The big food hack - 2024 Christmas Lectures with Chris van Tulleken 3/3

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Dr Chris van Tulleken investigates how we have hacked our food system to create an amazing array of things to eat, but also some serious problems to solve.

This is the third of the 2024 CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution, supported by CGI, on the theme 'The Truth about Food'.

Watch lecture 1 here:
Watch lecture 2 here:

With thanks to contributors Zoe Laughlin, Barry Smith, Dr Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde, Mark Amey and Monty the snake.

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What did the very first meal on earth look like? To begin his third and final Christmas Lecture in an explosive fashion, Dr Chris van Tulleken takes us back more than four billion years, to the beginnings of life. This was when microscopic bugs first began eating gases and metal, marking the start of an incredible food web which, billions of years later, humans have learned to master.

For tens of thousands of years, we’ve improved and hacked our foods, resulting in an extraordinary range of things we can eat. Chris reveals that we are the only species that processes and cooks our food – and he explores why this has given us more than one evolutionary advantage over other mammals.

Using some ingenious experiments – including making unmeltable ice cream - Chris demonstrates why a drive to make cheaper and more accessible meals has led to a new age of industrially produced foods, including some which can confuse our bodies' feedback mechanisms.

But the modern science of food processing hasn’t only created problems – it also offers solutions. To explore ways to improve our food system, and to wrap up this year’s Christmas Lectures, Chris assembles an expert panel of scientists. With the help of the Royal Institution’s young audience, together they set about finding ways to rediscover just how amazing our food really is.

This is the 199th year of the Christmas Lectures. They are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825, when Michael Faraday founded the series for children. They have become the world’s longest-running science television series and promise to inspire children and adults alike each year, through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience. Find out more here:

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Chris van Tulleken is an NHS infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, one of the UK’s leading science presenters and a New York Times bestselling author.

Chris grew up in London and trained in medicine at Oxford University, specialising in infectious disease and tropical medicine. He has a PhD in molecular virology from Greg Towers lab and in 2016 he won the Max Perutz award for his HIV research. He is currently an Associate Professor in the division of Infection and Immunity at UCL, where his research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of child nutrition, and he works with UNICEF and the World Health Organisation.

Chris is one of the UK’s leading science presenters having worked on many flagship Health and Science programmes including: Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, Horizon, The Truth About…, Operation Iceberg, Cloud Lab, Museum of Life, and Blizzard: Race to the Pole, among others.

Operation Ouch, Chris and his brother Xand’s double BAFTA winning series for CBBC, continues to delight audiences around the world, with Series 12 being filmed in 2023. Throughout the series, the twins create fun and often disgusting experiments to help young people learn how the human body works. The programme results in fan mail from around the world from a young audience who want to know, above all, what they need to do to become doctors.

His concerns about antibiotic resistance and over-reliance on prescription drugs led him to create a campaigning series for BBC One in 2017; ‘The Dr Who Gave up Drugs’, and in 2018, he turned the focus of the topic to children with the second series, which received rave reviews.

Following on from the success of ‘The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs’, Chris investigated the impact ultra-processed foods has on our children, in ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ for BBC One. In 2023, Chris published ‘Ultra Processed People’, which became an international bestseller.

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