Thailand: A Royal Food Legacy
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2017
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Historian Dr Polly Russell and chef Ashley Palmer-Watts visit farming communities in the Northern Chang Mai province of Thailand who have given up farming opium in favour of Western vegetables and salad crops for fine dining restaurants in Thailand's biggest cities. It's one of a series of hundreds of national development projects pioneered by the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej and started in Northern Thailand in 1969. Over the course of his reign Thailand's beloved monarch experimented with rice fields, vegetable beds, fish ponds, and a rice-mill within the grounds of his royal residence, before scaling the work up across the country.
Polly and Ashley hear how these projects have become part of a food and farming system for Thailand. A food system that's unique in the world, but could provide a model for current opium growing regions. They hear how by growing Western vegetables, flowers and fruits and farming fish, a new supply chain for some of Thailand's finest restaurants is being developed which doesn't rely on expensive imports. Polly visits 'Gaggan' in Bangkok, recently voted best restaurant in Asia, by '50 Best Restaurant Awards' for the second year running, to discover how some of the best chefs in the world are working with the Royal Project.
Presented by Dr Polly Russell & Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:04.4 | Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program. |
| 0:09.5 | Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:19.7 | It was an opium field, so the king has turned an opium field to vegetable field. |
| 0:24.0 | We have the first program in the world that have been successfully |
| 0:30.0 | find an alternative crop. It stopped the golden triangle anymore. |
| 0:34.0 | This week we're telling a story of how feels of opium poppies, the starting point for the |
| 0:40.3 | global heroin trade, have been transformed into farmland |
| 0:44.0 | into a source of food. |
| 0:45.8 | It's a story in a project that fits with a long tradition on the food program |
| 0:50.8 | of reporting on the power of food to transform communities, economies and lives. |
| 0:57.0 | And it's a story based around an unlikely tropical garden. |
| 1:01.0 | What strange is when you get close... tropical garden. |
| 1:07.0 | What's strange is when you get close into the gardens, almost all of the plants aside from the flowers, |
| 1:10.0 | all of them are vegetables. |
| 1:12.0 | I did not ever think I'd be seeing a brussel sprout growing in Thailand. |
| 1:17.0 | A most unlikely veg, but there's a lot that's unlikely in this story uncovered for us in Thailand by Food Historian |
| 1:25.8 | and Curator for Politics and Public Life at the British Library, Dr Polly Russell. Russell. |
| 1:34.0 | We were there in Changmy, having come from Bangkok. |
| 1:39.0 | You know, Bangkok is one of the most intense sort of modern urban |
| 1:46.3 | incredible cities and here we were in Shanghai which the moment we arrived it was |
| 1:51.8 | apparent that the whole pace of this place was |
... |
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