Jimi Famurewa has been announced as Ambassador for Museum of the Home’s five-year Food Equality Campaign for Change. This new focus for the Campaign for Change aims to support Londoners of all ages to access good food at home and reduce food insecurity. The campaign will work with frontline charities to bring about real change and use the Museum’s platform and wide reach to challenge perceptions of hunger and create opportunities to come together; learning from others and celebrating diverse cuisines.
Famurewa joins the Museum in his capacity as an author, broadcaster and freelance journalist and his ambassadorship will be marked at the Museum with the launch of the paperback version of his book Settlers: Journeys through the Food, Faith and Culture of Black African London on Monday 3rd July 2023. British-Nigerian writer Famurewa is the restaurant critic for the Evening Standard, a regular guest judge on the BBC One series MasterChef and was one of the lead judges on Channel 4’s The Great Cookbook Challenge with Jamie Oliver. He is the host of the culture and heritage podcast Where’s Home Really?, and, in 2021, won Restaurant Writer of the Year at both the Fortnum & Mason Awards and the Guild of Food Writers Awards. Settlers: Journeys through the Food, Faith and Culture of Black African London, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 and was shortlisted for Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
Museum of the Home take Food Equality in their community seriously, supporting Hackney Foodbank with free space for their distribution hub every Monday. The Museum’s Food Equality campaign will expand on this commitment, telling the story of foodbanks and why they exist, and hosting exhibitions highlighting how people have coped with food scarcity. Also in their local community, the Museum aims to use the Campaign to build belonging and tackle isolation through Free Tea Fridays. This is a weekly opportunity for visitors to drop in and connect with others.
The campaign also aims to inform audiences about sustainable, economical cooking and food waste by developing a Discovery Kitchen at the Museum to integrate food stories into public programming. This work will continue with local primary schools and families by promoting urban planting and food growing as a sustainable practice. The Museum will co-create a child-friendly Discovery Garden on their grounds as a permanent legacy of the campaign, providing opportunities to explore biodiversity and sustainable food production, seasonal planting, and soil health. By curating an exciting programme of food events with London’s most inspiring cooks, the Museum aims to engage all their communities.
Using objects from their collection, Museum of the Home will explore food equality, access to food and eating sustainably. Future exhibitions will explore how food has changed our home lives, with displays in the Museum’s permanent galleries focusing on migrant food cultures, the impact of global trade, famine, and war, and how media influences behaviours and tastes.
From Autumn 2023, Museum of the Home will invite thought-leaders, policymakers, artists, and activists to take part in their Home Truths programme. These debates and conversations around the food crisis will encourage people to work together to find solutions. And from Spring 2024, the Museum will kickstart a new digital collecting project of family recipes based on contemporary ethnographic research and oral histories of Black Britons.
Campaign Ambassador Jimi Famurewa comments, Food can be such a powerful vessel for joy, independence and cultural connection. This has long been a core part of my work as a journalist and broadcaster, and so I’m really excited about working as an ambassador for the Museum of the Home’s Food Equality campaign to help explore these themes and raise awareness at a time when issues around food insecurity have never been more pertinent.
