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My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Simon Watts.

As millions of people around the world switch to a

vegetarian diet, I'm bringing you the story of one of the cornerstones of meat-free

cuisine, the veggie burger. Veggie burgers are here. the

veggie burgers are here

the burger for people who don't eat burgers.

In 1982, Gregory Sams launched a product that would help take vegetarianism mainstream in the UK.

Well I had a list of names. I had green burger, earth burger, veggie burger, plant burger, sesame burger.

Finally decided, yeah, I'm going to call it veggie burger.

Veggie had never been used as an abbreviation for vegetarians,

and I got a trademark on it.

How did it go down then?

It absolutely flew off the shelves.

People thought it was a bit crazy,

but it was like there was this black hole waiting to suck it in

of vegetarians and would-be vegetarians across the country who had nothing to eat.

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