The Food Programme

Jaega Wise and her co-presenters start the New Year having a go on TikTok after #FoodTok raked in billions of views in 2021. What, if anything, can be learned from the app, which dishes up creator-made videos in three-minute-long bursts? The presenters are joined by TikTok Chef Poppy O'Toole, who posts as PoppyCooks to her two million followers. From turning ordinary cooks into stars, to setting o...

Leyla Kazim dives into the world of rapid grocery delivery, one of the newest trends to hit the world of food retail. In scarcely more than a year, a wave of new companies like Getir, Weezy, Gorillas, Jiffy, Zapp and Gopuff has arrived in cities across the UK which can deliver products to your door in as little as 10 minutes. It’s a sector that’s raised billions of pounds of investment and wants t...

Some of the biggest names in the food world join Dan and Sheila with their favourite Christmas dishes, including Claudia Roden, Jeremy Lee and Paula McIntyre. Noble Rot's Dan Keeling selects the wine. Presented by Dan Saladino and Sheila Dillon. Produced by Dan Saladino.

How did cod become such an important fish in so many different and diverse parts of Europe? In search of the past, present and future of cod, Dan Saladino travels to the west coast of Norway and the Arctic island of Lofoten. Presented and produced by Dan Saladino.

Sheila Dillon presents more stories of the winners of the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2021, which celebrates the people across the UK who've changed lives for the better, through food and drink. We meet Countryfile's Young Countryside Champion and The One Show’s Community Food Champion, as well as the winners of the Best Streetfood or Takeway and Farming Today's Farming for the Future categories....

The winners of the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2021 are announced at a ceremony at London's Broadcasting House.

What are the books that the presenters of Radio 4's The Food Programme have been relishing this year? You are about to find out. In this episode, Sheila, Dan, Jaega and Leyla get together at 'Books for Cooks' in London's Notting Hill to share their favourite titles; the ones that have made them think, that have inspired them to get creative, and have simply filled them with joy. We also catch up w...

Leyla Kazim visits 2021’s Best Shop or Market finalists in the 20th BBC Food and Farming Awards – a food co-op, rural farm shop and city market which are going the extra mile to support local food production and their communities. We meet the teams behind these three outstanding retailers, which are providing boundary-pushing models for the future by trying to create alternative food networks. Nea...

Less but better? With the COP26 climate summit underway Dan Saladino looks at how meat and dairy can play a positive role for the future of people and planet. Produced by Dan Saladino.

Seed breeders spend whole careers in search of that perfect fruit or vegetable, and some even come up with their own completely new designs. Think Tenderstem, Cotton Candy grapes, or a new type of cauliflower that's just started being sold: Caulishoots. In this programme, Leyla Kazim finds out what goes into creating these new varieties, what breeders, growers and supermarket buyers are looking fo...

The hospitality sector has a problem: it just can't get the staff. Businesses from bars to hotels are facing a massive worker shortage, as job vacancies in the sector hit their highest levels since records began. Last month, in an open letter to the government, various hospitality professionals warned that the sector was “close to imploding” because of acute labour shortages. And the cracks are sh...

Dan Saladino finds out how groups of influential investors are using the trillions of dollars they control to shape the future of food. It's argued that it is their decisions, not those of governments which will determine if we can solve the biggest challenges we're facing, from climate change to obesity. These funds, including our savings and pensions, are invested in the global food system. This...

What does it take to bring home the title of Best Food Producer in the Food and Farming Awards 2021? This year, Sheila Dillon and chef Angela Hartnett visit a local nose-to-tail butchery, a community cooperative farm and an enterprise employing ex-offenders to make delicious pasties and pies. H.M.Pasties was set up by Lee Wakeham to ‘bring out the good inside’ by employing ex-offenders like himsel...

Oz Clarke, the popular man of wine, has enjoyed success in wine writing and broadcasting for four decades. First appearing on our screens on BBC2’s Food and Drink in the 1980s, he helped lead a wine drinking revolution in Britain. Visiting Oz to share a glass or two from his collection, Jaega Wise hears about his varied career and lifelong passion for wine, as well as how he’s never been afraid of...

She might be best known as the colourfully clad host of the Great British Bake Off, but Dame Prue Leith's accomplishments during her six decades in the food industry are vast and varied. She's enjoyed success as a cook, restaurateur, businesswoman, broadcaster, campaigner, food writer and novelist; and in conversation with Sheila Dillon, on a balmy summer afternoon on the terrace of her Cotswolds...

Vodka is a spirit with a rich cultural history in a host of European countries including Russia and Poland, where it’s been distilled for centuries. In the west, it's traditionally been considered either a base for other flavours, or something to be knocked back as quickly as possible. But the recent craft spirits boom has seen more distillers experimenting with vodka, showcasing the subtle flavou...

Shedding its associations with street crime and violence, Buckfast is now drunk in upmarket cocktail bars, trendy restaurants and hipster haunts. Jaega Wise visits Glasgow to hear about this transformation, and finds out what a wine produced by monks in Devon can tell us about modern Scotland. Jaega speaks to a comedian about his complicated history with the drink, enlists help from a criminologis...

Leyla Kazim finds out how food companies and restaurants use PR agencies to get us thinking about the meals they want us to buy. From talking teabags to weird breakfast combos, social media has become a way for brands to show us their personalities. In this episode we speak to those behind the stories, find out where they came from, and why they work to keep brands relevant. In hospitality, as res...

Can you have your cake and eat it? Do you have bigger fish to fry? Are you seduced by food imagery in literature, and lured into rash purchases by the purple prose of food packaging? This, then, is the programme for you! Sheila Dillon is joined by author, poet and presenter of Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth', Michael Rosen, to discuss the origins and impacts of food language: from the everyday idioms th...

Dan Saladino tells the story of one of Britain's oldest and most popular biscuits, the digestive. He follows the story from a farmers wheat field to a food factory in London. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Dan Saladino finds out how farmers, millers and bakers are reclaiming wheat, flour and bread in Scotland. When flour ran out during the pandemic the project came into its own. Produced and presented for BBC Audio in Bristol by Dan Saladino

“It’s about trying to paint pictures – of different places, different moments in time, throughout China’s past.” Andrew Wong grew up helping out in his parents’ Chinese restaurant in central London, convinced that he would never work in hospitality himself. But the “magic” of the industry drew him in – and today he’s chef-patron of a restaurant on the very same site as his parents’ place, but tota...

The Coronavirus pandemic has brought into focus the lives of older and disabled people living in care homes like never before. From the start of the first lockdown, there were fears about food being in short supply, and then later came the reality of lockdown, with residents spending days alone in bedrooms, and video-calls and ‘window visits’ becoming the only means of contact with loved ones. In...

Dan Saladino finds out why a UN summit to transform the global food system has become so controversial. It has generated 2500 ideas for change but also a boycott by protesters. In 2019 the UN's Secretary General António Guterres highlighted ways in which the global food system was breaking down: hundreds of millions of people going hungry, billions more overweight or obese and tonnes of food being...

Could we kick-start a major transformation of our food system, in just three years? That's the ambition of the National Food Strategy, the first independent review of our food policy in nearly 75 years, commissioned by the government in 2019 and authored by Henry Dimbleby - who published the second and final part of the report this week. Food-related problems have been stacking up in the UK for a...