Brooklyn pizza joint known for pies and a radio network

Not far from the iconic Brooklyn Bridge - past the artisanal chocolate shops and organic grocers - is a gritty pizza restaurant, where the food is just as hyped as the diners. It's called "Roberta's," where young Brooklynites come to have a slice of pie.

If they want to watch a meaningful conversation, all they have to do is look through the glass. From an intimate studio in Bushwick, New York, 32 radio programs are streamed every week -- all of them about food, reports CBS News correspondent Vinita Nair.

Patrick Martins, founder of the Heritage Radio Network, said convincing the restaurant was easy.

"I came up to the owners and I said, 'If I drop two shipping containers in your backyard, would you allow us to run a radio station out of it?' And they said, 'As long as we can get the containers ourselves and use it for the restaurant if it should fail, then you can do it.'" Martins said. "They were like, 'We just got two shipping containers out of this.'"

The Network - which still operates out of those green shipping containers - now has more than 40 hosts. Among them is Emily Peterson's show, "Sharp and Hot," which answers cooking questions at every level, and Joe Campanale's show, "In the Drink," all about beverages.

Over the course of seven years, Martins and his executive director, Erin Fairbanks, have earned a reputation as broadcast leaders in the underground food scene.

"Well I think food is politics. When we looked outside in the media world, there were enough cookbooks to build a mountain taller than Mount Everest," Martins said. "But there wasn't anyone talking about, for instance, El Nino's effect on the wine harvest."

"We're not trying to be a lifestyle network. Our hosts are really practitioners," Fairbanks said. "They run restaurants, they run nonprofits, they are farmers. So there's no degree of separation."

The past year was one of the best for podcast growth in more than a decade. Twenty-one percent of Americans have listened to at least one podcast in the past month. Apple - the biggest carrier of podcasts - has 325,000 of them to choose from.

But the Heritage Radio Network is designed for a niche audience.

The Network - which used to lure its guests to come on air with the offer of free pizza - believes discussions about food and where it comes from should be part of the nightly news. It's why they never have a hard time finding topics - or people who are passionate to talk about them.

"It's grown so much and when I tell people I'm part of it, there's an approving nod, as opposed to an inquisitive head tilt," Campanale said.

As American culture continues to obsess over eating, Heritage Radio Network will document it.

"I felt like that's some pressure on us as a network... how do we kind of continue to push the envelope around serious food conversation? Because more people want to hear it. And our job is to step up and serve it," Fairbanks said.

To visit the radio network, visit http://heritageradionetwork.org/