
About the show
Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is the winner of The Guild of Food Writers’ Best Broadcast or Podcast Award 2022, and was shortlisted for Fortnum and Mason Best Podcast 2022 and 2024.
It’s about all of life from climate change to culture and politics to people through the prism of food. It’s for foodie book lovers who want to hear something more profound about the way we live, making the link between delicious food and the impact of food production on the land – through books.
Hear how A-lister food writers have changed the conversation about food as Gilly talks through their four chosen food moments from their latest books. As she joins the dots between stories from the old country and food identity, plant-based recipes and climate change, she shows how a deeper connection with food really could save the planet.
Listen to all your favourite food writers from Claudia Roden to Yotam Ottolenghi, Sheila Dillon to Anna Jones, Prue Leith to Elisabeth Luard, Gill Meller to Ravinder Bhogal, Dan Barber to Raymond Blanc as Gilly finds what’s cooking in the minds of our food writing stars.
Do support the podcast by subscribing, and PLEASE leave a review. You can do this by clicking HERE for the link to Apple Podcasts, click on Listen on Apple Podcasts under the show title and then click on Rating and Reviews! Thank you so much.
For more information and to join the mailing list, visit gillysmith.com
Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is rated in the top 2.5% of global podcasts by ListenNotes and in the top 40 of food podcasts globally by FeedSpot.
Theme music by Willy Zygier
Gilly Smith is also the presenter of the delicious. podcast and Leon’s How to Eat to Save the Planet which was highly commended in the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2021. She won the Investigative Food Work Award for Right2Food (now known as the Food Foundation Podcast) in the same awards.
She also produced The Big Table for Philip Lymbery, CEO of Compassion in World Farming, and is the multi-award winning author of Taste and the TV Chef: how storytelling can save the planet (Intellect Books 2020).

Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is the winner of The Guild of Food Writers’ Best Broadcast or Podcast Award 2022, and was shortlisted for Fortnum and Mason Best Podcast 2022 and 2024.
It’s about all of life from climate change to culture and politics to people through the prism of food. It’s for foodie book lovers who want to hear something more profound about the way we live, making the link between delicious food and the impact of food production on the land – through books.
Hear how A-lister food writers have changed the conversation about food as Gilly talks through their four chosen food moments from their latest books. As she joins the dots between stories from the old country and food identity, plant-based recipes and climate change, she shows how a deeper connection with food really could save the planet.
Listen to all your favourite food writers from Claudia Roden to Yotam Ottolenghi, Sheila Dillon to Anna Jones, Prue Leith to Elisabeth Luard, Gill Meller to Ravinder Bhogal, Dan Barber to Raymond Blanc as Gilly finds what’s cooking in the minds of our food writing stars.
Do support the podcast by subscribing, and PLEASE leave a review. You can do this by clicking HERE for the link to Apple Podcasts, click on Listen on Apple Podcasts under the show title and then click on Rating and Reviews! Thank you so much.
For more information and to join the mailing list, visit Gilly Smith
Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is rated in the top 2.5% of global podcasts by ListenNotes and in the top 40 of food podcasts globally by FeedSpot
Theme music by Willy Zygier
Gilly Smith is also the presenter of the delicious. podcast and Leon’s How to Eat to Save the Planet which was highly commended in the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2021. She won the Investigative Food Work Award for Right2Food (now known as the Food Foundation Podcast) in the same awards.
She also produced The Big Table for Philip Lymbery, CEO of Compassion in World Farming, and is the multi-award winning author of Taste and the TV Chef: how storytelling can save the planet (Intellect Books 2020)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, we’re off to a farm just outside London but which feels like it’s on a different planet, with Tamara Schiopu in My Vegan Farm Food.
Tolhurst Organic, a 20-acre farm on the Hardwick Estate, is a dream of how farming could be – and is about so much more than growing. This is about community, where the growers work the land and live on the river under the famous willows of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s books. Hardwick Hall, the original inspiration for Toad Hall, overlooks the Victorian greenhouses and the 500-year-old walled kitchen garden where the produce is only half the story. Gilly, who has written the foreword to My Vegan Farm Food, finds out why Tamara, who co-wrote it with Samantha Kroes, chose to tell the story of Tolhurst in a cookbook.
Pop over to Gilly’s Substack for a glimpse of that extraordinary community life Tamara describes on Extra Bites
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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