Tom Kerridge has an exciting new family cooking show with football star and child food poverty campaigner Marcus Rashford. The Manchester United player captured the nation's heart last year when his passionate advocating for free school meals over the school holidays caused a government u-turn on the issue. And he's stayed raising awareness, joining campaigns and putting his weight behind the issue of child food poverty since.
Bringing together Marcus' amazing success in championing the issue, and Tom's chef expertise, the goal is to help families who don't often cook from scratch to learn to cook healthy and cook smart... while having fun.
While the recipes are great for everyone to try, the project is being backed by the Child Food Poverty Task Force and the pair will be providing families with healthy and affordable recipes that will make tight budgets go further.
The pair will be sharing 52 recipes over the course of the year, one a week on Sundays. Tom will be teaching and Marcus will be learning along. The football star himself spoke in the trailer about how he wished he'd got involved in the kitchen more as a child, and the benefits of learning cooking skills early on, so the show is designed for both parents and kids.
Tom shared in the trailer the staggering figure that 2.3 Million children experienced food poverty in the UK between March and August 2020. Standing in the 76,000 seater Manchester United football stadium he asked us to imagine that stadium filled with children, and then to times that by 30. It's heartbreaking, and every effort to combat that should have our full weight behind it.
While a lot can only be done from the top down, repairing the damage done by austerity cuts and exploitative employment practices like 0 hour contracts, there is great work to be done from the ground up too. Projects like this that help families from within the home.
Teasing the project earlier in the week, Tom shared a smiling picture of the pair on the pitch, revealing the name of the project ,'Full Time', and the tagline; 'Get cooking with Marcus and Tom.'
When can we expect the show? You don't have long to wait! The first episode is arriving this Sunday on the @fulltimemeals IGTV.
Even if you're a household who almost always cook from scratch, this could be a great way to get the kids better involved with simple dishes they can take the lead on.
Elena Chabo is Cosmopolitan UK's former beauty writer, working on everything from buzzy celeb news and trending beauty, to sincere first-person reviews and engaging video content for social media. She also creates meatier features and expert-led how-to guides, for print and online. Her passion for Black beauty, textured hair, and the ways beauty interacts with culture, society, identity and relationships, quickly took over her writing career and led her into beauty journalism. Following an MA in Magazine Journalism in 2017, she cut her teeth across various roles at Stylist Magazine, before taking on a Digital Writer role at Good Housekeeping. It was here that beauty took centre stage and she launched and ran the site's first stand-alone beauty section. Remaining at Hearst, she joined the Cosmo beauty team in 2022. Find her on LinkedIn.
