Dates: A User's Guide
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dan Saladino explores culinary cultures and world religions to find out how the date became one of the earliest, most revered, and diverse of all cultivated fruits, and also a feature of Christmas.
Some of the world's historically important date palm oases have survived in the south of Tunisia. Dan travels to the ancient cities of Gafsa and Tozeur to visit two of them and watches the date harvest underway. There he tastes Tunisia's most prized date, the Deglet Nour, which translates as 'fingers of light' because of it's amber colour and almost translucent appearance. In Tozeur he also explores Eden Palm, the site of of a museum dedicated to dates and date palm, where he hears how the date has been an important food and source of trade for thousands of years.
Featuring food historian Ivan Day, food writers Yasmin Khan, Itamar Srulovich and Nawal Nasrallah, archeobotanist Professor Dorian Fuller, and scientist Shahina Ghazanfar.
Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously and then laughs at it. |
| 0:13.4 | This Christmas, forget about socks. We've got the best present of all. |
| 0:17.2 | Dead people! |
| 0:18.2 | All that sounds like zombies. Sorry, it's not zombies. Let me start again. |
| 0:21.8 | In our new family-friendly podcast series, dead funny history, historical figures come back to life |
| 0:26.8 | but just long enough to argue with me, tell their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves. |
| 0:31.8 | You're dead to me. |
| 0:32.8 | Dead funny history. |
| 0:34.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:50.3 | In the south of Tunisia, at the northern edge of the Sahara Desert, I'm about to witness one of the most impressive, acrobatic and dangerous feats used to source food. This young guy, he will show you how to harvest. |
| 0:55.0 | Okay? |
| 0:56.0 | So first we need to take off the shoes, otherwise he will fall down if he does not take |
| 1:00.6 | off his shoes. |
| 1:01.6 | He will show you how to climb. |
| 1:04.6 | Square foot. |
| 1:05.8 | Hi, Harjad, hi. |
| 1:09.8 | The young guy I'm about to watch, along with my guide, Meiji, is Said. |
| 1:15.4 | In his 20s, he's thin, wiery, and judging by what he's about to do, also fearless, all necessary |
| 1:24.1 | attributes for the job in hand, which is to climb high into a green leafy canopy |
| 1:29.4 | 50 meters above ground without the aid of a harness or safety net. |
| 1:35.1 | We call them the acroids. |
... |
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