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.

Would you like salt and vinegar?

Yes I would, please.

Well, I welcome you to the food program today with a bag of chips.

I'm sorry you can't share it.

It seemed a good place to start because right now buying

and cooking fresh potatoes is declining. They're somehow too ordinary. We take them for granted, which as I've been

discovering is so wrong. Especially when so many of us are cutting down on meat and making vegetables more central to our diets.

And when we're looking at the big questions, how do you feed a growing population well? I know there's a new nervousness about carbohydrates, but potatoes are nutrition

packed. And the story of the potato, it tells us a lot about where we are now, how we got here, and points us to where we might be going.

They're really good, these chips. It's a temptation to do this morocke.

...