The Food Programme

How we eat says so much about us. Where we come from, our family background, our feelings about our bodies even - our appetite for all kinds of pleasure... There was a time when how we eat was mostly about class, but whether you called it "tea" or "dinner" or "supper", there were still fixed conventions about when and where we ate, and what we ate. These days the certainties, the boundaries, have...

Sheila Dillon presents the highlights of this year's awards with Giorgio Locatelli

Seaweed, hydroponics and seeds. Dan Saladino meets the 'Future Food' finalists in the 2017 BBC Food and Farming Awards, and asks what their stories tell us about the future of what, and how, we all eat. Presenter: Dan Saladino Producer: Rich Ward.

Dan Saladino travels into the Caucasus in search of "zero compromise" natural wine makers. He finds them in Georgia, thought to be the birthplace of wine, and home of the qvevri.

Dan Saladino travels to a Georgia, considered to be an undiscovered food and drink gem at the heart of the meeting point between Europe and Asia. Food writer Carla Capalbo, author of Tasting Georgia: A food and wine journey in the Caucasus guides Dan through a supra, a traditional feast. Georgia, a country the same size as Scotland, south of Russia and north of Turkey, has one of the oldest, riche...

Once a cheap dish to feed workers, salted cod has been preserved by cooks around the world who serve it to celebrate: On Sundays, at Carnival, at Christmas. It's an ingredient which has played a part in the forming of empires, fuelled armies and cured hangovers. Sheila Dillon meets cooks and hears the enduring and surprising stories of cuisines shaped by salt fish. She asks why some of the best ne...

Dan Saladino investigates current pressures on chefs and the darker side of the restaurant kitchen. From breakdowns to addictions, is it a profession with more problems than most? Dan hears from a range of chefs who open up about the way their chosen profession has affected their lives, including Mark Hix, Rene Redzepi, Matty Matheson, Paul Cunningham, Shaun Hill and Philip, who works through an a...

Grace Dent discovers what has made Anthony Warner into the Angry Chef and unpicks the role that social media plays in spurring people towards diet plans and 'healthy-eating' regimes Anthony set up a blog last year to vent his fury at what he describes as bad science in his quest to reveal the truth behind so-called 'healthy eating'. He believes we're bombarded by false messages and claims about fo...

"Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance. Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared - with a flask of wine - between working people, can be more convivial than any feast." So writes Patience Gray in the introduction to her 1986 award winning book 'Honey From A Weed: Fasting & Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and...

Sheila Dillon and The Food Programme team go camping, to discover the possibilities of food and drink in the outdoors. Joining Sheila around a Monmouthshire campfire are BBC 6Music presenter Cerys Matthews, author of 'How to Eat Outside' Genevieve Taylor, forager and wild drinks teacher Andy Hamilton, Matthew De Abaitua - author of 'The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under th...

This week, Sheila Dillon is in Greece to speak to farmers and food producers about how they are carving new lives for themselves out of the financial crisis. Greeks have now lived through seven years of austerity after the most catastrophic European financial crisis in modern times. Unemployment is above 23%, higher than anywhere in the EU. Amongst the under 25's the figure is more than 46%. Life...

Sandor Katz has been enchanted by fermentation, the mysterious process by which microbes transform food and drink, for some two decades. Since making his first crock of sauerkraut, his fascination with fermentation has broadened, deepened, and he now travels the world giving workshops. Based in Tennessee, his books including 'Wild Fermentation' and the encyclopaedic 'The Art of Fermentation' have...

Dan Saladino asks if hunter gatherers, the Hadza tribe, hold the key to our future health. Presented and produced by Dan Saladino.

Dan Saladino eats with one of the last remaining hunter gatherer tribes, Tanzania's Hadza.

What can I do? That was the question posed to us by Food Programme listener Angie Roberts who cares for her mother Clara. Clara, like 850 thousand others in the UK, has dementia, and meal times were making her anxious. 9 months on from our last edition on food and dementia, Sheila Dillon hears from people living with dementia to see how food figures in their lives. She catches up with dementia ent...

As he prepares to move to Australia, leaving a lasting culinary legacy here in the UK, chef and food writer Alastair Little shares his life in food with Sheila Dillon. Born in Lancashire, from a very early age Alastair Little paid careful attention to the food and flavours around him. On early holidays around Europe with his parents, his eyes (and tastebuds) started to open up to a new world of po...

Think beer. Think boys with beards? Think again. The last time Sheila Dillon reported on the women in British beer, in 2013, she met Sara Barton head brewer at Brewster's brewery in Lincolnshire. At the time Sara was the only woman head brewer in the country and women were drinking only a tenth of all the beer sold in the UK. Today that figure has nearly tripled, Sara has become the first woman to...

From Confederacy of Dunces to Absolute Beginners and On The Road, Dan Saladino explores cult novels to find out how writers Jack Kerouac, Colin MacInnes and John Kenney Toole used food. Authors have always used food and drink in their narratives to help develop plots, bring characters to life and give a sense of place but Dan chooses three novels with in which food and drink plays a very specific...

Sheila Dillon takes a journey into the culinary use, history and the latest medical findings about turmeric. Turmeric (Curcuma longa) is a member of the ginger family of plants - and its rhizome, the part mainly used in cooking, has a deep orange-golden colour that marks it out. Responsible for this distinctive hue is the bioactive compound, curcumin. Turmeric - and curcumin - have attracted a lot...

Sheila Dillon charts the rise of the humble mac'n'cheese: a dish that crosses culture and classes and has established itself as a popular comfort food across the world. We discover the history of the dish. Food historian Polly Russell tells us how a macaroni recipe first appeared in the UK in the 1700s and slowly it became more and more prevalent over the subsequent centuries. We'll hear how macar...

At the age of 30, with no formal training, Jeremiah Tower became a chef. His approach to cooking changed the food world for good, then he walked away. Dan Saladino tells the story of the man who many consider to be the first "celebrity chef". The food writer and broadcaster Anthony Bourdain has described Jeremiah Tower as a "dangerous person to know", to others he's the Jay Gatsby figure of the re...

Culinary herb grower Jekka McVicar shares her life through food with Sheila Dillon. Taking a walk through the small herb farm where Jekka grows some 600 varieties of herb (300 of them culinary), Sheila discovers a world of ancient knowledge, vivid flavours, and taste possibilities. Having worked closely with chefs from Jamie Oliver to Raymond Blanc, and played with her band Marsupilami at the firs...

Lamb. Long a staple of the UK dinner table. But one glance at the statistics and it's obvious that 'Generation Y' aren't inspired. Estimates suggest under 30s are buying just 15g of lamb a week. That's just over 10 lamb chops in a year and less than half the UK average. In this programme Sheila Dillon asks young butchers, food entrepreneurs and a 3rd generation sheep farmer in his thirties whether...

Sheila Dillon digs up the remarkable story of how potatoes changed the world, offer a whole spectrum of flavour, and might shape our food future. With Sheila are cook and food writer Anna Jones, Charles C. Mann - author of '1493 - How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth', and the potato revolutionary and agronomist Alan Wilson. Presenter: Sheila Dillo...

Dan Saladino meets a woman who believes Venezuela's escape from crisis rests on chocolate. Maria Fernanda Di Giacobbe is on a mission to reclaim her country's former cacao bean glory.