How Christina Adane Became a Leading Voice of Her Generation
We sat down with the Gen Z powerhouse to talk free school meals, chicken shop politics, and building a fairer future
At 21 years old, Christina Adane has become one of the clearest and loudest voices of her generation, equal parts culture critic, organiser, and political disruptor. In 2024 alone, her work spanned continents and sectors: she hosted a panel for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, joined a parliamentary delegation assessing nutrition funding in famine-affected regions of Kenya, and launched Uniform Display magazine as editor-in-chief. She also co-hosted a party celebrating the UK’s most exciting underground artists and DJs, held a residency at the American School in London, participated in the first APPG for Tigray, and co-organised and self-funded a conference exploring youth and internet culture.
But being a game changer is nothing new for Christina. By 11 years old, she had already organised fundraisers to raise money for ActionAid. At 15 years old, she protested for climate action and joined Jamie Oliver’s Bite Back campaign. At 16, her petition reversed a government decision to cut free school meals during COVID, a victory that impacted, and continues to impact, millions of children across the UK.
Today, she’s channelling her energy into shaping youth culture and building a fairer future for the next generation.
Moving from Holland to London at the age of six, Christina was suddenly confronted with the city’s harsh realities. “I remember I had to change schools because one mum stabbed another,” she recalls. “The language thing was obviously big as well, but the biggest shock for me was seeing other African and Caribbean people. I was the only black kid in my nursery in Amstelveen.”
At 13, Christina moved to a new secondary school, where she realised a whole new load of disparities between her and some of her peers, which soon sparked her food justice activism: “I found out I was twice as likely to develop a diet related disease based on where I lived, and I was likely to die 10 years earlier than my wealthier counterparts at school” she says. “I figured it was a bit too late for me but not too late for [my siblings]. Maybe I can change something.”
“I lived in a food desert, and the chicken shop was the main place to hangout after school,” she notes. “It's very normal in British culture, and it's like a staple in youth culture. I don't hate it. People think I have beef with it - no, it's an institution of the working class and I get it. What my gripe is, is why was that the only place for young kids on the high street?”
In London, there are thousands of chicken shops, with Tower Hamlets having up to 40 for each secondary school in the borough. Not coincidentally, Tower Hamlets has one of the highest rates of child obesity in the U.K. By age 11, over half of children in Tower Hamlets are overweight or obese.
She’s not anti-chicken shop though, she just wants more choice. “I watch Chicken Shop Date, it’s cute. This is not me saying all of this is bad, but why is that the only space for youth culture to be represented? It's insane.”
From the classroom to the telly, food is a silent indicator of class, both in practice and in the way it’s marketed. “For example, look at any football game,” she muses. “Who sponsors it? Mars, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s… And then if you look at a tennis game, it’s Rolex, Evian... There’s a huge discrepancy in the images we see associated with certain sports and foods.”
However, her free school meals campaign wasn’t just about food, it was also a fight for humanity. “Under neoliberalism, economic valuation is seen as the ultimate data. We’re just figures on a chart, we don’t matter as people. The reason why the free school meal campaign was so important, was that it forced people to see these numbers as kids.”
“If a kid is getting hot, nutritious meals 190 days of the year, then you’re already a step into preventing diet-related illness down the line,” she continues. “Within say, one kilometre of every school, there has to be a third place for young people, state-funded, with free, nutritious food provided.”
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), About 30% of youth clubs in London closed between 2010 and 2019 as a result of cuts to local authority funding. A study conducted by the IFS also found that young people in London who lost access to a nearby youth club or third space performed worse in their GCSE exams, and test scores fell even more for pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Christina is clear-eyed about where the responsibility lies. “I don’t believe any of this systemic shit should be put on the consumer. The most powerful thing a consumer can do is recognise the system that they’re in and identify the stakeholders and call them out. The top 10 food companies in the world control 90% of the food we consume on a daily basis... I would focus on tighter regulations and restrict their product portfolios. Right now it’s minimum 70% UPF [ultra-processed foods] and I would cut that down to 30%.”
