Flavours of Home: The refugees forging new lives through food

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

COVID-19 may have pushed it from the front pages, but the refugee crisis rages on around the world, fed by war, famine and political persecution; and that’s before you even factor in a global pandemic.

In this programme, Sheila Dillon explores the remarkable stories of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, forging new lives and careers through food.

She hears from Josie Naughton, co-founder and CEO of refugee aid organisation Choose Love; Chernise Neo and her team at Proof Bakery in Coventry, an artisan bakery that trains and employs refugee women; Jess Thompson, the founder of Migrateful - a social enterprise where asylum seekers and refugees teach cooking classes, passing on dishes from their homelands - and one of their teaching team, Ahmed Sinno; and catches up with Chef Imad Alarnab, ahead of the opening of his London restaurant.

Rebuilding your life in a different country, learning a new language, integrating into a new community: none of this is easy. But cooking and sharing food can offer some rare common ground, bringing people together no matter where they're from.

Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol by Lucy Taylor

Transcript

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0:44.6	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:49.7	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.
0:54.7	We hope you enjoy it. To me, using food as a medium for refugees to rebuild their lives in a new country.
1:08.0	It connects them with where they've come from, with their culinary heritage, and at the same time it's something
1:14.9	that they can share. I don't have another accent in food, you know, this is something I can communicate with everyone.
1:31.0	Food is important in every culture, part of family life and every day and it's something that is a way to integrate into community here.
1:38.0	I would love someday to open my own big restaurant and that I'll be able to get people to taste our food.
1:48.0	I would love that.
1:52.0	High hopes like many immigrants over the last century,
1:55.0	of opening a restaurant to recreate the pleasures and memories of home
2:00.0	that will connect to new people in your new country.
2:03.0	Welcome to the food program,
	...

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