Did you know around a third of all food produced ends up in the bin?
We are thrilled to be part of a multi-year, Lottery-funded project called Food Use Places. The project aims to engage communities that are often left out of climate action through activities like composting, cooking, and sharing food. We are working together with partners across Sussex to help people learn new skills and take simple steps to waste less and reuse more – over 7,000 people have been involved in just the first two years.
“I would never have thought you use the cauliflower leaves like this before – I would have almost definitely thrown them out before.”
At the Community Kitchen, over the last two years, we have run over 30 sessions focused on using up leftovers and reducing waste. These included:
- ‘Chop & Chat’ session where volunteers processed surplus veg, dehydrated and stored for future use in classes and groups
- ‘Community Cook Up’ sessions where regular class participants joined us to use up any surplus in the fridge & storeroom in a creative cookery session (with tasty meals to takeaway). We have also used these sessions to host local community groups and share Food Use messaging, including Refugee Radio and Voices in Exile.
- ‘One Pot Wonder’ – our newest addition – small group sessions for local parents living on low incomes where we share skills & social support whilst processing surplus food
We are using surplus food sourced from local distributor Fareshare Sussex, alongside our own excess from recent classes or even donations from local community gardens.
“I love the chop & chat sessions – it’s great to do something so mindful which is also saving food from going to waste. It makes me feel so wholesome.”
We also developed two new, cookery leaders’ courses for those who cook at local community food projects – one aimed at helping them reduce waste and one about supporting others to gain cookery skills. We covered techniques for cooking with unusual donations and surplus, and for larger-scale catering dishes. Our second course focused on supporting others, eg helping a local food bank worker who wants to teach young people to chop vegetables safely and become more confident in the kitchen.
“Thank you for the great course, I’ll use it in our community cafe and learnt new tricks, new ideas and enjoyed making the flatbread. I learnt a lot more about recycling.”
And learning from this project has impacted our wider work. Across all our cookery sessions, not just those funded by Food Use Places, we found 53% of those attending said they picked up a tip on how to waste less/save more food.
We’re looking forward to another two years of reducing waste & building community together. Find out more about the whole project in the short video below.
The National Lottery Climate Action Fund supports community-led climate projects around the UK, with a focus on engaging new audiences who aren’t currently engaged in climate action. The fund aims to use stories and creative approaches to respond to climate change, and tell new narratives to promote behaviour change.