Foodcycle: save food, save us

This began when she said “Hey, I’ve got this lab report to finish and I don’t have time to finish that article for Felix. Can you throw an article together instead?”

And I said, “Yea, sure”.

F**k! Writing a Felix article is a lot harder than I thought! Are there times to ignore a hot blonde? Yeah, sure, this was one of them. But I’m from Imperial and even after years of university (eight!) I still haven’t learnt anything helpful. OK, enough whining! My granddad always said, “Once you’ve put yourself in an embarrassing situation you will figure out how to succeed.” This article won’t be witty but it’ll talk about a damn good idea and that should be enough. I need to talk about FoodCycle.

FoodCycle is an odd group of super enthusiastic, super-students that fight crime and work for humanity. You can see some members in the union Every Sunday afternoon cooking food for refugees. It is served to the refugees on Monday at the Notre Dame Drop-in Centre in Leicester Square. And they love it. They receive stir-frys, curries, veggie bakes, biscuits, fruit crumbles, salads… Did I mention it’s all veggie food? But it is good. (And we don’t actually fight crime, see foodcycle.org.uk).

However, we are running a raffle this week! Tom Aikens, one of the biggest names in London’s high end dining scene, will cook dinner for a few lucky winners on 21/03/11. His services normally cost £150 but you can eat his food for as little as £5. Buy a raffle ticket from tiny.cc/AikensDinner. Tom is not only donating his time and experience but also all of the ingredients needed for your dinner. In addition, Whole Foods Kensington are providing their kitchen and restaurant for the night and all the wine for your meal. The dinner will be a culinary feast so don’t miss it!

I joined FoodCycle ages ago when the group was just beginning at college and I had suddenly “a lot of extra time in my week”. The idea behind FoodCycle was easy: get food that would be wasted by shops, cook awesome meals with it and give those meals to people who need them. We’ve now served over 6,000 meals!! The average household chucks out £680 of food a year. (Do you remember that awful flat you once lived in? And remember that guy who never cleaned his pots and left half-eaten bowls of pasta?) The whole retail industry manages to waste almost 400,000 tonnes of edible food. FoodCycle works with shops to reduce the mountains of wasted food from the retail industry.

But FoodCycle is more than feeding people and reducing food wastage. I joined because it was something with open possibilities; you could do anything you want. You could throw massive parties to recruit volunteers, open a student restaurant or sell raffle tickets to raise funds. Find out more about Foodcycle on foodcycle.org.uk where you can see all the other universities involved and learn how to play a significant part in the operation.