The Food Programme: Feasts

What is the purpose of feasting? Sir Roy Strong analyses the historical functions of feasts, and Sheila Dillon finds out why cooking literally made us human and allowed us to feast. She visits the Thames Festival Feast, a modern urban harvest festival, bringing food back into the heart of the city, and recreate a sense of community. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that this unusual behaviour in humans is a direct result of our ancestors mastering fire, and the biological and cultural adaptations to cooked food that followed. The division of labour in food gathering and preparation, the owning and sharing of food and the power of feasts to show status are all traced back to our learning to cook. Sheila discusses feasts past, and present, in the studio with Sir Roy Strong, Rev Richard Coles and John Moat, poet, artist and creator of the rural Salamongundi feast in Welcombe, Devon