You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.

Welcome to our world from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.

We hope you enjoy it.

First pods. I'm in search of an ingredient that plays a big part in my life and most likely yours as well.

A bean found inside an odd looking pod that grows on beautiful trees.

The bean that gives us chocolate.

It feels like we're not walking into a farm, we're walking into a forest.

It's full of life of different insects, butterflies, animals, very, very harmonious.

I'm deep inside a cacao plantation, walking with two chocolate makers,

we're on the east coast of Venezuela, South America.

Across the Caribbean Sea lies Trinidad.

Further north is Cuba. But because of what I'm about to find,

this feels like an unworldly, strange, magical place.

...