Stefan Gates

Stefan Gates (born 19 September 1967) is a British television presenter, author, broadcaster and live-show performer.

He has written books about food, cooking and science.

He has presented over 20 TV series, mostly for the BBC, including Cooking in the Danger Zone about unusual food from the world's more dangerous and difficult places.

He develops half of these TV series himself, including the CBBC children's food adventure series Gastronuts and Incredible Edibles.

Gates presented BBC One's Food Factory.

He wrote and presented the BBC Two series E Numbers: An Edible Adventure, Full on Food and the BBC Four series Feasts.

Gates has also written and presented two BBC Four documentaries: Calf's Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food on food history, and Can Eating Insects Save the World? on entomophagy.

He appears as a guest on TV and radio programmes including Newsnight, Loose Ends, BBC Breakfast, Sunday Brunch, The Wright Stuff, Iron Chef, Blue Peter, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and This Morning.

Gates is a panellist on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet and has made two radio documentaries.

He also performs live shows and lectures, many at science and food festivals.

Gates was born in London.

As a child, along with his sister Samantha, was photographed for knitwear patterns and appeared separately in commercials and TV dramas, including Poldark.

They were the child models on the cover of English rock band Led Zeppelin's album Houses of the Holy (1973).

Gates was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the 1980s, where he took a degree in English.

After leaving Oxford University, Gates spent the first 16 years of his working life in film and TV – the jobs were varied and included: Assistant director, scriptwriter, director and producer, finally ending up in BBC Comedy as a development producer.

Due to his fascination with unusual foods he started writing about them, and this led to him becoming a presenter and co-writer on the BBC Two series Full on Food in the winter of 2004.

Gates presents food programmes including three series of Cooking in the Danger Zone, which has been shown in 25 countries, as well as broadcast globally on BBC World News.

In each episode of the series he visits a dangerous part of the world such as Afghanistan, Chernobyl, Haiti and Burma where the living is not easy and the food is unusual.

This has gained him a reputation for travelling to difficult or extreme places and eating unusual or shocking food.

His first book was Gastronaut: Adventures in Food for the Romantic, the Foolhardy, and the Brave, winner of the 2005 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Best Food Literature Book.

The series won the Slow Food award for best TV series at the 2008 Slow Food on Film Festival in Bologna and was nominated for the 2009 Guild of Food Writers Food and Travel award.

Gates presents a children's TV series, based on his Gastronaut concept, called gastronauts.

produced by Objective Productions.

In 2008 a companion to the TV series Cooking in the Danger Zone was published by BBC Books titled In the Danger Zone.

The series was nominated for the 2009 Guild of Food Writers Broadcast of the Year award.

He wrote and presented Feasts, broadcast on BBC Four in 2009 – it consists of three episodes filmed in Japan, Mexico and India.

In 2010 he presented a three-part series on food additives for BBC Two, E Numbers: An Edible Adventure.

In 2010 he presented a documentary for Radio 4, Stefan Gates' Cover Story, concerning his part in the Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy photoshoot.

Gates writes articles for newspapers and magazines including New Scientist and BBC Food and has written eight books.

He has also written 101 Dishes to Eat Before You Die, Stefan Gates on E Numbers, which is a companion to the TV series E Numbers: An Edible Adventure and The Extraordinary Cookbook (Kyle Books 2010).

In 2012, he took over the role of presenting of Food Factory on BBC One, after former presenter Jimmy Doherty left the BBC to join Channel 4.

He also appears regularly on Five's The Wright Stuff and BBC Two's Something for the Weekend the Good Food Channel's Market Kitchen.

His first children's book Incredible Edibles (2012) won the 2013 Information Book Award.

Since 2015 Gates has operated the YouTube channel Gastronaut TV.

The channel has over 50 videos and over 3,000 subscribers.

Videos include recipes, science, things to try at home, and clips from his TV series.

Gates performs "food stunt shows", mostly at science festivals such as Cambridge Science Festival, Cheltenham Science Festival, The Big Bang Fair and also at schools, theatres and food festivals including the BBC Good Food Show and the Ideal Home Show.

Gates is married to food photographer Georgia Glynn Smith.

They have two children, Daisy Gates and Poppy Gates.