This year has already been a big one for food-related events and announcements – from the impact of Covid-19 and panic buying stripping supermarket shelves, to high-profile campaigns around school holiday hunger, to the government’s plan to tackle obesity, to the recent launch of Part One of the National Food Strategy.

So what does all this mean for the UK’s food future?

Sheila Dillon is joined by industry experts, to discuss how our food system could and should change in future, and answer questions from listeners and special guests about what those changes might mean and involve.

The panellists are Helen Munday, chief scientific officer for the Food and Drink Federation and President of the Institute of Food Science and Technology; Dee Woods, a food educator, co-founder of Granville Community Kitchen and member of the Food Ethics Council; and Chris Elliott, Professor of food safety at Queen’s University Belfast and founder of the Institute for Global Food Security.

Sheila also speaks to Henry Dimbleby, author of the National Food Strategy, about the first instalment.

Listen here.

Sitopia – a land with food at its centre

Listen here.

Prime Minister Carolyn Steel joins Sheila Dillon for this special edition of The Food Programme from the year 2030. Sheila discusses the prime minister’s rise to power after Britain saw food shortages and riots in the 2020s and what it is like to now live in Sitopia – a land with food at the centre of everyone’s lives.

After meeting the prime minister in the Rose Garden, which is now a bounteous vegetable garden, Ms Steel and Sheila take a walk around London to see the radical changes to the country. She meets Chris Young from the Real Bread Campaign to hear about how the banning of industrial bread has created thousands of jobs in bakeries. Sheila holograms with Stephen Ritz, founder of The Green Bronx Machine, to hear how his pioneering work inspired the prime minister to turn school playing fields into gardens and classrooms into kitchens. And they speak with ‘agriwilding’ farmer Rebecca Hosking to see how nature and farming now coexist.