A Sudanese dish on the menu for Touraine schoolchildren in the canteen this Thursday, May 23. This is one of the new features of “Refugee Food Festival” de Tours, second edition from June 6 to 14, which gives the opportunity to refugee cooks in France to collaborate with French chefs for the duration of a service, and the design of the meal, and then open up professional prospects.
For this year, they are nine to participate in the festival for nine different operations. With in particular a collaboration between Ilham, from Sudan, and the central kitchen of Tours to serve a Sudanese dish to the 8,500 schoolchildren of the city this Thursday, May 23. A dish proposed by Ilham, a Sudanese refugee with the teams of the central kitchen of Tours.
Prospect of training or employment
“It’s a way of telling the story of these people, who are in France, who were recognized as “refugees” under the Geneva Convention by the State with a residence permit, who fled their countries where they were persecuted” explains Melina Aimé, solidarity project manager at the city of Tours. This Thursday, the meal will also be accompanied by awareness raising about the journey of these refugees, “for nursery schools, a text will be read to learn about Ilham, its dish and its history and for primary schools there will be a game to recognize foods and find their places of origin on a map, the idea is to show that our cuisine has been enriched by all these mixtures and these foods which have traveled”.
The other interest of this festival is tooffer professional prospects to these refugees. The eight participants of the 2023 edition are at this stage, all in training or hired. Stenio is now enrolled in apprenticeship training, which allows him, he says “to integrate well into society”. “There are teams who work all year round with the participants to support them in all the steps to take. explains chef Pauline Carasco, who is behind the “Refugee Food Festival” in Tours.
