The History of Chocolate

In this special live episode, recorded at the 2023 Hay Festival, Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Gillian Kenny and comedian Seán Burke to learn about medieval Irish folklore.Greg and his guests discuss the lore and stories from Gaelic Irish culture. Gaelic culture remained the domina ...  Show more

Greg Jenner is joined in medieval Spain by historian Professor Nora Berend and comedian Toussaint Douglass to learn about the colourful life and afterlife of the warrior known as El Cid. El Cid – real name Rodrigo Díaz – was a mercenary in eleventh-century Spain who fought for bo ...  Show more

‘For if a person fatigued with long and hard labour, or with a violent agitation of the mind, takes a good dish of chocolate, he shall perceive almost instantly that his faintness shall cease, and his strength shall be recovered’ The Cacao tree was first domesticated by the Olmec ...  Show more

People have been consuming chocolate for at least a couple thousand years, but it's only been in the last hundred that humanity has arrived at its crowning achievement: the smooth, creamy milk chocolate bar. Find out about the history of chocolate, how it's made and how it aff ...

The bittersweet world of chocolate is complex - cocoa beans are produced by some of the poorest people on the planet and turned into chocolate for some of the richest, and the sweet stuff is haunted by child labour, slavery, trafficking and deforestation. But could the rise of ar ...  Show more

A successful military hinges on nutrition, and modern warfare is no different. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max dive to the strange deal Uncle Sam made with the Hershey chocolate company: creating a candy bar that tasted terrible -- on purpose.See omnystudio.com/listener for ...  Show more