The Food Chain

This week we’re in South Africa, picking up great big squirming handfuls of maggots. Could these unpalatable little creatures hold the answer to some big questions – what to do about the huge amount of waste going into landfill, and how to meet the world’s growing demand for a sustainable supply of farmed fish, pigs and poultry? A company called Agriprotein thinks its fly farm is the solution. They've just won The Food Chain’s first Global Champion Award - which recognises innovative ideas that could have a longstanding impact on the way we produce or consume food. The Food Chain's Emily Thomas gets up close to their armada of over 9 billion flies in the first of two episodes to explore the potential of using insects as a protein source for animal and fish feed.

Why do farmers feed their cows sweets? What are the implications for the animals’ health, the environment and the taste of our meat?From the mystery of a rural US highway covered in Skittles, to chocolate-flavoured steak selling for hundreds of dollars, we explore the impact of feeding cows the byproducts of human food production.Plus, we take our own bag of treats onto the farm and discover cows have rather expensive tastes.Presenter: Emily Thomas(Picture: A cow eating a chocolate bar.)

Meet the people determined to revolutionise what and how we eat as we launch our first ever international award. We hear about the four shortlisted projects hoping to be named The Food Chain Global Champion, including an insect-based cooking oil, a beekeeper empowering women in northern India, a maggot-based animal feed, and a global movement seeking to transform food and agriculture. We’ll also hear form our international panel of judges on their reasons for shortlisting the final four, and a slam poet’s verdict in verse. The Food Chain Global Food Champion Award recognises a person or project whose work in the economics, science, or culture of food has (or has the potential to have), a global impact on how we produce, process, consume or think about food and drink. The winner will be revealed later this month.Presenter: Emily Thomas(Photo: Sahida Begum inspects her bees in the Araku valley, in the in the northern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Credit: Sahida Begum.)

For 20 years Sandor Katz has been fascinated by fermentation - the breaking down of food and drink by microbes. Through his books and workshops he has helped thousands of people begin to experiment with flavours, fruits, vegetables, spices... and microorganisms. Dan Saladino travels to Sandor's forest home in rural Tennessee to meet Sandor, hear his story, and discover for himself the transformative potential of this culinary process.Producer: Rich Ward

What does your choice of loaf say about you? Is your sourdough a source of pride? Have you ever felt ashamed of your sliced white? Flour, water, and salt - over thousands of years the basic recipe for bread has changed very little. But often there's been a dollop of judgement thrown in too. From Plato to modern-day Cairo, in this episode we’re talking about the ever-changing relationship between bread and social class. How have certain types of loaf come to have different moral and social meanings? And, can bread divide a society? Presenter: Emily Thomas(Photo: Loaf of bread. Credit: Getty Images)

Are you the kind of person who can’t help taking a picture of your food before you eat it? Do you search out Facebook foods, Twitter tips and Instagram ideas for new restaurants and recipes? Or maybe the very thought of all this puts you off your lunch.This week we meet foodies, writers and experts to discuss where education ends and obsession begins. The BBC’s Manuela Saragosa talks to: Adaobi Okonkwo, who blogs about food under the name Dobby in Lagos; and Anna Barnett, who is a blogger, contributor to Vogue and Grazia, and author of cookery book “Eat The Week”. She also speaks to Ursula Philpot, registered dietitian and senior lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University; and Eve Turow Paul, a millennial food expert and writer.(Photo: Woman takes picture of food on phone. Credit: Getty Images).

We’re on the hunt for the world’s biggest stashes of food. Can the food system handle a big shock, or is it time to stock up on your supplies? In last week’s episode we met people doing just that - stockpiling food in anticipation of anything from a major natural disaster, to the apocalypse. They had little faith that their governments would be able to keep the food supply under control in extreme circumstances. This week we set out to test their assumptions. From forgotten World War Two food sheds to Switzerland’s stockpiling sirens, which companies and governments are storing food in bulk? Where are they keeping it? Who can access it? And, if disaster strikes, will any get to you?Presenter: Emily Thomas Contributors: Tony Lister, Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, Professor Tim Benton, University of Leeds, Tracey Allen, J.P. Morgan, Corinne Fleisher, World Food Programme.(Photo: abandoned warehouse. Credit: Getty Images)

How long would your food supply last if you were unable to buy any food? Are you prepared for the worst is a hurricane hits, the floodwaters rise or the stock markets crash? Maybe your cupboards are full - but what if you had no electricity or gas to cook? Or if the water supply was turned off? And, if there was total breakdown of social order - could you defend the food you have? This week we meet the people who are stockpiling food in anticipation of anything from an earthquake to the apocalypse. They call themselves 'preppers'.Do they know something you don’t? When society is falling apart, do taste or texture matter? And when does stockpiling food become hoarding?The BBC’s Emily Thomas goes in search of some secret stockpiles to find the best post-apocalyptic food plans.With contributors: Pete Stanford, Lincoln Miles, owner, Preppers Shop, Henry Hargreaves, Photographer, Lisa Bedford, The Survival Mom, and Kate Daigle, psychologist.

It’s a food problem that can prove fatal - and we might be about to crack it. The first licensed medicines to treat peanut allergy are close to being approved by regulators. But we ask – why has it taken so long?For over a century we’ve known that an allergy can be treated by controlled exposure to the allergen. Simply put, the treatment of a peanut allergy is a very small dose of peanut. So when the prevalence of allergies began to soar in the 1990s you could have been forgiven for thinking a solution might not be far off. But as yet, there are no licensed medicines for widespread use. Some clinicians already use the technique – known as immunotherapy – but it is unregulated and the cost is prohibitive for many.This could all be about to change. Two treatments are expected to be approved by regulators in the next couple of years. It couldn't have happened without the involvement of charitable donors, venture capitalists, and pharmaceutical companies. The food industry has also invested millions. In this episode we explore the relationship between profit and progress when it comes to solving a serious food health problem. Why has it taken until now to get to this point? And, when the worst possible outcome is the death of a child, isn’t total avoidance of peanuts the safest option?Contributors: Dr Louisa James, Queen Mary University of London, Lisa and Clara Goff, Dr Andrew Clark, Cambridge Peanut Allergy Clinic and Chief Scientific Officer, Camallergy, Dr Pierre-Henri Benhamou, DBV technologies, Stephen Dilly, Aimmune Therapeutics, and Dr Robert Wood, John Hopkins Children’s Centre.Presenter: Emily Thomas

We're continuing our adventures in east Africa with the Hadza – a skilled tribe of hunter gatherers who could be the last remaining link to our ancient food past. We join them as they hunt and forage, eating baobab for breakfast and enjoying some very unusual honey, all in the quest to discover the ideal human diet.The reason the scientists and geneticists are so interested in the Hadza, is because it’s thought they can help us better understand our complex relationship with our gut microbiome – the community of microbes that live inside us all. It’s thought the microbiome exerts such a powerful influence on our health it’s considered now to be in an organ in its own right, and the Hadza have a diversity of gut microbes unmatched by any group on earth. So if the Hadza can help us understand the microbiome and where our modern diets have gone wrong in depleting gut microbe diversity, perhaps the secrets of the their diet can help us all become healthier humans.