Biscuits: A Serious Business

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2012

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Simon Parkes takes a look behind the scenes of Britain's favourite snack, the biscuit and as he discovers major change is underway to some of our most famous food brands.

Our most popular biscuits, including the digestive and the Bourbon became firm fixtures of British life in the 19th century. The snacks were produced in their millions in places like Reading and York and exported all over the world. Today, we spend more than 2.5 billion pounds eating our way through an ever increasing range of biscuits.

It's a world that's now having to adapt to a number of powerful trends. Firstly, as we're being encouraged to eat more healthy foods, millions of pounds are being invested by manufacturers with the aim of "reformulating" some of the most valuable recipes in the food industry. Secondly, with the rise of global food brands, more and more of these iconic snacks are being bought up by a small number of companies.

What does all this mean for a British food institution? Simon Parkes takes a close look at the pleasures and the profits behind the biscuit.

Producer: Dan Saladino.

Transcript

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0:49.4	W.W. dot B.C. dot co-
0:52.6	UK slash Radio 4 and now enjoy the podcast I remember the time of the day where I used to come home from school and my dad would be getting home from work about that time and we put on the kettle and make a pot of tea and
1:16.0	have a few biscuits. It seemed quite natural to discuss the biscuits and talk about maybe
1:22.0	there was a new one that we'd gotten hold of and
1:24.1	whether it was any good and my dad always used to have the phrase you know that's a
1:27.8	decent biscuit to describe ones that were particularly good I mean the sorts of
1:31.9	biscuits that we enjoyed were quite plain things.
1:34.4	A fig roll or a Gary Baldy. A few dry cream crackers was quite exciting.
1:40.8	Ah, cream crackers, Garibis, biscuits we have known and loved, how they've shaped our lives.
1:49.0	So come in, take the weight off your feet, let's put the kettle on. Can't see a bicky?
1:56.2	Ginger nuts I used to love, I think are fantastic.
	...

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