In spite of his extraordinary range of achievements as a writer, painter, TV and radio presenter, and autobiographer, Colin Spencer, who has died aged 89, is best remembered as a food writer. He won multiple awards over the years and served, at different times, as chairman and president of the Guild of Food Writers. In 2002, Germaine Greer described him as “the greatest living food writer”.
Even here his highly individual creative spirit encouraged him to range far beyond the narrow confines that constrain other less protean writers. In addition to his 18 cookery books, he wrote a food column in the Guardian for 14 years that, despite opening in 1980 with a promise of “no ideological lecturing”, would prove to be avowedly political in tone and range, dealing with the ethical aspects of agriculture and food production, as well as cookery, with equal passion. For many readers, he became the guiding light in an increasingly technological and complex food world. He was particularly vehement about the effects of factory farming and developments in GM crops.
He was an early advocate of vegetarianism, although not a vegetarian himself. “I do eat fish and game,” he confessed in an interview with Robert Tewdwr Moss in the Independent in 1993. He wrote several vegetarian cook books, among them Gourmet Cooking for Vegetarians (1978), The New Vegetarian (1986) and Green Gastronomy (1996), as well as a highly regarded history of vegetarianism, The Heretic’s Feast (1993).
For British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History (2002), he won the Michael Smith award and the Gourmand best culinary history book in the world award, and received a special commendation at the André Simon Memorial Fund awards.
In 1989 he was named Glenfiddich cookery writer of the year. As a broadcaster he contributed to series including Table Talk, The Food Programme, Woman’s Hour, Front Row, The Supersizers Eat ... and Vegetarian Kitchen.
Colin was born in Thornton Heath, south London, the son of Harry Spencer, a master builder, and his wife, Gypsy (nee Heath). He wrote about his early years in the first part of a planned three-volume autobiography, Backing Into Light: My Father’s Son (2013). By all accounts it was not a happy childhood. Colin was educated at Brighton college and Brighton Art College, having decided early in life that he wanted to be an artist. In 1950 he was called up for national service, and, although a pacifist (and a lifelong humanist), served in the Royal Army Medical Corps until 1952.
After a period travelling around Europe he embarked on a career marked by its diversity and productivity. His drawings and stories appeared in publications including the London Magazine, Encounter, the Transatlantic Review, the Times Literary Supplement and the Observer – for the last of these he often illustrated Katharine Whitehorn’s column. He drew artists and writers including CP Snow, Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman and in 1959 was commissioned by the London Magazine to draw EM Forster at 80. Forster sat for him in Cambridge, and 10 years later Colin also painted an oil portrait of the writer. The first of his nine novels, An Absurd Affair, set in Vienna, was published in 1961.
In 1957 he met and began an affair with the theatrical director and producer John Tasker, a relationship that he wrote about subsequently in Which of Us Two? The Story of a Love Affair, published in 1990. The book shone an honest and sometimes painful light on another theme of Colin’s life, his bisexuality.
He had passionate affairs with both men and women, something he was quite open about, at a time when such openness was unusual to say the least. As well as his autobiographical revelations, he also wrote Homosexuality: A History (1995) and The Gay Kama Sutra (1997).
He married twice, first in 1959 to Gillian Chapman, an archaeologist, with whom he had a son, Jonathan. They were divorced in 1969. Subsequently he had a long relationship with the West End producer Bob Swash. In 2003 he married Claire Clifton, with whom he had lived for several years and with whom he co-authored The Faber Book of Food, published in 1993. They later divorced.
Colin was held in as high esteem by his contemporaries as he was by his readers. He could be demanding, but was a man of great charm. As a colleague he was generous and forceful, not without a certain asperity when dealing with people he considered fools. He was a fine cook and a most hospitable host, with a penchant for lively conversation, bringing the same vigour to social gatherings as he did to life in general. He was the antithesis of contemporary intellectual conventions, seeking to find connections between diverse aspects of human experience rather than limiting himself to a narrow field of specialisation.
In reality he was too much of a nonconformist to be neatly contained within any standard box. What stands out from all his works is the sheer energy of the man, combined with a keenness of mind, and a wide-ranging curiosity.
He is survived by Jonathan, and by three grandsons and a great-granddaughter.
• Colin Spencer, writer and artist, born 17 July 1933; died 6 July 2023
