How Consumers Saved Our Cheese
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 977 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many UK cheese makers depend on supplying restaurants and hospitality. They faced ruin when lockdown struck but were saved by consumers buying tonnes of cheese in just a few weeks.
In this programme, Sheila Dillon meets those behind the campaign that saved British cheese makers, as well as those who benefited. She finds out why cheese is more than just a delicious treat, and asks 'what now' for the industry.
A BBC Audio production, presented by Sheila Dillon and produced in Bristol by Heather Simons.
Transcript
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| 0:38.0 | Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme. |
| 0:43.0 | Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. |
| 0:48.0 | We hope you enjoy it. Within the first two weeks we had lost about 70% of our business. We worked out |
| 1:00.4 | we were set to lose about 50,000 pounds worth of product. |
| 1:04.0 | Lockdown hit real cheesemakers hard. |
| 1:07.0 | Pretty much every restaurant that we do business with and there's about 400 of them. |
| 1:11.0 | We're nearly all shut. |
| 1:12.8 | And then something unexpectedly magic happened. |
| 1:16.3 | This is a massive deal and you could help fix that today and over the next coming weeks. |
| 1:21.4 | Jamie Oliver asked the British public to step in. |
| 1:24.3 | As we get a month into this, there are casualties and it's not just about food, it's about |
| 1:29.2 | culture. |
| 1:32.2 | And it worked. |
... |
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