The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
How pandemic pushed one charity to become an essential food source
Charity Eats Rosyth has sought to grow and share food, reduce waste, help the environment and improve food education since 2015.
However, when the pandemic struck, its staff were given key worker status and their roles changed from food educators to food providers.
Ethan Daish, food project manager at Eats Rosyth, spoke about the past 18 months.
He said: “We had to close our community hub as soon as it became clear we were going into lockdown.
“But even when we weren’t in lockdown, we were subject to social distancing measures and because we had such small premises.
“We ended up moving to more temporary premises and just having that physical move away from our old community hub into two bigger halls.”
After spending more than four years educating people on growing their own food, reducing food waste and organising cooking classes, Ethan and his team felt their change in status was exacerbated by Covid.
“Our role has changed because of the changing needs of society and of the people we are serving in our communities.
“Suddenly, we’re in a food hall making bags up for people, whereas before we had people coming in to look at what we had on any given day and for a lot more than just food.
“I think Covid-19 just accelerated what we’d already been seeing in terms of people’s dependence on food provision from sources that maybe weren’t or, in my opinion, shouldn’t be expected to take on that role.”
Ethan hopes the charity will soon be able to return to its roots.
“We’ve found ourselves in a frustrating position at the moment because providing food in a crisis situation is quite an intensive process,” he said.
“We are taking steps to get away from it, which has been partly enforced and partly because it wasn’t really our aim or our remit to do this before Covid.
“We have become more like a foodbank.”
He continued: “Our organisation was never designed to be a foodbank, but suddenly we’ve spent most of our time and effort providing crisis food and not the stuff with a more lasting impact.
“It’s been exacerbated by the pandemic, but I think it also shows issues in society that were there before.”
Though the pandemic brought about a food provision crisis at the start of lockdown last year, much of the inequality existed before Covid.
“I think there are certainly gaps in society, which even before Covid were certainly being plugged by third sector organisations, ourselves included,” Ethan continued.
“It became quite clear early on that we were going to get access to lots of food and that it would be needed by a lot of people.
“The system is quite complicated and there are different obligations for organisations.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you how much we are relied upon for food at the moment.”
Over the past 18 months, its role has caused Eats Rosyth to find itself conflicted around one of its main aims – reducing food waste.
“It is frustrating because food waste is a big problem that needs solving and our role in providing that food can sometimes conflict with our aims,” Ethan said.
“We would like to see an end to food waste and the
reason that we’ve tried to keep good food in circulation is because we would like to see that food made use of.
“It kind of conflicts sometimes, because it feels as though we are helping the problems continue and enabling food waste in some respects because we’ve become a way to keep that process going.
“Day-to-day, we see a lot of stuff shifted to us and it becomes a never-ending thing.
“It’s nice that we can keep good food in circulation rather than letting it go in the bin, but it’s not as simple as that.”