Dan Saladino and blacksmith Alex Pole explain how our food has been influenced by metals.

40 years ago the BBC broadcast a new TV cooking series called "Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking". It was a first, and showed audiences that Indian food did not rely on curry powder, and that dishes were different depending on what region of India they originated. But that's not all, the series and Madhur Jaffrey's subsequent books (she has written more than 30) had another effect; it made her a model for two generations of women with roots in India.

Today Sheila Dillon meets some of those prominent and hugely successful female chefs, restaurateurs, food writers and stylists who are currently working in the UK, to find out about their lives, and what they make of Madhur Jaffrey's legacy.

Asma Khan rose to fame when she was chosen as the first British chef to star in the Netflix series, Chef’s Table. She runs her London restaurant, Darjeeling Express, with an all-female staff.

Chetna Makan worked as a fashion designer in India before moving to the UK. She switched careers after making it to the semi-finals of the Great British Bake Off in 2014. She is now the author of 5 cookery books, and has more than 210,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Ravinder Bhogal is a chef, food writer and author of two books. She also runs the London restaurant, Jikoni, which she describes as being “proudly inauthentic”.

Romy Gill is a chef, broadcaster and food writer, and was one of the first Asian women in the UK to own her own restaurant.

Rukmini Iyer is a food stylist and writer and the author of the bestselling "Roasting Tin" series of books.

Sejal Sukhadwala is a London food writer. Her first book "The Philosophy of Curry" has just been published.

Presented by Sheila Dillon

In our world of globalised food, there are few things that have remained true local specialities, and the Staffordshire oatcake is one of them. This oatmeal, yeasted pancake is an institution in Stoke-on-Trent and surrounding area, but still hardly anyone beyond the Midlands seems to have heard of them. The oatcake has a history stretching back hundreds of years as a staple food for workers of the Staffordshire Potteries – it then suffered a dip in popularity from the 1960s which led to concerns about its future, but today we hear reports that local production is healthy, and even going up.

In the programme Leyla Kazim visits oatcake bakers in Stoke to hear how they’re keeping this much-loved local staple going strong. And we catch up with Glenn Fowler, the owner of the very last traditional ‘hole in the wall’ shop which closed in 2012, to find out how this Stoke institution lives on through its recipe. But as demand goes up, this is driving more automated production, so what could that mean for the traditional methods and the long-established recipes? And it is time for this overlooked oatmeal pancake to finally gain nationwide appeal?

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

No other tinned meat has had the worldwide cultural impact of SPAM. Though often denigrated in this country, it is celebrated across the world particularly in the Asia-Pacific where it became integrated into food cultures after The Second World War.

Jaega Wise explores this love of SPAM with Hawaiian chef Sheldon Simeon. She also meets Becky (Hanguk Hapa) in New Malden to talk about Budae Jjigae (army base stew), a dish born out of necessity, it is now a national comfort food.

SPAM also saw big increases in sales in the pandemic. As well as being a shelf stable and practical food, did our war nostalgia play a part in our renewed interest? Jaega talks to historian Dr Kelly Spring about how SPAM, gifted to Britain during the Second World War by the American’s, was initially received.

She also talks to Dr Duane Mellor from Aston University about the science and nutrition of tinned meat.

Archive of Stan Suffling and Walter Price is from the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

Presenter: Jaega Wise

Jack Monroe, the food writer and poverty campaigner sits down in her living room in Southend-on-Sea to share her 'Life Through Food' with Leyla Kazim. It has been almost a decade since Jack first made a name for herself as a blogger and food writer - documenting life as an unemployed single mum. Her blog, A Girl Called Jack (now Cooking on a Bootstrap) first focussed on local politics, but became popular when she started sharing her costed out low budget recipes. Since then, she has written six cookery books, has written 10,000 tweets, and become a voice for those living in poverty in the UK.

Jack's most recent campaign against the way inflation data is recorded and presented, resulted in the Office for National Statistics saying it would do more to represent the experiences of people living on different incomes in the UK. It also led the supermarket chain Asda to bring back and expand it's budget range of products. Jack is currently working on creating her own 'Vimes Boots' index to document the way food prices have changed over the past decade for people living on lowest incomes.

In this programme, Leyla finds out what motivates Jack to keep speaking out about inequalities, and how she deals with social media backlashes. She talks about her early food heroes, the pleasure she gets from cooking, and why she believes there needs to be more equality and inclusivity in the food world.

Presented by Leyla Kazim

Dan Saladino hears from cooks in Palermo, Marseille and Kyiv about Easter food traditions.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino

Dan Saladino speaks to food suppliers and farmers in Ukraine about the impact of war.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

A few months ago, Sheila Dillon opened a glass jar of chickpeas in her kitchen. Their taste was so different from those she had been eating for years from cans, she took to social media to find out why. The story that unfolded in the comments led back to the Spanish, and their way of eating beans and other legumes.

In this programme we meet the people who grow, select, process and trade beans, and hear of a culture that respects legumes, where home cooks know how to flavour them, often cook them from dry, and their many varieties are on display in markets and supermarkets.

Sheila accompanies Spanish food importer and expert, Monika Linton, as she visits her processed and dried bean suppliers in the Navarra and Salamanca regions of Spain. Monika first set up her company Brindisa, bringing food from Spain into the UK, 35 years ago. She says legumes are for the Spanish what pasta is for the Italians.

On the lentil fields of the Salamanca plains, we hear how farmers manage relatively small plots of land, and how the beans are used in rotation with other crops in order to both feed people, and nourish the soils.

However not all beans eaten in Spain are grown locally. In Madrid, Mario Castellanos from Legumbres Castellanos, his family business, explains why the country still relies heavily on imports from other nations.

Presented by Sheila Dillon

In the first of two programmes all about beans, Sheila Dillon asks if they could be the answer to our issues with health and global warming.

We're often told how eating less meat is crucial for a healthy lifestyle and a healthy planet. In response, supermarkets and food outlets have been adding more meat-free options, and whole plant-based product ranges, which are often highly processed. So what if there was another food that we could all do with eating a lot more of, that's relatively affordable, is healthy and can be good for soil health and the environment? For hundreds of years beans have had a reputation in the UK of being food for the poor, vegetarians, or as filler for stews and curries. Mainly sold pre-cooked in cans, the ranges have been growing in recent years, but by far the biggest seller are Baked Beans.

Someone who wants to change that is entrepreneur Amelia Christie-Miller, the founder of a new brand called Bold Bean Co. Sheila finds out why Amelia's beans that come in glass jars, taste so different from the ones she is used to eating from cans. The beans are imported from Spain, where they are a much bigger part of the culture. The owner of Spanish restaurant chain Bar44, Owen Morgan demonstrates how to make them the main event; Dietitian and nutritionist Dr Megan Rossi from Kings College London explains how the can also improve our gut health; and Dr Pete Iannetta from the James Hutton Institute, and writer and grower Susan Young (author of "Growing Beans: A Diet for Healthy People and Planet") say we should all be considering growing more beans in order to reap the benefits for our soils and health.

Presented by Sheila Dillon

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.