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Through this remarkable year, the key place of food in our lives has been put into greater prominence than ever. Supply chains and supermarkets, health and home cooking have been among our most vital concerns. With Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London, food and farming actionist Dee Woods and Sheila Dillon of The Food Programme.

Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City University of London, which he founded in 1994 and directed until 2016. For the last 25 years he has researched, written and lectured on the role of policy in shaping and responding to the food system, particularly in relation to health, environment, social justice, the political economy and consumer culture. He previously spent seven years as a hill farmer, an experience which has shaped his work ever since. His most recent book, Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them, was published in March 2020 and takes stock of the UK food system: where it comes from, what we eat, its impact, fragilities and strengths.

Dee Woods is a food and farming action-ist and campaigner, who advocates for good food for all and a more just and equitable food system, challenging the systemic barriers that impact marginalised communities, farmers and food producers. Her work meets at the nexus of poverty and hunger, human rights, food sovereignty, community development, policy, research, climate and social justice. Dee is co-founder of Granville Community Kitchen in South Kilburn. A previous BBC Food and Farming Awards winner, Dee sits on the GLA London Food Board, the steering group of People Food Power and is a co-editor of A People's Food Policy. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at CAWR, Coventry University, member of the Food Ethics Council and the coordinating group of the Landworkers Alliance, co-chair of the Independent Food Aid Network, (IFAN) and a trustee of Sustain.

Sheila Dillon has been a food journalist for more than three decades. She has worked on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, first as a reporter, then producer and now presenter. In her early days on the programme she produced groundbreaking editions on BSE – mad cow disease and its connections to our desire for cheap food, the rise of GM foods, the growth of the organic movement from muck and magic to multi-million pound business, and the birth of the World Trade Organization. All at a time when those subjects were not widely covered in the media and certainly not covered by 'food' programmes'. Recent programmes on childhood poverty, a look at the world in 2030 when Carolyn Steel, author of Sitopia, is Prime Minister, the glory of British pies, diet and cancer, and the inadequacies of medical training when doctors are faced every day with diet-induced diseases, carry on the tradition. In 2000 she helped set up the BBC Food & Farming Awards which judge shops, food producers, campaigners, cooks in public organisations, and policy makers – not only for the quality of their food but the difference they make to their communities, as well as local and national economies. She’s won numerous awards for her journalism, including the Glaxo science prize and honorary doctorates from Harper Adams University, University of Chester and City, University of London for her work, which, the City citation said, 'has changed the way in which we think about food'.

Food Season supported by KitchenAid