The Food Programme

On the anniversary of TV series 'The Naked Chef', Jamie Oliver talks to Sheila Dillon about two controversial decades dominating food on our TV screens and online, our home cooking, and dining out. In a two-part programme, Jamie, arguably the UK’s most successful food entrepreneur, reveals where it all went wrong with ill-fated restaurant chain 'Jamie's Italian’; the restaurants were supposed to d...

Food has been larking about in comedy since Charlie Chaplin first slipped on a banana skin and made bread rolls dance: but somewhere along the way, it's evolved from the slapstick sidekick to a much more significant comic entertainer... From the disastrous duck at Fawlty Towers, to Fleabag’s calamitous catering efforts – via wry dinner ladies, caravan fry-ups, comedic fried chicken shops and dark...

Dan Saladino tells the story Esiah Levy who shared seeds and changed lives. It all started with a squash. Soon after he started to grow his own food he cut open a particularly delicious variety and discovered hundreds of seeds inside. He felt compelled to share them with people so they could enjoy the same experience. So began a mission to encourage anyone who would listen, where ever they lived,...

Rain or shine, the British barbecue is a summer tradition: and we want to help your al fresco feasts go with a bang! Sheila Dillon calls on Genevieve Taylor - a food writer, food stylist and presenter with an affinity for the outdoors that’s led to books including How to Eat Outside, The Ultimate Wood Fired Oven Cookbook and most recently Charred: a guide to vegetarian grilling and barbecue. She's...

We asked you to tell us stories of meals you remember your grandmothers making. Now Sheila Dillon asks why these dishes - whether delicious or otherwise - stick with us into adulthood. Food writer Alissa Timoshkina shares her Grandparents Siberian recipes which provide the essence for her book 'Salt & Time: Recipes from a Russian Kitchen'. Blogger Ann Storr reminisces about her grannie's high...

Dan Saladino takes part in a gruelling nutrition study to work out what to eat. Founded by Professor Tim Spector "Predict" is one of the biggest food and diet studies ever devised. A technological revolution means it is now possible to monitor large groups of people as they eat food. With this accumulation of 'big data' and the use of Artificial Intelligence it's also becoming increasingly possibl...

Dan Saladino embarks on an epic quest into a world of food-filled computer games, to find out how and why foraging, cooking and eating have become such important components of the genre. Food has taken on a major role in many modern games - not only in terms of beautiful, Instagram-worthy designs bringing dishes to life on screen, but also food-related quests and story-lines - and even game-based...

Netflix chef and author of 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat', Samin Nosrat says anyone can learn to cook delicious food. Samin shares a life of food memories with Sheila Dillon. Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury

Magnus Nilsson takes Dan Saladino on a Nordic baking tour. For a nearly a decade Magnus, who is one of the world's most celebrated chefs, travelled through the region (which includes Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Finland and the Faroe Islands) and reached an important and controversial conclusion. He argues that the Nordics has the most diverse and the deepest baking culture in the world today...

The winners of the BBC Food & Farming Awards 19 are revealed at a ceremony in Bristol. In part two, Jamie Oliver reveals the winner of the inaugral Pat Llewellyn New Talent award. Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury

The winners of the BBC Food & Farming Awards 2019 are revealed at a glittering ceremony in Bristol. In the first course of the 2019 awards story, Sheila Dillon is joined by food industry experts including Angela Hartnett, Matt Tebbutt, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Andi Oliver - to celebrate the cooks, shop keepers, farmers, producers, entrepreneurs and food pioneers who make up this year's...

With days to go before we learn who the winners are of the 2019 BBC Food & Farming Awards Dan Saladino looks at the remaining food and drink ideas on this year's shortlist. Drinks writer Alice Lascelles guides us through the drinks makers; an experimental brewer from Leeds, a distiller based on the east coast of Scotland and a cider and perry producer from Herefordshire. Genevieve Taylor descr...

