The power of pepper
The Food Chain
BBC
4.7 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pepper is ubiquitous at the dining table, but arguably most of us don’t know much about it.
In this programme John Laurenson finds out about the pepper plant – how it is grown and harvested and the range of flavours it can offer. He learns about the history of this spice and why it was once so revered, and the ways in which you can use it today to make your food not just tastier, but also healthier.
If you’d like to contact the programme you can email thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk.
Produced and presented by John Laurenson.
Image: a cartoon wooden pepper mill with specks of ground pepper coming out of it, floats on a blue background. (Credit: Getty/yurumarukko)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm no longer ravenous. I'll no longer eat until I fall asleep. |
| 0:11.0 | The Hunger Game, a new five-part series exploring the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs. |
| 0:16.0 | It's been an incredible story with these drugs. |
| 0:18.1 | The uptake, the amount of product that's been sold, the amount of money is cost. What the drugs do, how they work, and the knock-on effects of their widespread |
| 0:26.0 | use. We'll be sitting here in three years' time going, oh, it caused problems that we're now |
| 0:31.2 | going to have to fix. The Hunger Game with me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:45.5 | Welcome to the food chain on BBC World Service. I'm John Lawrence in Paris. |
| 0:53.5 | There are a few things as familiar as pepper. People consume about three quarters of a million tons of it every year. We sprinkle it on everything, grind it if we're feeling classy. |
| 0:58.5 | So it's kind of amazing how little we know about it. |
| 1:04.3 | What is pepper? |
| 1:06.2 | No idea. No, that is something I've never studied. |
| 1:13.2 | Maybe it's from a tree or a root. |
| 1:16.2 | I'm sorry, I don't know. |
| 1:20.4 | Like salt, but in a different version. A mineral? |
| 1:25.4 | Worse still, like a spouse we've been sharing the table with for years |
| 1:28.9 | and who we can barely be bothered to look at, |
| 1:31.4 | we take it for granted. |
| 1:33.3 | Our forebears would have been astonished. |
| 1:36.4 | In the Middle Ages and the centuries that followed, |
| 1:38.6 | pepper was black gold. |
| 1:40.9 | Explorers crossed oceans in search of it, |
... |
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