Meet the UK broadcast journalist who "changed the way … we think about food" - Sheila Dillon by Geoff Tansey

For almost 40 years Sheila Dillon has been a leading food journalist and broadcaster and the voice of BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme. Here she talks about what led her from working for glossy magazines in New York City, writing on feminism and women’s health, to a working life devoted, first in the US and then in the UK, to bringing food journalism out of the features pages and leading the way in thinking of the food on our plates as a lens through which we can see our world more clearly. As the citation that came with her honorary degree from City, University of London, said, her journalism has “changed the way we think about food.”
In this conversation she talks about the differences she's found between the USA and the UK, the indifference to food amongst UK policy makers that was finally shaken by the mad cow debacle, and the current challenges within a food system that rests on the gross inequality that’s become embedded in the UK since the Thatcher era. She also talks about what’s hopeful…. a generation of young people who now aspire to farm and produce food, the rise of a network of quality food producers all over the country and our new interest in those European neighbours who value their own food cultures and live richer and healthier lives as a result.