The Food Programme

For cook and author Nigel Slater, 'Nutmeg and citrus are the scents of Christmas' but Sheila Dillon needs convincing. Together they look at the versatility of nutmeg as a spice that can bring life to mulled wine, egg custards, meats and puddings. People take it for granted now but nutmeg was highly prized in the kitchens of 16th and 17th century Europe. Traders ventured to the ends of the earth to...

Cambridge University historian Lesley Steinitz explains the pioneering story of Bovril. From its beginnings at the end of the 19th Century there are many parallels between Bovril then and our food production today. Robert Opie takes Sheila round the Museum of Brands to see Bovril's strong advertizing campaigns. Pete Simson drinks beef tea with the crowds at a Bristol Rovers game. And Sheila sample...

The Californian chef and campaigner Alice Waters shares her story with Sheila Dillon; from early life in the 1960's counter-culture to influencing the food thinking of Presidents. Alice Waters founded the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971. Her life had been changed forever by experiences as a student in France and at UC Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement lay the ground for the big...

Cookery Books of 2013. Ahead of the Christmas shopping season Sheila Dillon reviews this year's best cook books. Sheila is joined by comedian Stephen K Amos and food writers Catherine Phipps and Fiona Beckett. Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced in Bristol by Emma Weatherill.

Fenland celery has recently joined a select list of only fifty-five British foods to achieve the same EU protection as champagne, stilton and Melton Mowbray pork pies. But what difference will this status realistically make to the people who grow it? Sheila Dillon investigates the longer term impact of PGI status on another iconic English product, Grimsby Traditional Smoked Fish. She visits Grimsb...

Leontino Balbo - The Sugarman of Brazil. The incredible story of one maverick farmer who is trying to change the way we produce our food. David Baker brings us a story from Sao Paulo about a man who is managing to produce sugar whilst also helping wildlife. Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced in Bristol by Emma Weatherill.

In January of this year the Food Standards Agency confirmed results showing horsemeat had been found in supermarket burgers. Over the next few days and weeks, more DNA testing would reveal more beef products contained horsemeat. Ten months on there have been no prosecutions or fines and we're still waiting to be told how the unlabelled horsemeat entered the food chain, and who put it there. Crimin...

Restaurant reviews - who can we trust? Sheila Dillon investigates online review sites, newspaper reviews and guidelines to try and discover the impartiality of different criticism. She is aided by reviewer and editor Joe Warwick and previous restaurant inspector Peter Chapman. Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced in Bristol by Emma Weatherill.

Award winning drinks writer Pete Brown joins Sheila Dillon to explain why bottles of cider should be the drink of choice on the UK's dinner tables. A cider revival has been building for a number of years, many credit the "over-ice" advertising campaigns of the last decade for raising mainstream interest. What's happened since that time has been fascinating to watch for producers and drinkers alike...

Three decades ago Miles Warde worked on a hop farm in Herefordshire. Split shifts, tractors with lights, and when you weren't sleeping you'd be in the pub. Today that farm is now a vineyard, so the presenter began wondering what had happened to the great British hop. The first thing he discovered is that there are only sixty hop farmers left. The producer is Miles Warde.

Sheila Dillon meets a new generation of cooks using slow and pressure cookers. Sales of slow cookers and pressure cookers have increased over the past couple of years. Sheila visits Catherine Phipps to discover exciting dishes which can be made in a pressure cooker. And blogger Sharon Adetoro explains how the slow cooker has revolutionized her life. Producer: Emma Weatherill.

The School Food Plan, written by Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, aims to increase take-up of school meals, improve the quality of food served and tackle student hunger and the early causes of health problems. Released in July, it contains sixteen 'actions', from putting cooking in the curriculum to providing money for breakfast clubs to improving the 'image' of school food. John and Henry travell...

Myrtle and Darina Allen, revolutionised food in Ireland with their cooking. From pioneering restaurants to groundbreaking farmers' markets, Dan Saladino tells the story of food and Ballymaloe. In 1964 Myrtle Allen, a mother and farmers' wife turned her home in Cork into a restaurant like no other. Ingredients were grown on the family farm, foraged locally or sourced by producers nearby. Unusual fo...

Booze Free Bars - With an increasing number of us giving up alcohol, new bars are popping up across the country to provide an alternative to pub drinking.

Can street food change the world? Richard Johnson looks at ideas being tried around the world, from food carts setting up in "food deserts" to night time food markets being set up to transform city life. Producer: Dan Saladino.

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.