Let’s Get Cooking LET’S GET HELPING
Let’s Get Cooking is doing amazing work with children in care, but it needs wider support from the rest of the school food industry, urges Jane Renton
I don’t know about you, but one of the best memories from early childhood was cooking at home with my other three siblings on a Saturday afternoon. There was invariably a huge mess, squabbles about who was going to lick the bowl and dizzy anticipation over the fi nal result.
Yet that experience, which
hugely therapeutic benefi ts of teaching young people to cook: “The impact of this on troubled youngsters is massive. It is a huge boost to their self-esteem,” she says.
Cheri, who runs a nearby care home for young women aged 14 and upwards who have been returned to the state by foster parents who can no longer cope with them, concurs. She shows me her photographs of her girls, with the undisguised pride of a mother. “This one is going to make it to university,” she says. We move on to make a variety of main course meals. Charlene, Cheri and I make the most fantastic, healthy turkey meatballs and homemade Naan bread (I’ve been industrially reproducing them in my own kitchen ever since). The other teams make chicken Rogan Josh, seven vegetable curry and spicy chickpea and spinach curry. It’s not so much Hell’s Kitchen, but convivial great fun. I can honestly say I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. This is a really fi rst-class charity making a huge impact helping the truly inspiring people who do the work that most of us couldn’t or wouldn’t do. To be invited along and have the pleasure of their company was truly humbling.
engendered a lifelong love of cooking, is not automatically extended to young people in care. Some are looked after by wonderful, dedicated people. But others do not always share that sense of vocation or dedication to what is all too often a diffi cult task of raising kids, some of whom have been horribly damaged by the tragedy of their early years. Nor is there any consistency over the standard of food such children are fed. All too often it’s a case of pot luck. You may end up in a home where your carer feeds you well and likes to involve you in cooking, or conversely one where there is little interest in food. The Let’s Get Cooking initiative has set up several regional pilot schemes in County Durham, Eastbourne, and Yorkshire and Humber. But the scheme needs to go nationwide. It also needs the support of the industry. It needs more in the way of equipment and expertise. The impact of such involvement with these children – recipients of free school meals - will be substantial and life changing. At the Children’s Food Trust
conference in London in March we heard from several young women from Britain’s care system. They were the cream of the crop, who had gone on to further or higher education and who had against all odds triumphed over early adversity. Without rancour or bitterness, they described their
treatment and what they said dismayed all who listened.
First we heard from Elizabeth, who had solutions rather than complaints. She said dietary requirements should be addressed right at the outset of a child’s fi rst placement in the care system. At present no one person or external agency had that responsibility. Rahmatullah, a refugee from war- torn Liberia, and now a university graduate working as a librarian, spent fi ve years in care. She told us she had been placed with a Ghanaian family by the authorities in the mistaken assumption that she would be better off with another black African family, overlooking the fact that Africa is a huge continent with a vast variety of different ethnicities and cultures. “They used to cook different food for the children in their care – usually it was pork, which is something which I could not eat and which is not something in my culture.” But when she asked if she could have something else, she was told it was either that, or bread.
Twenty-three-year-old Sula had a similarly ropey food experience in foster care. She was constantly studying and had to travel three miles to her foster home – sometimes arriving back after meals had been served. “Our carer was very rigid about mealtimes, and if I missed any of them I just had to go hungry.” Rosalind Turner, on the board of the Children’s Food Trust and a former director of children’s services in Suffolk, said such accounts were “deeply chastening” and she is currently lobbying the government to try and get better standards of food care for children in care.
“There are no set standards. There needs to be someone who can assess [them] and be held to account,” she said.
June 2013
19
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