BBC-what have they ever done ..?

In 1979 a broadcaster called Derek Cooper started a programme on Radio 4 about food. Not recipes — food. Where it came from, who grew it, who profited, who went without. It was called The Food Programme, and it's still on air.

Over the following decades it was the programme that took things seriously before they were fashionable to take seriously. BSE. Genetically modified crops. The organic movement, when it was still dismissed as muck and magic. Cooper's belief was simple and stubborn: good food is a right, for everyone — not a lifestyle for the few. Sheila Dillon, who worked alongside him and carries the programme today, helped found the BBC Food & Farming Awards in 2000 to honour the people doing most for that idea. Farmers. Cooks. Small producers. Campaigners. Twenty-six years on, the awards are announced on the programme every autumn, and this year's finalists will be revealed on Friday 18 September at 11am.

I want to say why I think that programme matters more now than it did in 1979 — and it starts with chocolate.

Around six in every ten cocoa beans in the world are grown in two countries: Ivory Coast and Ghana. Yet the countries that grow the cocoa capture only a sliver of the value. The beans leave. The grinding, the conching, the tempering, the branding, the profit — all of that happens somewhere else. Cocoa is grown in West Africa and increasingly in India too, but chocolate, as a finished thing with a name on it, is made in Europe. The bars in every corner shop — the Kinders, the KitKats, the Cadbury's — are made from beans that have been blended into anonymity, so that no cocoa from anywhere tastes of anywhere.

Imagine if that were different. Imagine if the people who grew the cocoa also owned the means to turn it into chocolate — on the land, in the region, by the community. Chocolate would have a terroir. It would taste of the hillside it came from, the way wine does, the way cheese does. And the wealth would stay where the work was done.

That's a colonial story, and most of us can see it clearly when it's about chocolate and West Africa.

Here's the harder part. It's also our story, and it's about wheat.

A large share of the organic wheat milled in Britain isn't grown in Britain. It arrives by ship from the vast grain plains of Ukraine and Kazakhstan — so routinely that British ports run special pesticide checks on organic cereals from those countries. When it lands, it is processed by a handful of very large milling companies into flour that, like commodity chocolate, tastes of nowhere. Meanwhile British farmers who could grow beautiful organic wheat — who do grow it — struggle to find anyone who will pay them properly for it, because the mill down the road closed decades ago and the big mills buy on price.

Wheat is the elephant in the room. It's the largest crop we grow, the foundation of the British diet, and the one whose economics we almost never discuss. We have quietly let it become a colony crop in reverse — grown far away, processed by the few, sold cheap to the many, with nothing tasting of anywhere.

It doesn't have to be like that. We know it doesn't, because in Devon four organic farms grow wheat with names and varieties and years attached to it, a small mill pays them what they ask, and people eat the results and can tell you which field it came from. Wheat can have a terroir too. Bread, pasta, biscuits can taste of a place. The means of production can sit in the community, owned by the people who work there. It's not a new idea. It's a very old one that we let slip.

That is what The Food Programme has been gently insisting on for forty-seven years: that food is not just what's on the plate but everything behind it — land, labour, ownership, power. Derek Cooper called it good food as a right. We call it FOOD IS LIBERATION. Same idea. Different accent.

Friday 18 September, 11am, Radio 4. Put the kettle on.

WE PAY FARMERS WHAT THEY ASK.