Ever fancied a spiritual journey that involves applesauce, powdered milk, and starvation so severe you hallucinate a raisin? In this week’s episode of What The Food, we tuck into history’s most deranged cult diets, from the jungle gruel of Jonestown, to Heaven’s Gate’s death-by-pudding, to the one-grain-a-day enlightenment plan of Aum Shinrikyo.

How do cults use food to control people? Why are so many of them obsessed with purification? And can you really find God on a 500-calorie salad? Join us as we rank the worst of the worst in a roundtable food fight no one asked for, and uncover why the road to salvation is often paved with beige, boiled suffering.

Trigger warning: This episode contains dark themes including starvation, coercion, and mass death, but we’ll hold your hand through it with our usual dose of British humour and sarcasm.

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Theme music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada. Available for use under the CC BY 4.0 license (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)