Community cuisine: the joys of feeding your local neighbourhood
Armed with saucepans and just a little spare time, these volunteers have helped to feed thousands of people in difficult times, writes Xanthe Clay
What do we do when we want to make people feel better? We feed them. Bake a cake, cook up a stew, buy them soup: given that a hug is currently out of the question, it’s the next best thing. So it’s no surprise that during the pandemic, for many of us, food was the area where we most wanted to help. Food banks have been inundated with offers even while overall volunteering figures (not including the NHS volunteers) are down, largely because of the older generation having to isolate.
Food is about more than comfort, of course. From the heartbreaking video of a nurse crying because the supermarket shelves had been stripped empty by the time she was able to leave work, to the campaign by Marcus Rashford to keep free school meals running over half term, stories of food hardship feel especially devastating.
Restaurants and food businesses have been at the forefront of the movement to help feed the nation. There are stories like the Filipino chefs in London, who provided free boxes of adobo for NHS staff, including the 20,000 UK-based Filipino nurses, many of whom had only just arrived when Covid struck. In Bristol, Tess Lidstone of the tiny Box-E restaurant, organised more than 2,500 free food boxes and recipe videos for young care leavers, while The Radhuni Indian-Bangladeshi restaurant in Loanhead, south of Edinburgh, has given away thousands of meals to front-line workers. I could go on – and on.
You don’t have to be in the food industry to volunteer. Take “The Batheaston Baker Boys”, Jon Haslett and Harry Dawson, two young men who live in supported accommodation and have been baking cakes for local hospital staff. Or Dawn Richardson, the owner of a framing shop in Belfast, who spent the first lockdown organising soup deliveries and the second raising money to buy food for food banks and the homeless.
So what does it take to volunteer? Commitment and time, of course, although less time than you might imagine: organisations are keen to make it fit into your life. But also the knowledge that you won’t just be helping others. According to a study by NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations) with Sheffield Hallam and Nottingham Trent universities, volunteering gives us a sense of purpose in times of crisis, helps us cope with anxiety and helps establish a sense of solidarity with others. There’s also evidence that it builds self-esteem for those who have lost their jobs or been furloughed.
Feeding people feels good, as the inspiring stories overleaf prove.
Not enough time to volunteer? How does cooking up an extra portion of your regular dinner once in a while sound? That’s the idea behind Anna Mantell’s Whitstablebased project, Food Friends. Set up two years ago, it has mushroomed through the pandemic, with more than 60 regular volunteers, aged between 18 and 70, in a four-mile radius of the town.
One Covid-era volunteer is 27-yearold Hannah-Grace Chapman, who lives near the coast with her partner, George, and works in customer service. Put on furlough during the first lockdown, she was daunted by the thought of doing nothing all day. Posting on a local message board asking if anyone needed help, she was put in touch with Food Friends, and Mantell gave her a call.
“I told Anna the kind of things I make on a weekly basis, so she could match me up with a food friend,” Chapman explains. This part of the vetting is as important as the inevitable DBS check – if you make a lot of curry, for example, you won’t be matched with someone who doesn’t like spicy food.
She was matched with Geoff, “a lovely man,” she says. “I cook for him every Tuesday, whatever I’m making for us, but also, when I’m doing a roast there’s always too much, so I’ll drop him a message to see if he wants some. We chat on the phone mostly, then I take his dinner and leave it on his doorstep. His favourite is spaghetti bolognese.”
Geoff loves the chats and the homecooked meals, but Chapman clearly gets a lot out of the relationship, too. “Aside from giving a bit of a structure to my week, it’s just so lovely to have met Geoff. I would never have met him otherwise, and had all sorts of interesting conversations. A lot of younger people don’t volunteer, maybe because they are too busy. But this completely fits in with your life – you are already cooking dinner anyway.”
Despite the small scale, Food Friends is run with professional care, and achieved charitable status in October. Mantell is a former nurse, and one of her prime concerns was food safety. She got together a steering group, including food hygiene expert Sarah Howarth, and drew up a handbook. Volunteers are offered food hygiene courses alongside the compulsory DBS checks.
New beneficiaries are referred via the website and from GPs, charities such as Age Concern, and social prescribers. As relationships develop, so does the menu, and volunteers may end up adapting the family meal that night so it fits with their recipient’s tastes – much as you might with a visiting relative. “People get to know each other and it’s just what you do, isn’t it?” says Mantell.
The idea of sharing a meal also chimes with the recipients. “Food Friends might be the first form of support that people might accept,” she explains. This is especially true if they realise modern households tend to be overgenerous with their catering, and a lot ends up wasted, which goes against the grain for the older generation.
Mantell now works full-time on the project, which can go far beyond simply organising cooks and diners. Last month, one volunteer called to say she couldn’t get hold of her beneficiary. “We had to get the police to break down the door and we found she’d fallen,” says Mantell. “Her life was saved because of that volunteer. Nobody else would have found her.”
As for the future, Mantell would like to see more of us cooking for our neighbours. “I would love to say, in five years’ time, Food Friends will be across the UK. When I think of the impact we’ve had on people’s health and well-being just in Whitstable, it would be amazing to be able to spread that.”
food-friends.co.uk