The Food Programme

Scagglethorpe Queening, Ribston Pippin, the Wass - Simon Parkes meets those restoring the orcharding tradition of the north, from the walled community garden at Helmsley to the orchard village of Husthwaite, and samples some of the commercial fruits of these orchards including a new cider brandy from the orchards of Ampleforth Abbey. Dr Joan Morgan, apple expert and author of the seminal New Book...

Sheila Dillon looks at some of the latest developments in airline food. The supply chain is beginning to open up and innovative producers from the north east of Britain have succeeded in winning contracts to supply leading airlines. One of these suppliers - 'Look What We Found' - has led the way in technology to deliver quality ambient food in a bag. They've converted this to a tray of food that c...

Sheila Dillon looks behind the scenes of the world's largest and smallest pasta factories. It's a difficult time as wheat prices are high and so competition for grain is fierce. Fires, droughts and speculation in the wheat market together with poor harvests of durum wheat is creating a rise in prices. Pasta producers all over the world compete for the best quality semolina, produced from the mille...

Northern Ireland's new Focus on Food policy, published earlier this summer, aims to put food at the heart of economic growth, and encourage value added, and quality, food production. While in the South the food revolution of the past 30 years created a plethora of innovative, quality food businesses to feed a burgeoning tourism sector, in the North the food and farming industries have been more co...

Ice Cream : Everyone seems to like ice cream and with the market worth an incredible one billion pounds a year, it would seem to be recession-proof. This programme explores the market and the marketing. There has been an explosion in the number of artisan producers so how do they all compete? And what keeps the big players at the top of their game? What is real ice cream anyway? And, what is the d...

Chef Mark Hix travels to Transylvania to help revive a disappearing food culture. From cheese making shepherds to pickle producers, he meets the people improving food in Romania. Producer: Dan Saladino.

Richard Johnson is on a mission to revive the fortunes of the British kebab. A life long lover of the world famous street food he's convinced that a more authentic kebab culture can flourish in Britain. On his travels he finds out how and why it became so popular here and where most of the UK's kebabs are made. Then, in order to understand the authentic techniques used in Turkish kebab making Rich...