Inspired by the long running City of Sanctuary refugee support charity, The Camden Borough of Sanctuary, began in the summer of 2025, in collaboration with Dr Hanna Baumann of the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, in a study which focussed on migrants access to public services. (Sustain, 2025)
FEAST has contributed to the project by organising a monthly community meal, in which refugees design and cook a menu of their choosing at both St Pancras & Somers Town Living Centre and Likewise Community Centre, creating meals for community members of these spaces.
Along with the nutritional value, a signature of these events has been an emphasis on the cultural relevance of the dishes provided, and of the social activity itself.
In an earlier session in 2025, one participant, Jessica remarked that she hadn’t always liked cooking, especially vegetables. However:
When designing the menu, Jessica drew inspiration from her grandmother’s recipes – notably her pumpkin dhal – recalling fond memories of family gatherings and shared meals at her grandmother’s house.
In another session, participants planned more elaborate meals from their home cultures:
“Akaila and Kate are excited to cook their home country’s national dishes at future services. They have suggested creating the menu together for the January lunch, with Kate contributing Xachapuri (Georgian stuffed bread) and Akaila contributing a fish dish.”
At other times, the cooks shared recipes of mutually loved dishes, such as in February’s meal, where three Iranian and Persian volunteers had a shared love of Ghormeh Sabzi (or Sabzi Ghormeh in Azerbaijan).
At Likewise Community Centre in Swiss Cottage on 17th June, the volunteers made the last meal in the year-long Camden Borough of Sanctuary community meal programme. They decided to make a Persian style meal, which had proven very popular in other meetings, and cooked spiced chicken with vegetable skewers, turmeric rice, salad and baba ghanoush and served it to members of the Likewise community.
On the 20th June, coinciding closely with this meal, was World Refugee Day. It was established in 2001, the year that marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention by the UN. The Convention outlines the status of a refugee and those displaced due to conflicts or persecution and defines the specific rights that a refugee or asylum seeker has under international law, presided over by UN member states. (UNHCR, 2026)
Our relationship to food necessarily changes as we migrate, due to differing ingredients and food cultures. Food helps to create the sense of place that we may now find ourselves in, but this only makes sense through the food that we have come to recognise as culturally important.
The importance of culturally appropriate foods is recognised by the UN as being as part of its Right to Food statute. For philosopher Michiel Korthals, a lack of culturally appropriate food is as much of an ‘evil’ as hunger itself. Food is not an inert substance or nutritional ballast that simply sates our hunger. It comes from the culture that prepares it as much as its material constituents. (Korthals, 2012) (FAO, 2026)
For Korthals, even new developments in foods must always come from the processes, rituals and techniques that we already know. Transferral of food and cooking of food from one place, or culture, to another “always takes the path of assimilating the unknown to the known”. For example, when corn and potatoes were first used in Europe, they were initially incorporated into bread, as bread was the cultural and culinary mainstay of the time.
Food writer Fozia Ismail talks of the recreation of food from home in a different and perhaps hostile environment. She writes of her mother, from the Ethiopian/Somali border and for whom camel milk was of huge cultural value and used in many symbolically important meals.
Upon moving to England, camel milk was impossible to find at that time, so she used to re-create it with local ingredients for special occasions:
‘Fresh camel milk has a strong association with the Somali landscape.[..] a loss so keenly felt that my mother (along with a generation of her peers) took up a recipe for camel milk, consisting of the following unlikely but available ingredients: a dash of 7-Up, natural yoghurt, salt, and water. Imagine our excitement each Ramadan when she brought out the ‘camel milk’. – (Ismail, 2018)
In a FEAST kitchen, with the fairly basic ingredients that we have, we cannot hope to fully express the tastes and cultures that people have had at home. However, the social bonds that existed at home may be recreated, in a small way, in situations like these.
As the Borough of Sanctuary progressed, Eleanor Butterworth, FEAST’s Volunteer and Partnerships Co-ordinator reported that:
“As the months go on, it’s increasingly clear that the most important thing about these sessions is the social value of cooking. [..]but when we talk about food, conversation always turns to eating together, cooking for others and food as a connector.”
In the sharing of food, we can communicate our different cultures to one another through taste and story, in a way that is difficult to express through words alone.
References:
- Borough of Sanctuary cooking session reporting by Eleanor Butterworth.
- Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, (2026) Right to Food, Available at https://www.fao.org/right-to-food/background/en/
- Ismail, F. (2018) Food as Resistance, Available at https://oxfordculturalcollective.com/fozia-ismail-food-as-resistance/
- Korthals, M. (2012). Two evils in food country: Hunger and lack of representation. In The Philosophy of Food, (eds) Kaplan, D. University of California Press. (103-121)
- Sustain (2025) New co-designed community kitchen opens in Camden, Available at https://www.sustainweb.org/news/jul25-camden-community-kitchen-co-design/
- UNHCR (2026) World Refugee Day, Available at https://www.unhcr.org/uk/get-involved/take-action/world-refugee-day
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Written by Harry Yeatman