The Food Chain

These are tough times for restaurants. If the pandemic's rolling lockdowns were not bad enough, independent eateries now find themselves caught on a conveyor belt of crises: inflation, labour shortage...

3 Apr 202426min

Step inside the chocolate factory to hear the secrets of what it’s like to invent sweet treats for a living. Find out why chocolatiers think the raw material is like a “needy child”, but can also bri...

28 Mar 202427min

Fasting has been a religious and cultural practice for thousands of years, why do people do it? What happens to your body when you fast? The Food Chain speaks to a British family breaking their fast d...

21 Mar 202432min

Dumplings feature prominently in cuisines around the world. Some, like the Ghanaian kenkey, or the Irish dumpling, are balls of dough. But in many countries they’re filled with other ingredients. Fro...

14 Mar 202427min

Sweet, sour, salty, bitter and... umami. Have you heard of the fifth taste? Umami, meaning ‘delicious flavour’ in Japanese, was discovered by a chemist in Japan in 1908 but it took nearly 100 years fo...

7 Mar 202430min

Three school chefs tell Ruth Alexander what it’s like serving up canteen food every day. Find out how they manage hundreds of hungry child customers, what pro tips they have for making vegetables see...

29 Feb 202427min

Have you heard of ultra processed food? In 2010 a group of Brazilian scientists said we should be focusing less on the nutritional content of food, and more on the form of processing it undergoes. The...

22 Feb 202433min

What do you and your family chat about at dinner? We eavesdrop on conversations over food all over the world, hearing about poetry, politics, what is on TV and how Morag’s leg is recovering. Whether ...

15 Feb 202427min