Alongside her policy focus, Christina has spent the past few years building new cultural institutions. “I saw the food part of my work and the culture part as originally separate strands,” she explains. “With culture, I’ve just been a nerd about it for so long. I’ve been mad obsessed with the underground scene, and I grew up on House of Pharaohs, 808INK, obviously grime, and the new wave shit as well. When Len dropped his first single, I was there. I always wanted to document what was going on around me.”
Sparked by her experience growing up in London, Christina understands the complexities of Black British identity in the diaspora. “When you’re a young person in this country, particularly when you’re part of a diaspora, you have such awareness that this shouldn’t be or isn’t your home,” she says. “But you also don’t feel at home back home.” It’s this sense of “constant liminal space,” as she puts it, that has informed her cultural and political instincts. “You have to redesign your identity based on certain features from your heritage culture, but also from this culture you’ve adapted to,” she explains.
Her critique of mainstream efforts to reclaim British symbols like the Union Jack is particularly sharp. “It doesn’t make sense to me when Skepta or Stormzy, people that have been celebrated by the British institution, do that,” she says. “It feels dangerous when we’re claiming nationalism in the resurgence of ethnonationalism.” She calls out the legacy of “Cool Britannia” as a “state-sponsored promotion of neoliberalism in culture,” one that still shapes how youth culture is celebrated and co-opted today. “How can you fight for liberation using the labels they gave you?” she asks, pondering the effectiveness of ‘Black British’ solidarity. For Christina, class is a sharper lens. “Class comes before race in this country. If you’re a wealthy black man, you’re wealthy before you’re black.”
British media today, she says, is exhausted, especially when it’s used to repackage global responsibility as charitable aid. “I’m really tired of the way the media depicts people in deprivation,” she says. “The Brits love to see themselves as heroes helping poor African kids. That needs to go.”
Fashion media, in particular, frustrates her. “I wrote a Substack about this and I said that without addressing what’s going on in the wider world, these events [like the Met Gala] are empty,” she declares. “Last year, I was looking at [a magazine]… and there was an image of Ice Spice holding her fanny next to a page about Gaza. What is going on right now?”
For Christina, gestures of solidarity ring hollow unless they’re followed by action. “The whole point of [fashion] is to celebrate humanity through adorning and beautifying ourselves. It just feels really remiss that the industry hasn’t done anything to commemorate the lives of those in suffering right now.”
Her thoughts return often to Ethiopia, to the conflict in Tigray, where her mum’s family is from. “I felt so much guilt campaigning against obesity, and doing all that stuff here while there was a famine going on back home,” she says. “It’s the same stakeholders creating both environments. It’s governments and companies. That’s what’s causing famine here and in Tigray and in Yemen.”
Since the beginning of the Tigray conflict in November 2020, food shortages have spread throughout Northern Ethiopia, with over 200 000 people dying as a direct result. In Tigray alone, 89% of people are in need of food aid. It is the worst famine in East Africa since 2012.
The famine in Yemen has been ongoing since 2016. In May 2020, UNICEF described Yemen as "the largest humanitarian crisis in the world," and hundreds of people are dying from starvation every day.
She doesn’t mince any words about the way the West chooses which crises to care about. “Why could we not get any attention to Tigray of any sort of scale like we’ve seen with Ukraine, or with Gaza?” she asks. “That selective attention is a [form of] renewed imperialism, and until we realise how our guilt drives that, we’re fucked.”
Christina is adamant that no revolution will come from within. “You can’t revolutionise a system from within,” she says. “If revolutionary change were to happen, it would have to happen by people snatching it from power, because nobody wants to give up power.”
Still, she’s not without hope. “What I do bet on is the rise of the far right and ethnonationalism bringing people together,” she adds. “What I think is really dangerous for power, is when both sides give up on the institutions where power lies, and we’re seeing that happen now.”
Her driving force is creating a better world for her little siblings, and what does that look like? “Free food, third places, nature, good education, and good social housing…”
She leaves with a message for the new generation of creatives coming up: “don't beg for permission from the industry, do your own shit. Legacy media is dead,... They don't represent our culture at all. Why knock at their door when we can build our own legacies?”