that when I was doing my PhD, I used to go off on field trips where you were in the middle of nowhere and were forced to cook. Lots of field biologists are like that.

I do most of the cooking at home, but I'm not averse to going out and spending a fair amount of money on a meal. A couple of years ago I went with my wife and her cousin to - what's that one in Chelsea? I think it's Gordon Ramsay. I have never got nearer to getting up and punching a waiter in my life. The food was very good - it was a bit mucked around for my tastes - but if there's one thing that drives me mad it's having a meal as if you are in intensive care. In other words, little metaphorical bleeps going on all around you, people with grey faces waiting for the next crisis. If that's what you want why not get hooked up to a drip in hospital to go through the full experience?

· The university canteen is not open to non-students

Dr Alice Roberts

Dr Alice Roberts is a clinical anatomist and osteoarchaeologist teaching at Bristol University. She presented Don't Die Young on BBC2 and is strongly committed to public engagement with science and medicine.

Many issues of health and food are very complicated and I don't want to preach or set myself up as a paragon of virtue - that wasn't what Don't Die Young was about at all. My main concern is the rising levels of preventable diseases, like cancer and heart disease. It's bizarre and shocking - we know the risk factors and still they are on the increase.

Two years ago, my partner, Dave, and I moved into a 1930s farm-worker's cottage a few miles outside Bristol. The garden is not huge, but it's big enough to grow vegetables in, and from June to around Christmas last year, we didn't have to buy any vegetables. The provenance of food is really important to me, and that's one of the reasons I like the Primrose Café in Clifton. They are great proponents of the Slow Food movement and organic produce, and there are loads of options if you're a vegetarian, which I have been since I was 18. After I made up my mind to become vegetarian, I went on holiday to Greece and ate a lot of lamb - because I absolutely love the way they cook lamb in Greece - and then I came home and gave up meat.

However, in May, Dave and I found a deer on the road that had been knocked down and killed. We rang some friends who turned up and we lifted it into the boot. The following day, we went around to Nick and Miranda's, where they had hung the deer in their garage. Using my anatomical skills, and being careful to avoid the hundreds of ticks, we gutted the deer into a wheelbarrow. Some days later we went back to skin it and cut it up, so there's now a pile of venison in Nick and Miranda's freezer, and we're planning a roadkill dinner party. I'm wrestling with the idea of eating this meat, as there doesn't seem to be any ethical objection: I wasn't responsible for the animal's death and I have always enjoyed the taste of meat. But I'm worried that I might like it too much.

Although the process of converting the dead animal into joints of meat was a messy, mechanical business, there was also something quite moving about it. At the moment, I have no idea if I'll eat it. I imagine I will decide on the day.

· Primrose Café and Bistro, Boyces Avenue, Clifton Village, Bristol (0117 946 6577)

Professor Susan Greenfield

Susan Greenfield is Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford. She has been awarded a CBE for her contributions to the public understanding of science, and the French Légion d'honneur. She doesn't miss the Spam fritters of her youth.

I find it very encouraging that science is starting to find its way into food preparation. For a long time scientists were thought of as non-sensual people, like Mekons, and science was not considered relevant to everyday life. Chefs like Heston Blumenthal show that food should be fun, you should take time to eat, that a table should be for something much more than ingesting calories. Fifty years from now, I can see us having a vastly improved knowledge of nutrition. I also think we will see a decline in obesity, simply because it is becoming such a problem.

I have a big problem in that I adore eating and hate cooking, so I love restaurants like Le Manoir. I'm a Baby Boomer and grew up in the Fifties, before food was interesting. My mother used to say, 'I can't see the point in cooking because it's all gone in half an hour.' I'm sure that brainwashed me slightly. For me, being able to produce food like Raymond Blanc does at Le Manoir would be as possible as jumping off a cliff and flying.

When I was a child, we would eat things like salad with salad cream, Spam fritters and Vesta chow mein - standard fare, really. But, perhaps more than the average family, my parents liked to experiment with Indian and Chinese restaurants, both of which were starting to come in to England at that time. The other special meal was Sunday lunch. I'm half-Jewish, on my father's side, and culturally it has been a big influence on me. We would eat gefilte fish, smoked herring and coleslaw and your school reports would be handed round the whole family. The culture is similar to what I see in my Asian students now, where the extended family is very engaged in the education of the next generation. I have fond memories of getting my school report back from my uncle and there was a ten-shilling note inside, because I had done well.

My early cooking experiences were Mary Baker cakes - they were marketed as 'just add an egg' because the housewife of that time would not want instant cakes but, as long as she was doing something, that was fine. As a kid, my mum let me do this and I remember the magic - that when you put them in the oven, they expanded and became golden and changed properties. I suppose that was an early grounding in science. My cooking never really developed from there, I think mostly because I'm a very impatient person.

Everything changed when I lived in Paris for a year when I was 27. I didn't learn to cook - in France you can go to any old supermarket and serve a fabulous lunch of paté, saucisson sec, camembert and a baguette. I lived near the market on Rue de Seine in the Latin Quarter and the French housewives would make such an effort to get the absolute best produce: they would pick food up, pinch it, smell it, push it. It had a real influence on me. When I arrived, I was a typical scruffy Oxford student but within two weeks I was making sure that I had painted my nails and that my shoes matched my handbag.

