Jack Monroe delves into cupboards and kitchen cabinets to find out how we consume and care about our crockery.

This is no trivial matter. Tableware is the result of a negotiation involving your household rituals, attitudes to food and aesthetics. The relationship between cup and lip can get obsessional. It's a delicate subject and one which, as Jack discovers, goes deeper than you might imagine.

She talks to people at home in kitchens, in restaurants and in warehouses. She speaks to one man who lives in his car about his experiments with tableware when he doesn't actually have a table, and learns how the choices we make about our crockery and the way we treat it can offer vital clues to the health of a marriage.

Jack also hears how one woman turned her addiction to vintage crockery into a business venture, and meets the ceramicist Alison Britton who prefers to drink tea from a white cup.

Children are conditioned to tableware sensibility from the word go - the reward for eating it all up is the picture at the bottom of the bowl. Some stuff is too good to eat from - but in Greece they ritually smash their plates on the most important occasions. Why?

And then there's the office mug collection and the tense negotiations of personality and status - as Jack, who remembers days in the emergency services, knows only too well.

Producer: Sarah Cuddon
A Testbed production for BBC Radio 4. Show less