May Updates

Hello! Things have been quiet on the blog recently, but if you join our Facebook group there are always interesting articles being posted and discussions going on about food waste in the UK and actions to tackle it.

Here's what our waste warriors have been up to recently:

Caitriona and Mei-Wah have begun planning the next Good Food for Good Causes event, which will take place in July or August. We will post an announcement once we've set a date, and once again we will be welcoming volunteers to help out on the day and in the run up to the event. Watch this space...

Back in March, thanks to Vera's hard work, we were awarded £500 by CityCamp to help further our cause. Meetings have begun to decide the best way to use these funds, and one of the ideas being discussed is getting an FWC mobile phone so that we can be contacted easily by charities and volunteers without any confusion about who to call!

If you've been down London Road recently you'll have seen that the brand new, revamped Open Market is almost ready to launch, and our waste warrior Josie is leading the new Foodshed venture that will be promoting local food producers through a rent-a-shelf scheme. Keep up to date with Foodshed on Twitter: @foodshedbtn. Good luck Josie!

FarmDrop (online, click & collect shopping that supports local farmers and food producers) is launching in Brighton & Hove at the end of the month. A FarmDrop results in zero waste for producers, as everything they bring to the drop has already been sold. FWC volunteer Sarah will be selling her delicious cakes as a Guest Producer for Brighton. Keep up to date with Hove FarmDrop @hovefarmdrop and Brighton FarmDrop @FarmDropBtn, which is being run by FWC volunteer Mei-Wah. 

And finally, good luck to our volunteer & Sussex Gleaning Co-Ordinator Bernie as he hurtles towards the finish line of his MA!

FWC in The Guardian

Our pumpkin gleaning efforts have continued to receive good media coverage months after the event itself: did anybody see us on Rip Off Britain: Food last week?

And we've also been featured in The Guardian online, which is fantastic new exposure for our work, and also for the work of the local charities that we are able to support; Lunch Positive and Synergy were both discussed, along with the more well-known St John's and YMCA.

We continue to be amazed and delighted at the attention our events are attracting, and hope you will read the article here.

Sussex Uni Waste Society

FWC member Laura is the chair of Sussex University's Waste Society.

"Sussex Waste Society provides a positive and friendly atmosphere for students to think, talk and act about waste.
We want to educate ourselves and others about waste (food, paper, recycling etc) and how to reduce, reuse and recycle. We want to interrogate the environmental and social problems with waste.
We run campaigns to achieve actual change in waste policy within the University, the Union and the wider community. We also organise social events, film screenings, field trips and more."

Some of you may have met Laura at our most recent Good Food for Good Causes event - she was manning the donation table and organising the surplus for groups to collect. Behind the scenes, in the weeks leading up to it, she worked hard with the team to help plan and promote the event.

This April, The Waste Society is putting on an event called Skip - Cook - Share: volunteers will be collecting food from skips and from students who are binning food before the Easter holidays, cooking it up into an amazing meal, and handing it out in Library Square (in the University of Sussex campus). Click on the link above to see/join the facebook event.

If you're a student or staff member at Sussex then we heartily encourage you to get involved!

Do you also belong to a waste society at your university? Or would you like to? Want some advice on setting up a group to tackle food waste? Get in touch!

News: CityCamp Funding

A huge thank you and congratulations to FWC member Vera who successfully secured funding for The Food Waste Collective from CityCamp Brighton.

Vera pitched The Food Waste Collective at CityCamp and won a share of £1000 in funding, which will be shared with our local friends, Bike Hub.

This funding will be amazingly useful for moving forward with our work - more details to follow!

*Photos from our twitter feed. Join us @foodwastecoll

Food Waste vs. Food Scarcity in the UK

A huge congratulations to Charlotte Haworth, one of our fantastic FWC waste warriors, for having her article published in Permaculture magazine!

Permaculture - practical solutions for self-reliance is one of the foremost publications in the UK focussing on the sustainability movement, and always features inspiring and creative ways to live a more sustainable life and create a better world. Charlotte's article examines the paradoxical situation we have found ourselves in, where increasing numbers of people are going hungry even as we throw away vast quantities of perfectly good food. The Food Waste Collective is featured as one of a number of solutions being found to readdress this issue.

In the UK, the amount of food waste produced is an estimated 15 million tonnes per year (4). With food prices themselves continuing to rise, and growing reports of families unable to afford enough to eat, there appears to be a clear gap in between hungry people on one side, and wasteful food companies on the other. In many ways this gap is completely avoidable; all it would take is some concise organisation and (crucially) increased communication between all involved. While the gap remains, however, many are seeking individual solutions to the incongruity by taking action for themselves...

Click on the link to read more of Charlotte's article, Food Waste vs. Food Scarcity in the UK.

Good Food for Good Causes - 28th February 2014

Repackaged surplus goods © Laura Grossmann

On 28th February, The Food Waste Collective commandeered the Municipal Market (Circus Street) to host their quarterly Good Food for Good Causes (GF4GC) event.  GF4GC was created and organised by a dedicated team of volunteers in order to divert perfectly good surplus food from landfill, and give it to deserving projects throughout Brighton & Hove such as food banks, refuges, community cafes and lunch clubs. This month we repackaged a huge variety of food, including chickpeas, spelt flour, polenta, poppy seeds, brown rice flour, haricot beans and several sacks of gluten-free bread flour. Charities arrived throughout the day to collect the donations, and we were lucky to have volunteers on wheels to deliver to those charities that couldn't make it down themselves. The atmosphere throughout the day was electric, and despite the chill in the air everyone remained cheerful and bursting with energy.

A charity representative inspects their donated dry goods © Josie Jeffrey

We feel it is crucial to address the issues of food waste and hunger together - it is wonderful that we were able to prevent the pointless waste of healthy, surplus food, but even more wonderful that it reached people who truly needed it, and that we were able to make a contribution that allows charities and community groups to continue with the vital work they do. Our next event will be in 3 months time, and we will be looking out for more keen volunteers to help get good food to all the good causes in Brighton & Hove!

Finally, a big thank you to...

• Infinity Food, our dry-goods donor.
• Fanny's of Hanover and the Real Patisserie for their beautiful baked contributions.
• All the volunteers who made the day a success through repacking, welcoming, signing charities up to Plan Zheroes, organising pre-orders, providing recipes and food to share, taking care of the venue, and delivering food by bike to those charities that couldn't make it down.
• The charities themselves who came down to accept the food - your stories were wonderful to hear, the conversations helped to warm us in that chilly venue!

Volunteers still smiling after a hard day's work! © Josie Jeffrey