The Food Programme

DIY Foods - Tim Hayward meets the people taking ambitious food production into their own hands. Andy Mahoney makes his own cheese in the spare room of his house in South London. Hannes Viljoen makes his own biltong to give the taste of his native South Africa to his friends and family. And three friends in Guildford - Nick McDuff, Dick Nevitt and Nevin Stewart - have invented a new method for maki...

An Ode To The Bacon Butty. Hardeep Singh Kohli's personal plea to the nation to reflect on a food of wonder: bacon. Hardeep goes on a roadtrip around Scotland meeting bacon eaters, makers, regalers and producers. Producer: Emma Weatherill.

Dan Saladino looks at how food has increasingly become a big ingredient in crime fiction.

Every year at the WOMAD festival, one tent in a field in Wiltshire becomes the venue for a remarkable meeting of food and music. Solo artists and bands from all over the world gather to share recipes and stories with the audience, who get to taste dishes created in front of them, often by musicians who have never cooked in public before. In this edition of The Food Programme, Sheila Dillon is at t...

Sheila Dillon asks why the future of the UK's most popular fruit, the banana, is uncertain. Producer: Emma Weatherill.

Sheila Dillon meets the cooks specialising in great food on small budgets, part of a world of food blogging influenced by life of benefits, periods of homelessness and shopping budgets that can be as little as ten pounds a week. One of the highest profile blogs is "A Girl called Jack", written by Jack Monroe, a single mum who lives in Southend-On-Sea. Out of work, having complications with benefit...

The word 'vegan' has for the nearly seventy years of its existence - represented a diet and a way of eating that has not captured hearts - or stomachs - beyond a small, dedicated group of people calling themselves vegan. In this edition of The Food Programme, Sheila Dillon hears from two influential and meat-loving food writers, Mark Bittman and Alex Renton, who have found themselves looking again...

In part two of their exchange of food stories Magnus Nilsson invites Valentine Warner to venture into the lakes of Sweden's Jamtland in search of wild trout. In the summer the sun remains in the sky and so at midnight they head into the forests of northern Sweden to catch brown trout, an important and traditional food for traditional communities in the region. Producer: Dan Saladino.

In a two part special Valentine Warner and Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson swap food stories from their own very different food cultures. Magnus Nilsson comes from the hunting culture of northern Sweden, a region called Jamtland. The long, harsh winters and shorter but still intense summers, inform this now world famous chef's work. Valentine Warner has a lifelong passion for seasonal cooking and sour...

Sheila Dillon meets a new generation of producers making butter special again.

Sheila Dillon looks at the award winners who are leaving high flying careers to follow their passions and dreams in food production Producer: Maggie Ayre.

The story of Mott Green, cocoa farmer and chocolate maker, who was changing the industry one bar at a time. Born in New York, this gifted engineer and mathematician left Manhattan in his twenties to explore the Caribbean. He ended up in Grenada, fell in love with cocoa and with a local drink, "cocoa tea". Despite this chocolate tradition and Grenada having some of the finest cocoa trees in the wor...

In the throes of bereavement food can seem unimportant. People lose both their appetite and their sense of taste. But food and cooking can also play a positive and healing role in helping individuals come to term with their loss. Sheila Dillon explores the healing power of food and how it can help to remember and recapture memories of those who have died. Sheila visited the Hospice of St Francis i...

Sheila Dillon speaks to the writer Michael Pollan on the craft, science and pleasures of cooking. In his new book, Cooked, "a love letter to cooking", Pollan who is one of the world's most popular thinkers on food reflects on the value of being a cook and preparing our own food. From understanding the physics and culture of the barbecue to the art of fermentation, Pollan has spent the last two yea...

Sheila Dillon finds out why the debate about the role of sugar in our lives is hotting up. Recent books and news stories have re-awoken a forty year debate about what makes us fat. Robert H. Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco. A lecture he gave on sugar has attracted more than three million hits. He makes a case that sugar is problematic, not just...

Sheila Dillon asks if food and nutrition should have a bigger role in treating cancer. Is the medical profession too reluctant to see food as an essential component in improving the well-being of cancer patients Producer: Maggie Ayre.

Jancis Robinson remembers the specific bottle of wine which ignited her passion for both drinking wine and writing about it. She began reviewing for the University paper 40 years ago and has grown to become a world renowned author and critic on the subject. Sheila Dillon explores some of the big trends that have taken place during her career, from the growth of English wines, to the rise of superm...

Inside one kitchen in Bristol, thirteen strangers from all over Europe gathered to share food and stories about food. The Food Programme was there to capture it all as the cooking got under way. As well as resulting in one of the most diverse menus ever assembled it was an event that explained why cous-cous can spark conversation, how a special Bulgarian dish can help tell your fortune and why a h...

Charles Campion reports from Normandy in France as he helps judge the world black pudding championships, which features entries from Japanese, Austrian and Irish butchers. Each year the "knights of the black pudding", a long established organisation of food lovers, hold the annual Foire au Boudin. Nearly six hundred butchers from around the world enter the competition to help celebrate the ancient...

There's an army of lorries at work right now, transporting food and other goods all over the country. They keep food on our shelves and without them the UK's economy would collapse within days. But what's it like to work, live - and eat - on the road? Reporter Andrew Webb spends a day at the Orwell Crossing truck stop near the port of Felixstowe, with its 24-hour restaurant. Truck driver Dougie Ra...

Tim Hayward bites into Britain's growing chilli scene, from growers to expert eaters and those who like their chillies red hot. Producer: Maggie Ayre.

Sheila Dillon meets Madhur Jaffrey, Indian cooking legend, who's just returned from the sub-continent on her latest adventures into its vast food culture. This year the actress, broadcaster and food writer turns eighty. She left Delhi sixty years ago to pursue a career in the west, but still remains the world's most influential and respected exponents of Indian cuisine. With her BBC television ser...

Sheila Dillon looks at the practice of fasting - then and now - from a religious and medical perspective Producer: Maggie Ayre.

Each January, with the arrival of the seville oranges, hundreds of people across the UK ritually boil and jar batches of marmalade, following family recipes and leaving their kitchens sticky and fragrant with citrus. But who's eating it? For years sales figures have been in decline and the under 25s say it's 'boring'. So Tim Hayward heads out to a little corner of Cumbria to the Dalemain estate wh...

Sheila Dillon looks at how our sense of taste develops throughout our lifetimes, and what happens when we lose it, through old age, illness or injury. Two hundred thousand people a year seek medical help over loss of taste, Sheila hears the story of Marlena Spieler, a food writer who lost her sense of taste following a road accident.