The Food Programme

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 the 'Taste the World' tent and uncovers some of the food stories and experiences that have shaped these unique performances.On the journey Sheila encounters Guo Yue, who grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and is now a master flautist and respected cook. There's also Nano Stern from Chile, Québécois band Le Vent Du Nord as well as South Louisiana's Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys.In the company of Taste the World's host Roger de Wolf, there will be roux bubbling, passionate story-telling and a culinary phone-call to the deep wilderness.

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 benefits and reduced to feeding her small boy Weetabix mashed with water, she went online to share her experience and started writing about food. What followed was a record of some of the most savvy shopping tips to be found anywhere, from dishes that can be cooked for 27p a portion, through to a forensic guide to every supermarket shelf, freezer cabinet and fresh produce aisle. In a recent report by Oxfam, the numbers of people now using food banks has reached 500,000, linked, charities say, to recent reforms of the benefits system. The government disputes this link, but food insecurity is increasingly found in every region of the UK.Others who have taken to writing about their efforts to cook and eat well on low budgets include Belfast born, now London based, Miss South who along with her brother, who lives in Manchester, Mr North, share recipes and pictures of the food they enjoy. Miss South recently came out as being "properly poor" in a blog posted last November and her writing has inspired others who need to cook on food budgets hovering between £15 and £20 a week.The third blogger in the programme is Tony, aka Skint Foodie. Once a high flying, restaurant going professional, his writing documents a determination to eat well despite losing everything to alcoholism.Producer: Dan Saladino.

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 at a vegan plant-based diet. Sheila Dillon joins in at a Vegan Potluck and discovers a new chain of German vegan supermarkets and asks if there is a wider shift in attitudes towards veganism underway.Presenter: Sheila Dillon Producer: Rich Ward.

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 sourcing ingredients from the wild.In part one, Valentine invites Magnus to venture into woodland in east Sussex woods to search for British wild boar.In southern England indigenous wild boar populations were wiped out generations ago, but in recent years, after farmed boar escaped into the wild, measures have had to be put in place to control pockets where a new population has been outgrowing their habitat.Valentine and Magnus meet Simon Barr, an experienced hunter, and the man licensed to control a population of boar on the Sussex and Kent border to share a food experience long disappeared, to hunt and cook a British wild boar. In part two, Valentine travels to Jamtland to experience a food story Magnus is determined to share.Producer: Dan Saladino.

Sheila Dillon meets a new generation of producers making butter special again.

Sheila Dillon looks at the award winners who are leaving high flying careers to follow their passions and dreams in food productionProducer: Maggie Ayre.

The story of Mott Green, cocoa farmer and chocolate maker, who was changing the industry one bar at a time.Born in New York, this gifted engineer and mathematician left Manhattan in his twenties to explore the Caribbean. He ended up in Grenada, fell in love with cocoa and with a local drink, "cocoa tea". Despite this chocolate tradition and Grenada having some of the finest cocoa trees in the world, farmers were leaving the land and abandoning their crop because of low prices. Mott Green took it upon himself to change that.By using hand built machines and creating a co-operative, Mott managed to build a chocolate factory in a tropical climate, the first time this had been done. Sales of his quality bars grew and cocoa farming on the island once again became profitable. His success was documented in a film, Nothing Like Chocolate, and he was celebrated in Grenada as someone who had not only made a big impact on the island's economy but also changed thinking about chocolate around the world.Tragically, shortly after the Food Programme recorded with Mott Green he was killed in an accident as he was repairing some equipment. The programme follows him through the chocolate making process and as he embarked on a three month voyage transporting his bars across the Atlantic using only wind and solar power.Producer: Dan Saladino.

In the throes of bereavement food can seem unimportant. People lose both their appetite and their sense of taste. But food and cooking can also play a positive and healing role in helping individuals come to term with their loss. Sheila Dillon explores the healing power of food and how it can help to remember and recapture memories of those who have died.Sheila visited the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted which runs cookery courses for those who've been bereaved. Some of those taking part had lost the will to cook - especially the prospect of making meals for one rather than two. Others found they'd lost the partner or parent who'd made all the meals and found themselves not only grieving but without the knowledge and skills to cook for themselves. They explained how a simple course has given them far more than just a collection of recipes.The programme also looks at the legacy of recipes which can be a way to remember loved ones and connect with them after they have passed on. Over the years Bridget Blair has gathered together the recipes of relatives, friends and neighbours for posterity and while the book is covered in spatters and finger marks her children are keen to inherit the secrets of those recipes and the memories. Meanwhile Rob Tizzard is trying to replicate his late mother's bread pudding recipe from memory which somehow never seems to come out exactly the way she made it but brings him joy trying.Produced in Bristol by Anne-Marie Bullock.