Food for thought - a visit to the Real Junk Food Project

Finding out what people are passionate about, connecting with them and their story is something that is really important to me. It’s central to my whole approach to life! When the opportunity arose to run photography workshops with young people from Employability Solutions, I was keen to ensure that alongside getting creative, we included the opportunity to connect with some amazing people and share their stories.

This is the first in an ongoing series of blogs that will feature individuals, groups and organisations that are seeking to make a difference, putting their passion into action and in so doing - changing the world. It gives me great pleasure to introduce: The Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP).

I first heard about TRJFP via LinkedIn after seeing some posts shared by their founder Adam Smith where he was talking about catering weddings and events with food made from ingredients that had otherwise been bound for the bin. We took a group of Staff and Students from Employability Solutions on a visit to find out what TRJFP is all about.

A quick look on their website states that “Since our inception in 2013, we have prevented over 6000 tons of surplus food from becoming waste, this is the equivalent of 14.3 million meals diverted into bellies and not bins”!

That’s an amazing outcome in and of itself - a staggering amount of food goes to waste, but what I was most surprised to learn from our visit to their Kindness Warehouse in Leeds is that TRJFP is about so very much more than intercepting food waste.

We were made very welcome by Janet one of the volunteers who had very kindly come in especially to show us around and by Josh (Adam’s son). Janet’s passion is inspiring and I was immediatley struck not just by the scale of the operation, but by the scale of the problem of food that gets either stuck in the distribution network or is at risk of just being thrown away because supermarkets can’t sell it.

TRJFP has a number of creative solutions to this problem such as their ‘Pay As You Feel’ cafe and recently launched ‘buy a box’ where they open up the warehouse to shoppers who can buy a box of fresh fruit and veg for £10. They also educate and campaign against global issues that food waste creates.

In conversation with Adam it was clear that simply finding ever more creative ways to make use of surplus food isn’t a long term solution - in fact in many ways the biggest challenge is in avoiding becoming complicit in a system which clearly isn’t working. We live in a world where there is enough food to go around and yet people go hungry while many tons of food is consigned to land fill - in short: madness!

Adam gave us a tour of their garden area just at the side of the warehouse where they are taking a revolutionary approach to bringing contaminated land back into use as productive growing space, fertilised and nourished by food that has past it’s best and utilising a secret ingredient which helps speed up the composting process. Seeing how this once derrelict plot of land was being brought back to life was amazing - if they can grow food here then clearly it’s possible to grow food almost anywhere!

Hearing Adam talk about this aspect of the organisation it became clear that THIS was the central theme - to create spaces where people can grow food and supply themselves with healthy, nutritious and fresh produce and in so doing bypass the broken system of over supplied processed food which is not only bad for our health but bad for the environment too.

The visit prompted some challenging conversations on our way home and the next day as we reflected on our experience visiting TRJFP - it was clear that in order for this issue to be resolved a HUGE mindset shift is required on the part of the public when it comes to how we think about food. An example which came up in our conversations was ‘best before end’ dates - and the idea (that food companies have been pushing) that once that date has passed then the food should be thrown away, this results not just in wasted food but think of the wasted energy growing, packaging and distributing it, only for it to end up in the bin!

We left feeling very inspired by the drive of everyone involved with the TRJFP - the challenge that they are taking on is huge, but the reality is that this challenge belongs to everyone. Food waste impacts us all - not just the environmental factors associated with growing, distributing and then dumping food but also the structural inequality that seems hard wired into a system that over produces food and yet people still go hungry.

From pay as you feel cafes, catering events, distributing food directly to the public and experimenting with new ways to grow sustainable produce in urban environments TRJFP are showing us a different way, a more sustainable way, a more human oriented way. We offer Adam, Janet, Josh, Becky and all of the team our sincere thanks for sharing their story and their passion with us.