Marcus Rashford has temporarily swapped the football pitch for the kitchen in a bid to get the nation’s families cooking hearty homemade food together – with a little help from chef Tom Kerridge.
Full Time: Get Cooking with Marcus and Tom is the latest move in the Manchester United player’s #EndChildFoodPoverty campaign.
Every Sunday, the pair will upload an easy-to-follow cook-along video on Instagram, with Tom showing Marcus, a celebrity guest or a family how to make a tasty, filling, low-cost meal, such as Mexican-style chicken, fish pie jacket potatoes and shakshuka traybake crunch.
The videos will run weekly for a year, and recipe cards for all 52 dishes can be picked up at supermarkets, including Waitrose.
The aim of Full Time is simple: to give families ideas for filling dinners; to teach both grown-ups and children vital cooking skills; and to encourage the use of Healthy Start vouchers, which low-income families with children under four, or a baby on the way, can spend on vegetables, fruit, pulses and milk.
“Marcus and I are super-proud to be working together to spread the message of how easy simple cookery can be, for even the most inexperienced of cooks,” says Tom. “We don’t expect you to have lots of equipment; you can still make great-tasting, fun and filling food.
“Cooking is a valuable skill that everyone can embrace, and that will see you through the whole of your life. Marcus even admitted to never peeling a carrot before; now he can!”
“I’m enjoying it massively, even though I'm not the best cook,” admits Marcus. “And I see it as an opportunity for families to spend time together. Some parents don’t spend much time with their children because they’re always at work, so half an hour or 45 minutes of cooking together is really valuable.”
The initiative couldn’t come at a better time. According to the National Food Strategy (an independent review of the nation’s food system, led by Henry Dimbleby), 4.2 million children are living in poverty in the UK, and are likely to go to bed hungry. That’s 30% of all children, or nine in a class of 30.
These are pre-pandemic figures – today’s picture is likely to be worse. In August, the Food Standards Agency (the government’s food safety watchdog) noted that many people living in poverty were going hungry, and the risks of malnutrition and obesity were raised as struggling families could only afford poor-quality food with limited nutritional value. “There are children out there worrying about where their next meal is coming from,” says Tom. “They may be living on bowls of cereal and pieces of toast.”
The Healthy Start vouchers, which can be spent on fresh, frozen or tinned fruit and vegetables, and dried or tinned pulses, became worth £4.25 each this month, up from £3.10, after Marcus’s Child Food Poverty Task Force pressed the government to increase their value. Currently only around half of all eligible families are claiming them.
To tackle any embarrassment associated with using the vouchers, the Full Time videos are aimed everybody, not just lower-income families, and the pair have enlisted some of their famous friends – including Joe Wicks and Fearne Cotton – to join in with the cooking.
“We needed to come up with a creative project that really engaged children most in need while also attracting all children, to break down the stigma around usage of the vouchers,” explains Marcus. “Personally I’ve never understood the stigma. If you’re in need of something, and the help is there, it’s there to be used.”
Single mum Amy Fletcher, 27, who lives in Bolton with her sons aged 3 and 2, uses the vouchers regularly. “I didn’t grow up eating fruit and vegetables, and I don’t really eat them now, to be honest, but the Healthy Start vouchers have definitely encouraged me to buy fresh food for the boys,” she says. “They absolutely love fruit now – they want it more than anything else. There’s no way I could afford to buy things like blueberries and cherries without the vouchers. It’s made such a difference, and I feel good watching them eat healthy things.”
“When you’re struggling, the Healthy Start vouchers really help,” agrees Chloe Hughes, 26, a single mum with two children under 2, who’s currently pregnant. “Without a doubt they definitely get us to eat more fruit and veg.”
Although they’re hugely successful in their own careers – 23-year-old Marcus as a Premier League and England footballer, and Tom, 47, as a chef and proprietor of Michelin-starred pubs and restaurants – neither had an easy time as children.
Tom, who grew up in a single-parent household on an estate in Gloucestershire, had free school meals and would regularly cook for his little brother while his mum worked two jobs. Marcus also relied on breakfast clubs and free school meals, and recalls the family using food banks and soup kitchens. “I remember sometimes at school I’d fall asleep because I hadn’t eaten,” he says, “so I can see how it has an affect on kids’ ability to learn and concentrate in class.”
Last June, Marcus famously forced the government into a U-turn on holiday school meal vouchers – meaning that more than four million children were fed over the summer holidays – and on 1 September he set up a Child Food Poverty Task Force, in collaboration with charities and companies including Waitrose, to continue tackling child food poverty. With Full Time, he hopes the nation will pull together to get young bellies filled.
“I wish something similar to what we’re doing now was available to me as a kid; I would have loved it,” concludes Marcus. “I’m proud of what we’ve done here, and I can’t wait to see what the response is.”
:: Watch the first Full Time cookalong video on Sunday 25 April on Instagram.com – search @fulltimemeals. For more information, visit endchildfoodpoverty.org or healthystart.nhs.uk
What’s on the menu?
“It’s all about recipes that are filling, fun and cost-effective,” says Tom. “Many of the ingredients qualify within the Healthy Start voucher, whether it’s vegetables or pulses, and the dishes range from being literally pence – 25p a portion – to around £3.50-£4 for a family of four, if they contain meat.”
Simplicity is key. The first recipe, chicken satay stir fry, has a sauce made with peanut butter; a creamy chicken pie is made by ‘cheating’ with a tin of cream of chicken soup; pizzas are created by spreading tortilla wraps with tomato purée and topping them with diced veg; and frozen peas are warmed through, mashed, mixed with mayo and mint sauce and piled onto toast with melted cheese and ham.
Only basic kitchen equipment is needed – an ingenious omelette is even made inside a kettle, with the egg mixture held in a zip-lock sandwich bag secured by the lid – and Tom has swapped weighing scales for spoons and a mug for measuring. “We’re using my favourite mug, which funnily enough has a picture of Marcus on it,” he says.
“We’re just trying to keep things as simple as possible.”
This feature first appeared in Waitrose Weekend in April 2021 (c) Waitrose