The Food Programme

Jaega Wise and her co-presenters start the New Year having a go on TikTok after #FoodTok raked in billions of views in 2021. What, if anything, can be learned from the app, which dishes up creator-made videos in three-minute-long bursts? The presenters are joined by TikTok Chef Poppy O'Toole, who posts as PoppyCooks to her two million followers.

From turning ordinary cooks into stars, to setting off trends for kitchen gadgets, viral recipes, and #WhatIeatinaday getting millions of views, people using TikTok are going mad for gastronomy.

However unlike other social media sites where picture-perfect images of food are shared, TikTok takes viewers into ordinary kitchens, and seems to celebrate (mostly) the creation of lavish looking dishes with seemingly very little skill or effort.

Food on TikTok has also become tied in with the ASMR genre (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) where creators deliberately emphasise the sounds and textures involved in cooking.

So could TikTok be the inspiration for a new generation of cooks? And can the more mature cook learn anything new? Or is the so-called Wild West of the web’s version of cookery too unwieldy to properly inform? Will the hype around influencers and their inevitable marketing tie-ins put an end to any ‘authenticity’ on there? And is the site doing enough to protect those with eating disorders?

Presented by Jaega Wise Produced in Bristol by Natalie Donovan

Dan Saladino meets the plant hunters searching for the world's lost and forgotten coffee varieties and Michael Pollan, author of This is Your Mind on Plants, explains how caffeine helped usher in the modern world.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Dairy alternatives with real milk proteins but no use of cows are now becoming a reality. In the US you can now buy animal-free dairy ice cream, and around the world scientists and food technologists are aiming to create lab-cultured dairy products indistinguishable from the real thing. This is possible through precision fermentation, a process which uses genetically engineered microbes to grow the proteins in a bioreactor, which is how insulin and rennet are already produced. The proteins are then separated and used to create products like milk and cheese from scratch.

Companies creating precision fermentation-made dairy believe it could play an important part in reducing the environmental impact of traditional dairy production, and provide a much needed source of alternative protein. But as this new industry emerges it’s still not known how consumers will take to animal free dairy, and if it can scale up enough to make the products widely available and affordable to make an impact.

In this programme, Leyla Kazim visits a company in London creating an animal-free cheese, and asks if it can ever be the same as a traditionally-made product. And as this new industry grows – how far could it go in making dairy more sustainable?

Presented by Leyla Kazim and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol

The price of food is rising alongside fuel, energy and other costs, and experts are warning that households face the biggest squeeze on disposable incomes for at least 30 years. On average the lowest income families spend twice as much on food and housing bills as the richest families, so increasing food price inflation will disproportionately affect families already struggling to get by, according to the Resolution Foundation.

As millions more people are on the brink of being pushed into food poverty, the food industry faces a turning point. The publication of a government white paper responding to the recommendations of The National Food Strategy is expected soon. The strategy’s assessment was dramatic – that Britain needs to change what it eats and how it produces food, in order to reverse the damage it does to our health and the environment.

In today’s programme Sheila Dillon is joined by three guests to discuss the true cost of our food, and some of the issues we face in reforming the system. In these extreme conditions we now live in, how can we provide everyone with a decent diet that will underpin the UK as a healthy nation? With Tim Benton, Research Director of the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House and Professor of Population Ecology at the University of Leeds; Kathleen Kerridge, anti-food poverty campaigner and Chair of the Lived Experience Panel at The Food Foundation; and Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director of the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London.

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

Dan Saladino looks at the war in Ukraine through the lens of food. Are people already going hungry? And what does conflict mean for the millions dependent on Ukrainian wheat?

Fundraising for people impacted by the war is already underway; Cook for Ukraine https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/cookforukraine, and, as featured in the programme there is the World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/

This week's Radio Appeal came on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee https://www.dec.org.uk/

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.