Sheila Dillon

What do we KNOW about food, really?

How much ‘fake news’ is going around about food? Do we really know where our food comes from and what’s in it? How bad or good it is for us, for the climate? How do we collectively educate the public with the right messages? How do we reach a wide audience?

Sheila Dillon has been a food journalist for over three decades, beginning work as an editor and writer at the New York based magazine, Food Monitor. Then moving to BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, first as reporter, then producer and now presenter.

Early on in her work at The Food Programme she covered the breaking scandal of BSE, the rise of GM foods, the growth of the organic movement from muck and magic to multi-million pound business, the birth of the World Trade Organisation and irradiation at a time when those subjects were not even a gleam in a newshound´s eye. Recent programmes on hospital meals, Ultra-Processed Foods, the government’s failure to implement the National Food Strategy, and the role of wholesale markets in the UK carry on the tradition. She was also the creator of Radio 4’s first interactive grocery show, Veg Talk, launching Greg Wallace onto an unsuspecting world.

Her investigative work has won many awards including the Glaxo Science Prize, Caroline Walker award plus several Glenfiddich & Guild of Food Writers Awards. The citation attached to her honorary doctorate from the University of London, said “ her journalism has changed the way we think about food."