Agriculture
The Science Behind Your Salad
Crossing the globe to discover how the best ingredients that end up on our tables are grown
The Science Behind Your Salad is an awarded podcast for the whole world. We’re not only in search of the best food on the planet, we’ll be telling the stories behind how that food is grown. We’ll hear about new technology already revolutionizing the way crops are grown and the stories of the farmers and growers striving to do the biggest jobs on Earth, putting food on our plates every day in the face of huge challenges of limited resources.
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Latest Episode: The Future of Food
Food is also what connects farming to human health and our natural environment. In this episode of The Science Behind Your Salad, we ask you to close your eyes and listen: the steady hum of bees, the deep boom of a rare bittern, and the people creating the future of the food on your plate.
Host, Jane Craigie, visits the rice fields of Australia, where a grower and an ecologist are working side by side to create habitat for endangered birds while producing food and managing limited access to irrigation water. We hear from a nutritionist about how diets shift through our lives and circumstances, and why nutrient density matters for lifelong health. And we meet innovators transforming agriculture: one listening to bees’ wingbeats to track pollination, another developing biological controls to fight pests, and a carrot variety developer working for better flavour, resilience, and shelf life.
This is farming, science, and nature - connected in so many unseen and fascinating ways.
Our guest: Barbara Bray
Barbara Bray MBE FIFST is a Registered Nutritionist and food safety consultant of African heritage.
Her work over the last 30 years focussed on delivering food safety in food supply chains and nutrition strategy for businesses, alongside leadership and educational roles in her public engagement activities.
She is currently researching diets to protect health of older adults at Queen’s University Belfast under the BBSRC funded Doctoral Research Programme to train PhD researchers in food systems.
In 2017, Barbara was awarded a Nuffield Farming Scholarship to travel internationally for her study of nutrition and farming systems of vegetables.
Her TEDx talk ‘What Youth can teach us about positive ageing’ (YouTube) looks at how we shape our food environment for the young and how we can adapt to better accommodate an ageing society.
She hosts the podcast ‘Women Positively Ageing’, the show for women in mid-life and older who want to live well for longer.
In 2019, Barbara was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list for her 'Services to Food Nutrition’.
Our guest: Tim Simmons
Tim is a sales specialist for leeks and carrots for the UK & Ireland at BASF Nunhems, Netherlands. He grew up on a family farm and has worked in agriculture for his whole career. Tim has worked on farms, sold agricultural tractors and machinery. Before his role with BASF Nunhems, Tim worked as Farm Manager for Huntapac Produce in Shropshire in the UK and then as National Assistant Farm Manager UK, managing the growing and harvesting of the crop and supplying carrots and parsnips into the UK retail sector.
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Episode: World Food Prize
COMING SOON
Past podcast episodes
Winner Gallery
The podcast series are the winners of the following international and communication awards.
