Stefan Gates 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 was a panellist on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet, and has made two radio documentaries.
He is the author of 13 books, including recent titles such as Fartology: The Extraordinary Science Behind the Humble Fart (2018), Catology: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Cats (2021), Rude Science (2024), and Science You Can Eat: Putting What We Eat Under the Microscope (2025), a children's science book that explores food through interactive experiments.
As a child, along with his sister Samantha, he was photographed for knitwear patterns and appeared separately in commercials and TV dramas, including Poldark and Supernatural. They were the child models on the cover of English rock band Led Zeppelin's album Houses of the Holy (1973).
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. 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.