Know your onions

James Wong may not yet be a household name but he does have trouble getting through the checkout line at Sainsbury’s. As the presenter of BBC2’s Grow Your Own Drugs, the 28-year-old’s fame is fast on the rise. In a nutshell, he is the Jamie Oliver of plant-based medicine: affable, competent, with a cheeky glint in his eye. While Oliver can inspire even the laziest housewife to whip up a simple Italian supper, so too Wong possesses the telegenic power to make a sceptical, black-thumbed gal want to heal herself naturally. After watching his latest series, I found myself out on my rainy terrace furiously pruning a shrivelled potted rosemary for clippings to mix with organic wine, thus creating a foolproof tincture to improve short-term memory and ward off dementia.

Where was I again? Oh right, Sainbury’s. So there was James Wong, queued up and minding his own business, nursing a rather nasty tension headache if you must know, when a strange woman appeared out of nowhere and began shrieking at him. ‘It turned out she was completely irate about the fact that I was buying aspirin,’ he says. ‘She said, “I knew it was a BBC scam! I believed in you and here you are, just buying aspirin, in front of everyone.”’

A nice, middle-class Anglo-Malaysian boy, Wong was gobsmacked to be so rudely accosted in public. Today, however, he is filled with l’esprit d’escalier. ‘What I’d say to her now is, “I know you might think aspirin is from the dark side, but it’s actually based on salicin, a chemical that is found in willow bark, which people have been using for centuries to cure headaches.”’ Wong grins, dark eyes flashing. He is, it must be said, remarkably handsome for a gardening geek. ‘“If I was at home, I could pop into the cupboard and take out a tincture, but buying it in pill form just happens to be a cheaper, quicker alternative that works for me right now, OK?”’

OK.