I usually have the 10-course Menu Découverte when I come here, which is fantastic because you get to try so many things. I like eating a lot and I have quite a high metabolic rate. For me, it would be torture to go on a diet of any type. I'm just a pig. I used to be a smoker and I cruised through life at seven-and-a-half stone with beer and ice cream and three-course meals, aided and abetted by cigarettes. Since I stopped, I've rocketed up to eight-and-a-half, nine. But for me, starving yourself means cutting off the most wonderful sensual experiences. As someone once said, 'Food is the sensuality of old age'.

My great vice now is coffee - it has become the surrogate cigarette. When I gave up smoking, I realised that I was missing the reward system - if there was a particularly hard phone call or I had finished a paragraph, I would light up a cigarette. I can see that I have now substituted the coffee for the cigarettes. I know I should cut back but life is short and I think we mustn't get so po-faced and self-righteous that we throw out the fun with everything else.

· Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Great Milton, Oxford (01844 278881)

Professor AC Grayling

AC Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck University, London. He is devoted to making the basics of philosophy available to all.

I do think there is a strong correlation between the food you put into your body and your mental wellbeing. I'm very fond of saying to people, I repeat it endlessly, that a normal human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. That means that you have got to make the best use of everything you've got. So if you were to be very irresponsible about your body and became incredibly obese or drugged to your eyeballs or drunk all the time or hardly able to breathe because you smoke too much, then you would be failing yourself in this little bit of equipment that helps you to process thoughts. Eating right and exercising right is just obviously the right basis.

My mother was a very neurotic, anxious, bad-tempered, difficult person. She was nervous about a lot of things. We lived in Africa, so she was worried about snakes and spiders, and she thought the Africans among whom we lived would murder us one day. It's amazing they didn't, considering the way that expats lived in central Africa in those days. But she was also nervous about people swallowing fish bones and choking to death, or meat going off in the hot weather, so I have early memories of anxiety, food being a source of worry and a potential threat. And I've never been a great fish-eater, very probably because of my mother.

We had a number of servants, but our cook, who was with us for a very long time, was very good indeed. He had the whole range: he could cook the roast and two veg, but he would also make delicious puddings and pastries and bake bread. It was a good British diet, better than most people were eating in Britain at that time because of the aftermath of war. There was no difficulty getting food and there were also a lot of local foods such as sweetcorn, sweet potatoes and yams and we had a very big garden with lots of fruit trees. The one fruit we didn't eat was avocado pear. My mother had never come across it before in England or anywhere and she thought it was horrible, green and slimy.

Our time in Africa ended in a very, very tragic way. I had a sister, seven years older than me, who was murdered by persons unknown. She had married somebody not long before and he was indicted for her murder but acquitted, so if he didn't do it we don't know who did. And it was an absolutely horrible thing because she was missing for some time and finally they found her body in a river in South Africa. My mother wasn't well at the time, she had a heart complaint, and she and my father had to go and identify my sister's body. It made my mother very ill and shortly afterwards she had a heart attack and died.

I was here at university and I had to fly out to be with my father and brother. My father, as you can imagine, was completely devastated, and my brother and I had the responsibility of propping him up, and my brother, who is older than me, had to organise my mother's funeral. Neither of us had the opportunity to grieve properly, and it took a long time to come to terms with it. And I found that, when I got back to the UK a couple of months later, the only fruit I could eat that had any tropical association was avocado, because we never ate it when we were in Africa. To this day, I don't eat bananas or mangoes or anything like that - they bring back memories.

I am a vegetarian now and have been for about 30 years. I must have become one in my late twenties, and it was quite a process. I spent a long time thinking about it, considering the pros and cons, before I came to a decision that, for me, is part ethical and part aesthetic. For a short while, smoked salmon was an honorary vegetable; I found it a little bit difficult to give that up. But when I became completely vegetarian, about two weeks after I last had any meat or fish, I was going for a walk in Regent's Park and feeling absolutely wonderful, full of energy and clarity and light. And I was thinking to myself, 'What's going to go wrong now?' But that feeling of energy and lightness has stayed with me ever since. I stopped drinking alcohol a little before, just because I always found that it disagreed with me.

At that very early stage, I became interested in what I am mainly interested in now, which is Italian, Indian, Chinese and Middle-Eastern food. All those four cuisines are absolutely as easy as pie for vegetarians. If you walk into an ordinary Italian restaurant you can eat very tasty food in unfussy, inexpensive circumstances, whereas in order to eat really well if you eat meat, you have got to go upmarket. You are going to get a piece of leather if you go into a cheapo place and order a steak. Cantina is a bit upmarket as Italian restaurants go, but the food is simple, fresh and delicious, and I like to come here with friends and family. I don't really cook myself, although I do find the textures, colours and perfumes of raw food really rather lovely. Sometimes I think I'd like to do it, but there's only a thousand months, you know.

· Cantina del Ponte, Butler's Wharf, London SE1 (020 7403 5403)

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