This is the BBC.

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. I'm standing on the very edge of Loch Fine in our guile. I'm looking down into the water and if I had a lifetime I could count the

stones and the boulders. The water is so clear. But across from me there are high hills, high wooded hills containing the lock. It's utterly beautiful.

It is a brigadoon vision of Scotland. We're only 50 miles from Glasgow, but it feels remote. It's not an easy

50 miles from Glasgow. It's through countryside, narrow roads. But what's extraordinary about this lock, lock fine, is that it's become the focus

for an explosion of food businesses that trade with customers all over the world. And I'm staying in this lovely place

to talk to the people here in big businesses and to local cooks about how food

creates the culture here and about why food tradition is central

to the identity of this thriving community. when Lock Fine Oyfine Oysters were set up in the late 1970s.

We hear more about that later, but first I'm going to a much newer company, the real Mackay

stovey company.

I'm up in the mountains and there are sheep all around me. It's a traditional

Argyle Hill farm and it's run by Ruri Mackay. He's been the tenant farmer here for 16 years. Before that, he was a

shepherd like his father before him. With his wife Allison, he's expanded the farm

into something else, the Stovey Company, and it started with a rock concert.

Ten years ago, sheep farming was really on the doldrums. The land trade was just desperate.

It was a struggle just making a living out of the whole thing.

It was very nearly giving livestock away.

It was just disastrous at the time. At that time the estate decided to run a rock

concert in the castle grounds and it just kind of of we've seen it happening and we've

well we need to try and get into this somehow or other you know.

...