Is Food Processing the ‘Missing Middle’?

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 976 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Much focus goes on food growing and selling, but is the missing link in increasing the UK's food self sufficiency actually food processing?

It might be all about Ultra Processed Foods in the news, but there is another, much older, side to food processing that plays an integral role in getting food from fields to our plates.

Beans, peas, oats, veg and barley can all be produced in the UK in abundance, but producers often have to transport their crops for miles to reach basic processing facilities like cleaning, sorting, de-hulling or grading. The UK’s processing factories are part of a globalised food supply chain, importing vast volumes of grains and pulses from overseas as ingredients in our food. But it wasn’t always the case, as we hear from a Sheffield historian who has uncovered the city’s link with pea canning and the female pea pioneer who transformed the processing industry.

From the farmer making oat milk in his own barn, to the UK’s last remaining processing facility for peas and beans, Sheila Dillon lifts the lid on this hidden part of the supply chain, and finds an industry at a crossroads.

Produced by Nina Pullman.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:07.0	An early start here. It's time to kick off.
0:10.0	Your day. Morning!
0:11.9	What a line-up.
0:13.3	Oh, thanks very much. We do get some great guests on the show.
0:16.1	The crowd is loving this.
0:18.3	Thanks, guys. Thank you. Too kind.
0:20.2	From morning chaos to match day commentary.
0:23.6	And everything in between.
0:25.0	BBC sounds packed with personality.
0:31.1	Welcome to this edition of the food program, where we begin our story in an ancient farm building in Hampshire watching an unusual
0:39.6	but very of the moment process unfold. You're looking at this funny collection of sort of cobbled
0:48.7	together pipes with little rubber teats attached. I made that out of washing machine bits.
0:56.0	You figured that out, you did it?
0:58.0	So that we wouldn't have to fill one bottle at a time, we could fill a whole crate.
1:01.0	But yeah, a lot of what I've put together is bits and bobs that, you know, you would find anywhere.
1:06.0	But then there's also these bits of kit which are very expensive.
1:10.0	This is George Crossley, young organic farmer and founder of Toots,
1:14.8	an oat drink he makes from his own oats at the back of a 15th century barn
1:19.2	on his family's farm in Hampshire, with the help of Norman Lopez, a refugee from El Salvador.
1:26.7	We're standing besides a big steel tank.
1:29.3	Yeah, so that's a thousand-liter heated tank.
	...

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