The BBC, well known for the quality of its material, broadcasts the Food Programme on Radio 5 once a week. BBC describe it as “making sense of food, from the kitchen and canteen, to the farm and factory”.

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If you are not aware of podcasts, this is one type and is essentially a recording of the Radio 5 programme, which is “published to” services such as iTunes, Zoon, Google Reader and RSS feeds. By accessing it through these services the item is either downloaded to you device (iPod, Zoon) for offline listening or streamed through your internet connection.

Each programme addresses a particular food topic (eg small scale dairies, marmalade, puddings) and normally considers processing, marketing, sales, legislative and consumer issues, presenting a understandable but knowledgeable view of the subject.

Most podcasts store all their episodes on the service, but BBC for “copyright” reasons allows only the current episode to be online at a time. This means that you need to go to the website to listed to episodes you missed. These are played on BBC’s custom player and can not be directly downloaded, but must be streamed. It is however worth it as there are some facinating episodes in the 188 that are archived.

Although I’ve only listed to 10 or so some of the podcasts that I found useful were: