A place at the table: fostering and adoption
The Food Chain
BBC
4.7 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What’s at stake when a child has their first meal in a new home?
For children entering care, especially those who have faced food insecurity, that first plate of food can be a big moment.
In this programme, Ruth Alexander explores how food and mealtimes can help children feel safe and give them a sense of belonging.
She meets Jessica-Rae Williamson, a 21 year old care leaver from Manchester, England, who still remembers the first meal she ate with her foster family, aged 13.
In Wrexham, Wales, Ruth meets long-term foster carers John and Viv, Cath and Neil and Rosemary, who have opened their homes to dozens of children through Foster Wales. They discuss their strategies for dealing with picky eating and hoarding.
Dr Katja Rowell, feeding expert and author of the book “Love Me, Feed Me: The Foster and Adoptive Parent’s Guide to Responsive Feeding”, gives her counter-intuitive tips for avoiding mealtimes becoming a battleground.
And Melissa Guida-Richards, author of the book “What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption”, shares her experience of being adopted from Colombia by Italian and Portuguese parents living in the US and her subsequent search for her Colombian heritage through food.
This programme contains discussion of food poverty and insecurity, and disordered eating. If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised and need support, speak to a health professional.
If you would like to get in touch with the show, please email: thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk
Produced by Beatrice Pickup.
(Image: a partly eaten plate of spaghetti bolognese sat on a child's knee.Credit: Getty Images/BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might |
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| 0:38.0 | So when I was living with my mum, I would describe us as below the poverty line. |
| 0:43.1 | We were very, very poor. |
| 0:44.4 | We experienced homelessness more times that I can probably count on one hand, which is hard |
| 0:50.5 | for any young person, but it also meant that food also wasn't always widely available |
| 0:55.1 | when I was living at home I would often go to school and that free school meal would be my |
| 1:00.2 | one meal of the day and I would go home and there wouldn't be food in the cupboards. |
| 1:05.6 | This is Jessica Ray Williamson from Manchester, England. She's 21 under care lever. And these are some of her memories |
| 1:12.7 | of the time before she went into care. I would be fed when my mum ate and she didn't eat very often |
| 1:18.8 | because of the struggle she was going through. So that shaped my relationship with food because |
| 1:23.8 | not only was it not available, but when it was, it was when it was convenient for her, |
| 1:28.3 | not when, you know, a growing child needed it. |
| 1:30.9 | When there was food at home, what sort of food was there? |
| 1:34.1 | I remember sometimes I would literally just be toast or cream crackers or things like that. |
| 1:40.4 | Sometimes I would only get fed, you know, like porridge. |
| 1:43.7 | If there was a meal cooked, which was |
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