Food writer Stefan Gates continues to explore some of the most controversial food issues and dangerous places in the world.
INDIA
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Sunday, 10 June, 2007
1930 BST on BBC Two
Repeated: Thursday 28 June at 0055 BST on BBC Four
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In India Stefan visits some of the world's poorest and most oppressed people.
More than 160 million people in the country are classed as Dalits and are considered "Untouchable".
Tainted by their birth they enter a caste system that condemns them to an inescapable cycle of poverty, illiteracy and oppression.
Nowhere is this discrimination more evident than with food.
The "Untouchables" are not allowed to eat in the same places or even touch the same plates of other castes.
Stefan ventures to India's most lawless state, Bihar, to meet Dalits who work the land. He meets a particular sub-caste known as "Rat-Eaters" and joins them in the fields where they live up to their name: catching, roasting and eating rat.
But it is not only poverty and discrimination they face. Stefan tracks down an "upper caste army" whose aim is to keep the Dalits in their place, often violently attacking them.
Stefan then heads to India's "City of Dreams", Mumbai. Here he visits the city's most exclusive and expensive restaurant, to see at first hand India's rapidly expanding middle class with money to burn.
But he also sees another side to the city when he visits the largest slum in Asia, home to thousands of Dalits trying to find a way out of the caste discrimination.
He also meets Bale Rao, a Dalit who now works as a tiffinwala, delivering lunch-boxes on his bicycle to middle-class office workers around the city.
Producer: Chris Alcock
Executive producer: Will Daws
CHINA
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Sunday, 10 June, 2007
1930 BST on BBC Two
Repeated: Thursday 28 June at 0055 BST on BBC Four
|
Stefan travels to China, finding out how the rapid pace of modernisation is changing the way people eat.
He spends a day working at the Kung Fu fast food joint and samples the menu of a Beijing penis restaurant.
He also attempts to shake off his Communist party minders to talk to one of China's poverty-stricken farmers.
Producer: Ruhi Hamid
Executive producer: Will Daws
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