Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!
And welcome back to Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland. If you’ve been here before, you may be starting to get the gist of things, and if you haven’t, don’t worry about it! To learn more about My Child and Fostering Ireland, check out the homepage and the welcome blog. As this blog is still brand new and finding its feet, it might also be worth your while checking out the pilot blog, too, to get a feel for what kind of topics are explored, and what kind of themes will be followed. Other than that, there is nothing wild or startling that you need to know, so without further ado, let’s get started.
This week, our chosen topic is going to be about food – particularly dietary requirements and how they are navigated in a household harbouring kiddies from different cultural backgrounds. But first, the why.
Of the 4.7 thousand people who applied for asylum in Ireland in 2019, nearly 10% of these were unaccompanied minors, or UASC’s (Unaccompanied Asylum- Seeking Children). That’s almost fifty children who found themselves on Irish soil without their mum or dad: in fact, without any relatives at all. They traversed Europe alone, leaving behind war, danger, poverty, and family. While fifty may not seem like a lot in comparison to the overall number of immigrants entering the country each year, it is a lot in the sense that they are not the only children of a different cultural background ending up in care. Ireland’s rate of diversity has been booming steadily since the Celtic Tiger, meaning many different families from many different cultural backgrounds are settling in Ireland and learning, constantly. This can sometimes lead to conflict concerning how children are looked after, which can sometimes lead to foster care placements (psst; this is where you come in!). It is absolutely inevitable that, for as long as you foster, you will be fostering children from all kinds of cultural backgrounds.
I don’t think I need to dive into a lesson in tolerating, accepting and nurturing foster children whose cultural backgrounds differ from our own…right? At least, I hope I don’t need to. It’s common sense! Instead, why don’t we dive into some anecdotes?
Raiding the Pantry
What kinds of spices are you hiding in your pantry? Why don’t you check there for me. Oh, you have “all of them”? Check again.
I want to say seven years ago, but time passes so quickly and I simply can’t remember. So, about seven years ago now, my mother began fostering a girl and her younger brother. We’ll call them Olive and Adam. They were Nigerian, but had been raised in Ireland and so were used to the Irish culture and food. But as Nigerian families will know, when you’re at home with your family, you eat Nigerian food! The fact that Olive and Adam had been raised in Ireland didn’t serve as an excuse to ignore their cultural background and cook them Irish food. They were away from home, and they were worried that life was going to change and veer away from comfort and home and family. This includes smells, tastes, sounds, practices. They were in an entirely alien environment, and those of us who have experienced the plight of being thrown into an alien environment know that when that happens, all we want is home. We all have a home dinner that we love, that we’ve eaten since we were babas and barely able to hold a spoon. For me, that home dinner is fried eggs, spuds and beans, all mashed together in an orange-y heap on a dinner plate – sometimes with sausage soldiers thrown in. It’s also pig’s arse and cabbage with spuds; basically anything with spuds, really. If I woke up one day in an apartment in rural Japan and there was a Japanese person there serving me sushi three times a day, of course I would miss my spuds! I love sushi, don’t get me wrong, but I’d be miserable.
So, when we discovered that Olive and Adam would be staying with us for a while, we wanted to make sure they felt as comfortable as possible. Even with Irish children, one of the first questions my mother always asks them is what they like to eat. We were kind of lucky in the sense that we lived just across the road from a McDonald’s, and this was almost always the answer on the first night. But that aside, it was so interesting to hear about the different combinations of foods and dinners that people liked, and I’d like to think that nowadays, I have quite a versatile diet. I’m one of those people who can and will eat anything, and when have you had a problem with a person like that?
For Olive and Adam it was jollof rice – an immensely popular dish involving long-grain rice, Nigerian-style curry powder, and thyme. Patty didn’t know how to make it, but luckily the siblings had a crisp idea and so we all set off to Tesco to do a Nigerian shop. This, I highly recommend. Do a cultural shop! Ask your temporary guest what they like to eat. Maybe they only know the name of the dish, and not how to make it, but that’s why Google exists! You can turn it into a bonding experience. Cook together, learn together, and you never know – you might end up loving what you come up with.
The Everyday Reality
But wait! You’re not a chef, and this isn’t a hotel! How are you supposed to cook two separate dinners every day, and do two separate shops every week?! This is madness, you say. Absolute madness. You pull your chef’s hat from your head and throw it on the kitchen tiles and stomp on it, and then you fall to your belly on the same tiles and bang your fists and feet, screaming, “WAAAAHHHH, THIS IS TOO HARD!”, and the poor foster child is looking at you and blinking in bewilderment, wondering if they should pat you on the back or back away slowly. But as they’re backing away they bump into me, and I’m glowing like an angel, here to make everything okay and tell you exactly what to do because I’ve lived it. I have had my spuds and beans on Mondays and my jollof rice on Tuesdays, because against popular belief it is actually possible to subsist on both, and nobody will die (unless they have a life-threatening allergy to one of the ingredients involved, in which case I cannot help you as I have never experienced this…and so I will back away with the child and we will go upstairs to watch a movie and ponder over your mental health). Kidding!
And look, obviously it isn’t guaranteed that your child and the child you foster will like each other’s food. When I say I had my jollof rice on Tuesdays, what I really mean is I begged Olive and Adam to make it without added spice, and I would still be sitting down to the dinner table with a pint of milk. Sophie didn’t like jollof rice at all, and so Olive and Adam would make it for themselves because they knew how, and Patty would make something else for Soph. When you’re in a situation where a foster child doesn’t know how to make their own dish, just try to accommodate. It doesn’t have to be a four-times-a-week thing; as long as it is done, and done more than once, the child you’re fostering will know that you care about their diet and are willing to make them feel like they can be their cultural selves in your home. And as I often say: it always boils down (in this case, sometimes literally) to the context of the situation at hand.
Takeaway
The takeaway is: don’t rely on takeaway! Your kids will be fine. When listening to other people’s stories, it is too easy to detach yourself from the anecdote and imagine the foster children as robots that will self-destruct if they are fed the wrong thing. And please, please don’t feel like you have to be the host(ess) with the most-est! Accommodating other cultures in your household is about tweaking a few things here and there. My suggestion is to take it slowly. Maybe start by introducing a day of the week that celebrates a cultural dish belonging to your foster child. If it doesn’t take, try a different dish next week! And if your biological child huffs and crosses their arms and says, “I don’t wanna eat that!”, then it is time to humble them. The world is overflowing with diversity, and globalisation is rushing to the surface of a kettle that has been boiling for many, many years. Don’t be left in the past…a!
Which reminds me, Patty once made penne pasta for a girl who had never seen it before. Long story short, Patty watched in amazement as the young girl stood in the middle of the kitchen with a piece of penne in her mouth, screaming. The texture was all it took. Be prepared for this! Literally, anything can happen.
I know it was a short one this week, but thank you so much for reading, and this is not the last time we will be talking about food! Diet plays an enormous role in fostering, and I am positive that the questions will be flooding in about it in the future.
On that note, if you have any questions about this week’s blog, or if you’d like to suggest a new topic for my next post (up on 19/11), please feel free to ask through the question portal. As always I would like to extend a huge thanks to Kerry over at Orchard Fostering for supporting this blog! You can find out more about Orchard by visiting the homepage.
‘Til next time,
Naoise
Naoise McGuinness 