“Food and cooking is SO IMPORTANT to me and my culture. It is how we express love and kindness.”
— Akram
“I love cooking. It makes me VERY HAPPY to make this special food for my family.”
— Laila
When the Free to Feed cooks explain their dishes, it invariably comes back to family. Verena’s Colombian cheese bread is her daughters’ favourite. Halima’s salad is from the Somalian grandma who taught her to cook; Nada learned her Egyptian tomato dish from her mum. Anh’s easy Vietnamese chicken is a tribute to her mother, who fed a family of six while running a business. For the asylum seeker and refugee instructors of Free to Feed’s Melbourne cooking classes, food is a lifeline to home.
Humanitarian worker Loretta Bolotin started Free to Feed after being struck by the hospitality and hope she encountered when invited into refugees’ homes. Today, it’s a thriving school and catering business.
“Free to Feed was an opportunity to figure out how we could put the stories and the faces and the foods of newly arrived refugees front and centre, and
