The Food Programme

Dan Saladino and food historian Ivan Day rediscover lost flavours from Christmas past with a feast that features chestnuts from an Italian forest, a cheese from the Yorkshire Dales and a once revered meat sourced from the Cumbrian fells. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Sheila Dillon and guests come together at Cherry Tree Library in Blackburn to discuss this year's best food books. From recipes and biographies, to food history and policy - there are choices for everyone to put on their Christmas lists, or.. check out from the library! Cherry Tree in Blackburn like most libraries has a wealth of food books to delve into, but unlike most libraries it also has its...

This year's winner of the Derek Cooper Lifetime Achievement award, scientist Professor Tim Spector explains the latest research into what, how and when we should be eating, from the power of polyphenols to the mysteries of our gut microbiomes. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Fred Sirieix, the French maître d’ joins Jaega Wise to share his ‘Life Through Food’ and passion for hospitality. It’s been a decade since Fred started to appear on television, and he’s best known for being the Front of House on the long-running Channel 4 series First Dates. But before that, Fred had reached the top of his profession working in some of London’s most prestigious restaurants, and ha...

The winners of the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2022 are announced at a ceremony at the National Museum Cardiff. Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Clare Salisbury for BBC Audio in Bristol.

The winners of the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2022 are announced at a ceremony at the National Museum Cardiff. Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol

There's a growing anxiety around avocados. With more awareness of their impact on the countries where they are grown, some chefs have been reducing their presence on menus. Are worries about their sustainability well-founded? Why do we focus so much on avocados and could we replace this contentious fruit with something else? Leyla Kazim meets chef Adriana Cavita at her new Mexican restaurant to ta...

Sheila Dillon and chef Michael Caines meet the three Best Food Producer finalists of 2022, a community farm in Sussex, a business making cultured butter, and processor of wild Scottish venison. Ardgay Game is a family run business which sources the highest quality wild venison from the Highland estates of Scotland. Their team of expert butchers turn this source of sustainable wild meat into a prem...

As rising temperatures supercharge the UK wine industry, Jaega Wise finds out what this means for winegrowing at home and abroad, and the mixed blessing climate change presents. She finds out how winegrowers, viticultural scientists and wine trade experts feel about the double-edged sword of climate change, and what the future might look like for the industry both in the UK and further afield. In...

Dan Saladino explore three big ideas that are set to influence the future of food and farming: the reinvention of wheat, supplies of wild meat into hospital kitchens and 'taste education' for children. Each one is a contender in this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards, in the innovation category. Dan heads into a forest to see how the cull of a growing deer population is resulting in better hospit...

Welcome to the world of cocktails and the people who make them. As Jaega Wise discovers in this programme, it's a world of extremes. On one hand, in the past decade, bartending has become a respectable, profitable career for some. International awards and competitions have thrust people like Monica Berg of London bar Tayēr + Elementary, and Max Hayward of Cardiff's Lab 22 into the media spotlight....

As energy bills rise to their new capped level at the start of October, Leyla Kazim shares some inspiring stories of giving that she has heard while on the road with the BBC Food and Farming Awards. Judging is currently underway for the Awards, which will be held for the first time this year in Wales. Given the financial situation the UK is in, with food inflation at its highest rate since 2008, p...

The quality of hospital food around the country remains a very mixed picture, despite various initiatives over the last decades. But now there is real optimism around a major Independent Review of NHS Hospital Food in England, published in 2020. Sheila Dillon looks at the barriers that have been holding back progress, and talks to Prue Leith, an Independent Advisor for the review, about the latest...

The co-op that's saving land, a food culture and villages at risk of being abandoned. In Benevento, Italy, Lentamente is also giving former convicts a future through farms and food. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Thirty years ago, Dave Myers, a specialist prosthetic make-up artist walked into a pub in Newcastle after scoring a job on a Catherine Cookson TV drama. Beyond the throng of TV crew sipping their white wine spritzers, he spotted the then assistant producer Si King, eating the pub's curry of the day at the pool table. He walked over, introduced himself and said to the landlord, "I'll have what he's...

Sheila Dillon hears the story of one of the most loved and admired chefs in the business, Jeremy Lee, and celebrates the joy of his simple ingredient-led cooking. As chef proprietor at Quo Vadis in London’s Soho, and previously at the Blueprint Café, Jeremy Lee has been creating ever-changing regional, seasonal and historically inspired British cuisine. He learned in the kitchens of some of the ke...

The latest calculations from economists point to an inflation rate for average shopping baskets of just under 12 per cent, but as Dan Saladino hears from has been retailers, analysts and supermarket customers, everyone is expecting that that figure to increase by the time winter arrives. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Meet the chef who ran away with the circus. Ols Halas is one of the longest-serving cast members at much-loved Gifford's Circus. As well as being head chef in Gifford's travelling restaurant 'Circus Sauce', he also drives the lorries, helps put up the big top, he's even performed. He lives and breathes the circus life. Sheila Dillon meets Ols on tour in Gloucestershire on an August morning as the...

Since the American Civil War to the present day, fried chicken has been used to create negative stereotypes of black people. These stereotypes and this history has seeped into today’s consciousness which has established a complicated relationship between chef and author Melissa Thompson and the food item. It’s a relationship which she wrote about and she joins Jaega Wise to explore her feelings an...

In the UK poor diet is a worrying public health issue, and we rank one of the worst in Europe for levels of obesity, particularly among children. Reformulating the most unhealthy foods to reduce sugar, salt and fat is the food industry’s main strategy to turn things around, and this is echoed by the government. Reformulation has been going on for decades, and there has been some real progress rece...

Protein supplements have been around for a long time but recently it feels like they made the jump from a niche product for gym enthusiasts to something much more mainstream. We are seeing protein being added to all kinds of food products for example, from chocolate bars to cereal. Jaega Wise wants to find out more about these products. Do we need them? What are they made of? How much protein shou...

Dan Saladino talks with Sandor Katz about the diversity of fermentation around the world. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

The award winning and inspirational chef tells his food story to Dan Saladino. One of his mentors, Raymond Blanc, explains why Michael is one of the best chefs of his generation. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

In a world where our attention spans are getting shorter, where we are rewarded not for the attention we pay to others but the attention we receive – is it time we re-evaluated the value of attentive growing and farming, and mindful eating? Could paying attention, as cheesemonger and podcast host Sam Wilkin argues, be the secret to great food and drink production and relishing what we consume on a...

What difference would it make if more people rejected cheap bread made using the Chorleywood Process, and moved to eating 'better' bread, i.e bread with fewer ingredients? In this episode Sheila Dillon explores why some scientists, campaigners and academics believe we ought to be eating more 'proper' bread, and puts her body to the test to see what difference it could make. Professor of Genetic Ep...