The Food Chain · BBC World Service

A place at the table: fostering and adoption

·32 min·2 clips

Jessica recalls being scared to touch anything in her foster home, then eating spaghetti bolognese to make a good impression.

This episode of The Food Chain explores the complex role of food in the lives of children entering foster care or adoption. Host Ruth Alexander speaks with a care leaver, foster carers, and adoption experts. Jessica Rae Williamson, a 21-year-old care leaver from Manchester, recounts her childhood experiences with food insecurity and homelessness before entering care at age thirteen. Foster carers Viv, John, Rosemary, Neil, and Kath from North Wales share their collective decades of experience fostering over a hundred children. Katia Roel, a former family doctor and author of "Love Me, Feed Me," provides coaching on feeding children with trauma histories. Adoption educator Melissa Guida-Richards, author of "What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption," discusses her personal journey discovering her Colombian heritage through food. Jessica's first meal with her foster family was a nervous encounter over spaghetti bolognese, chosen for its neutrality. She recalls her foster mother stocking "safe foods" like turkey dinosaurs to ease her transition and establish security. The foster carers describe common behaviors like children hoarding tinned beans under their beds or eating tubs of margarine directly from the fridge. They emphasize never shaming a child for these actions, instead offering a dedicated shelf for their hoarded food. One carer's standard practice is to ask a new child their favorite food and serve it that first night. The group recounts eating only cheese sandwiches for weeks to make a child feel comfortable at the family table. Katia Roel explains that unreliable access to food constitutes a profound trauma, disrupting a child's internal hunger cues and often leading to either frantic eating or extreme pickiness. She notes that sensory processing differences, often linked to prenatal stress, can make unfamiliar foods feel physically unpleasant. A surprising insight is that pressuring a child to eat vegetables during a stressful "45-minute hostage negotiation" of a meal may cause more bodily harm from cortisol than any nutritional benefit gained. Melissa Guida-Richards describes her initial, failed attempts to cook Colombian plantains and arepas as a deeply dejecting experience that highlighted her cultural disconnection. She found her breakthrough moment learning to make arepas with her birth mother in a kitchen with a wood-fired stove in Colombia. Jessica reveals that despite years of food security, she still compulsively "wolfs down" her food like "a dog who hasn't been fed," a lasting physiological imprint of her early insecurity. The foster carers highlight that consistently setting a place at the table, even for a child who isn't home, is a powerful signal of belonging and permanence. The episode's tone is compassionate, educational, and deeply personal, blending poignant narrative storytelling with practical advice. The style is conversational and interview-based, moving seamlessly between emotional firsthand accounts and expert commentary. Listeners interested in child development, trauma-informed care, or the psychology of eating will find this episode profoundly insightful. Those seeking a lighthearted discussion about food or family recipes might find the themes of neglect and trauma too heavy.

As heard by us

A close look at how food can become a bridge into family life.

The piece starts with food insecurity, then widens into the quieter question of what feeding a child asks for: trust, routine, and a sense of belonging. Jessica Rae Williamson's memories of poverty in Manchester stay blunt and hard to shake.

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Why you'd press play

When food means safety, you hear how families are built around the table.

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