The Food Programme

Latest Episodes:

Kombucha: A Miracle Drink? Oct 08, 2023

Show notes

Kombucha has been around for a while but it has not had huge success in this country like it has in the US and Australia.

In this programme, Jaega Wise looks at why that may be as well as sampling some drinks from our BBC Food & Farming Awards finalists and investigating the health claims of kombucha.

This programme features Old Tree Brewery, William Kendall, Mark Ilan Abrahams, Paul Cotter, Lucy George from Peterson Tea and Kara Monssen.

Presented by Jaega Wise and produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Sam Grist

Local food – is it working? Oct 01, 2023

Show notes

Local food networks thrived during lockdown with more people turning to local producers, farm shops and veg box schemes as supermarket shelves ran dry. But how are they doing now? The Covid pandemic was a reminder that localised networks give our food system resilience during disruption, but also that they pay farmers fairly to produce food in a nature friendly way, and helps them stay in business. The cost of living crisis has been one of the biggest difficulties for this system recently, as consumers pay a higher price at the till.

Sheila Dillon visits Growing Communities, a local food network in Hackney, East London who run a veg box scheme, to hear what’s needed to help networks like theirs to expand. She also talks to Rana Foroohar, global business columnist and associate editor at The Financial Times, about what the Biden administration is doing to decentralise the food system in the US. Nigel Murray, Managing Director of Booths Supermarket, explains how they support smaller producers and local supply chains in the North West of England and Yorkshire. And we hear from the Food Producer finalists in the 2023 BBC Food and Farming Awards, about how they are carving out their own diverse network of customers outside the supermarket system.

Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol

Abergavenny at 25 Sep 24, 2023

Show notes

25 years ago two Monmouthshire farmers had a plan. BSE had hit the rural area hard, and they wanted to create a food festival to showcase the area's produce. They set about putting it together in the relatively unknown town of Abergavenny. 25 years on and the event is now one of the UK's best known food festivals that attracts a star-studded line up of chefs and producers, hosting demonstrations and discussions and much more.

Sheila Dillon has been going to the festival for many years, and in this programme finds out why Abergavenny Food Festival has had such success, how it continues to stay relevant, and what impact it has beyond the town.

Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol for BBC Audio by Natalie Donovan

BBC Food and Farming Awards: street food finalists Sep 17, 2023

Show notes

Judges have been visiting the finalists in this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards. This episode of The Food Programme celebrates the businesses shortlisted for the street food and take-away category. This year it's been extended to include small eateries as well.

Chefs Sam Evans and Shauna Guinn won the award eight years ago. Now they're back as judges. We sample Malaysian rendang cooked in a traditional clay pot at Joli in London; meet the cooks at Maasi's in Cardiff who've invented the "naanwich" in their Pakistani cafe; and try curries from DabbaDrop in East London, which are delivered by bike.

Presenters: Sam Evans and Shauna Guinn Producer: Rebecca Rooney

The Food Innovators: Radical Thinkers, Big Ideas. Sep 11, 2023

Show notes

Dan Saladino judges the The Food Innovation Award part of the BBC Food & Farming Awards. He is searching for big ideas that can change the food system. In this programme he meets the three finalists:

Wildfarmed grow cereals, alongside farmers that share their values, using a regenerative farming method that prioritises the health of the soil. They are aiming to create an alternative to industrial farming.

Too Good To Go is an app that lets you rescue unsold food from bakeries, cafes and supermarkets that would have otherwise been thrown away, at a much lower cost.

The Alexandra Rose Charity aims to support low-income families by providing fresh fruit and veg through a voucher scheme and prescription scheme through GPs. The vouchers can be spent in local markets, helping the local economy.

Festival Food Sep 03, 2023

Show notes

As summer draws to a close, Jaega Wise heads to the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) to learn what goes into feeding the thousands of fans gathered for the Green Man festival. Over the past 20 years or so, the food at music festivals has evolved from mostly burgers, chips and noodles, to an array of traders cooking foods from all over the world, sit-down banquets, and chefs on the line up.

So what has driven this change, and can it continue to thrive while the cost of everything involved in producing it has risen so much? What has the evolution of better festival food meant for sustainability? And what do you do if you don’t want to spend a fortune on food at a festival, but still want to eat well? Comedian George Egg has some answers.

Presented by Jaega Wise Produced in Bristol for BBC Audio by Natalie Donovan

A Food Museum – can it make us care about food? Aug 27, 2023

Show notes

If food is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and also a lens through which we can interpret our history and how we live now, then surely it deserves a museum? The UK has only just got its first permanent Food Museum. It’s in Stowmarket in Suffolk, recently rebranded from The Museum of East Anglian Life. Sheila Dillon visits its beautiful 84 acres, with its historic buildings, crops, orchard, kitchen garden, water mill and animals to find out how the museum team are reinterpreting its collections to connect people to where our food comes from.

Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol

Wedding Food Aug 20, 2023

Show notes

Wedding food is one of the biggest costs on the big day but the sit-down three-course dinner is making way for food trucks and festival-style take-aways. We explore how the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have affected couples and caterers. We find out why it's called "a wedding breakfast" - even though the reception's rarely in the morning and ask what's happened to the traditional wedding cake. We also meet a chef who's campaigning to stop food waste and caters for weddings with food that would have been thrown in the bin.

Presenter = Jaega Wise Producer = Rebecca Rooney

The Global Food System: Too Big to Fix? Aug 13, 2023

Show notes

World leaders met in Rome to fix the food system. Dan Saladino reports on what happened at the United Nations summit and looks at some of the big ideas put forward for change.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Medicinal mushrooms – magically good for our health? Aug 06, 2023

Show notes

Mushrooms like Chaga, Reishi, Lion’s Mane and Turkey Tail are popping up all over the place at the moment, in supplements, powders, and even coffee. These are the so-called medicinal species of mushroom that have been used for centuries by our ancestors, and currently today in Traditional Chinese medicine. Sheila Dillon started taking these mushrooms a decade ago as part of diversifying her diet after becoming seriously ill, but they weren’t that easy to buy then. Now they seem to be everywhere. And some of the health claims you can find online attached to these medicinal species go way beyond what can currently be backed by modern science.

In this programme Sheila finds out how medicinal mushrooms went from ancient wild food, to the latest hot health and wellness trend. We hear from Professor Nik Money, mycologist at Miami University in Ohio, about Lion’s Mane and what we currently know about the claims that it’s supposed to be good for our brains. To taste the freshest UK-grown medicinal species in the flesh, Sheila visits specialist mushroom grower Forest Fungi in Devon. And she has a mushroom coffee with Dr Emily Leeming, Scientific Researcher at Kings College London, to discuss mushroom supplements, and what we know about the nutritional benefits of mushrooms and their impact on the gut microbiome.

Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol

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