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We hope you enjoy it.

I'm sitting in a room with a laptop about to listen to a voice from one of the most revealing food resources we have in this country.

This is an archive of Frank personal interviews with people working with food, from factory workers to fruit pickers, from chefs and school cooks, to people who have shaped national food policy.

Until now, the National Life Stories Food Collection

has only been available to listen to

within the confines of the British Library

on the Houston Road in London. Now it's being published online

for everyone to use. So consider this program an introduction and historian Polly

Russell, your guide.

Sheila, I'm going to play for you an extract from a recording with someone called Andrew

Mackenzie, who worked as a poultry buyer in a large retailer from the 1970s up to the mid 2000s.

This was recorded in 2000,

and here he reflects on his job.

It is right that we eat flesh animals.

The thing I struggle with...

No, struggle is the wrong word.

The thing if I were to think about it too much that I might struggle with

is the way that we have exploited it and moved it to such a clinical

and efficient way of doing things.

But the way that the breeders have worked with chicken is that they have almost in the last 20 years taken a day off their life at the point of slaughter to achieve the same weight through genetic selection.

...