Sheila Dillon comes from Hoghton, Lancashire. She has been a food journalist for almost three decades, beginning work as an editor and writer at the New York based magazine, Food Monitor.
She has been part of The Food Programme since 1987, first as reporter, then producer and now presenter. Her futuristic documentary, Sitopia, based on Carolyn Steel’s book about a world shaped around food, won gold in the 2021 UK Publisher Podcast Awards.
In the late 1980s and 90s she and Derek Cooper covered the breaking scandal of BSE, the rise of GM foods, the growth of the organic movement from muck and magic to multi-million pound business, the birth of the World Trade Organisation and irradiation at a time when those subjects were not even a gleam in a newshound´s eye.
Recent programmes on food in care homes and the government's The National Food Strategy carry on the tradition. She is also the creator of Radio 4's first interactive grocery show, Veg Talk.
In January 2008 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by City University for her work, which, the citation says, "has changed the way in which we think about food."