As Ramadan 2019 draws to a close, many British Muslim reach the culmination of a month of fasting during daylight hours. But that doesn't mean that food is forgotten. On the contrary... In this programme, food writer Yasmin Khan celebrates the social, cultural and culinary rituals of Ramadan, the most holy month in the Islamic calendar. She speaks to comedian Tez Ilyas about celebrations with fami...

Genevieve Taylor sets out to meet a few of this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards finalists, and hear how learning about food has changed their lives for the better. The first stop is Liberty Kitchen - a finalist in the Best Street Food or Takeaway category. This social enterprise operates at Pentonville Prison, where inmates produce a diverse range of 'street balls', including classic Italian me...

Dan Saladino arrives on a beach for a Robinson Crusoe experience. Will he be able to survive on wild food? Chef Gill Meller and foragers John Wright and Monica Wilde lend their expertise. This castaway coastal feast is something of a tribute to the 300th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Defoe's novel, a story itself inspired by the experience of a Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk who in 1...

What does it take to produce delicious food of the highest quality in the UK in 2019? This year, it was the turn of chef, food writer, BBC TV presenter, and this year's head judge in the BBC Food and Farming Awards Angela Hartnett to find out. In this programme, Angela and Sheila Dillon spend a day with each of the finalists in the Best Food Producer category. Together, they visit three farms, in...

At a time when shops are closing across the country, we visit three food retail businesses that are bucking the trend. Levenshulme Market in Greater Manchester, A Small Good Thing in Bolton and Squash in Liverpool are all making a positive impact in their communities Sheila Dillon meets entrepreneur John Timpson to find out what this could tell us about the future of our high streets. Presenter: S...

Food assurance labels come in all sorts of forms, appearing on all sorts of ingredients available from shops across the UK. Their logos promise certified standards in a range of production attributes - from environmental impact to animal welfare to safety to chemical usage. But how well are these schemes understood? What does the general public really want to be assured about? How much impact can...

Dan Saladino meets the scientists working on the future of a truly global food, the banana.

Can you reinvent a food culture? Dan Saladino meets a man who did, Denmark's Claus Meyer, the co-founder of Noma, one of the world's most influential restaurants. From there he went to Bolivia and set up a restaurant to rescue lost foods of the Andes and Amazon, and onto New York where he founded a cooking school in a neighbourhood with some of the worst levels of food related illness in America....

Should you leave a cash tip or is card just as good, do you prefer a service charge or would you get rid of tipping altogether? Sheila Dillon finds out when she meets the co-founder of Hawksmoor Restaurants William Beckett to talk about our attitude to tipping in the UK and how it varies from city to city. Peter Davies of WMT Accountants describes how high-profile scandals have dented our trust in...

One September Ella Risbridger tried to kill herself. She survived and left the hospital thinking about making a pie. When she got home, her partner persuaded her to make the pie, and it set Ella on a course to teach herself to cook. And in teaching herself to cook, she has taught herself to live. This is a programme about pies. The pork pie of Pete Brown and his ‘soon-to-be-wife’ Liz’s first date...

Robots are building burgers, stretching dough in pizzerias and cooking up a media storm. Soon, they could deliver our groceries, invent recipes using machine learning and cook in our homes with arms dangling down either side of our stoves. But should they and what will this mean for the future of everyone that works in the food industry? Sheila Dillon talks to the inventor of the Moley Robotic Kit...

Dan Saladino travels from Brixham to Tokyo in search of Bluefin tuna. In recent months there have been more sightings of the endangered fish in British waters but does that mean we can eat them? The Bluefin is the rarest, most valuable and at risk of the seven tuna species found around the world. Found in three main stocks around the world, in the Pacific, Southern and Atlantic Oceans, some popula...

10 years ago, Randeep Singh and his colleagues had a moment of realisation. More than 200 people in their immediate local community were living without a home. They were hidden from normal life, living beneath bridges or in refuse collection rooms. Together, they decided they could do something to help them, and they begun a project cooking hot meals and sourcing food donations. Their volunteer ba...