June 2025

At our June 2025 meeting we welcomed Penny Locke of Hungerford Food Community who gave a presentation on reducing food waste.  With thanks to Penny, please find her notes from our meeting below:

Thank you for inviting me to say a few words about Hungerford Food Community.

Our aim is to help connect the local community to real, sustainable food. We work in several ways. We teach people of all ages to cook more from scratch, we educate people as to where their food comes from and encourage people to buy food from local producers by running monthly markets and we raise awareness of the problem of and solutions to food waste.

LOCAL MARKETS

We run 7 monthly markets a year in Hungerford to support local producers, help local people to be able to buy directly from them and learn more about where their food comes from. Eg we promote venison, Berkshire Trout, Shalbourne Community Growers, locally pressed apple juice, local

COOKING

In today’s world there is more and more ultra processed food and more diet-related health issues (costing an estimated £6 billion a year).  It’s called the Junk Food Cycle where the more ready meals and snack food manufacturers sell to us, the less we cook and so the more prepared meals we buy. There is an arms war between the food scientists who make processed food irresistible and addictive so the manufacturers make more profit, and the food scientists who are developing anti-obesity drugs.

So our aim is to help connect the local community back to real, healthy food by inspiring people to cook more from scratch, grow their own and buy local produce, for example at the monthly markets.

We run hands-on cooking workshops for all ages including a Kids in the Kitchen programme.  Cooking is a skill that has been lost over recent generations. Women are still the main cooks in most households but even if they do cook from scratch Mums are often too busy to teach their children and schools have other priorities.

We run after school cooking clubs at Hungerford and Shefford Primary Schools and also cook with Hungerford and Lambourn Youth Clubs.

Our recipes are based on the Eat the Rainbow concept introducing kids to as many new vegetables as possible to help them have a varied, nutritious diet growing up. Last week we made Rainbow Pasta Salad with green beans, tomatoes,  beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, sweetcorn, peas and kidney beans. And Cheesey Rainbow Scones with sweetcorn, carrot, spinach and sun dried tomatoes. You get the drift…

We run smoothie bike for kids to select a rainbow of fruit to pedal into a smoothie on a stationary bike - and apple pressing activities in the autumn to help reduce the amount of garden apples that go to waste (about 80%).

We also support gardening in schools and youth clubs so kids learn where produce actually comes from and get the pleasure of cooking and eating something they’ve grown and picked.

We were donated a table top flour mill by Dove’s Farm and we run wholemeal flour milling and butter-making activities for nursery age upwards to help kids learn where staple foods come from. It’s surprising how many adults don’t know that brown and white flour comes from the same grain and that brown flour is more nutritious because it contains the shell of the grain that contains the most fibre, protein and vitamins and minerals.

We also cook with Foodbank clients, 8 Bells for Mental Health and HomeStart West Berkshire.

FOOD WASTE REDUCTION

How many slices of bread are wasted every day in the UK? How many bananas? What percentage of potatoes grown are never eaten? 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food. And 25 million tonnes of greenhouse gases are created by wasted food.

We rescue surplus produce from local growers and farm shops.

• We are given produce by Cobbs Farmshop and also collect from local supermarkets. Sometimes we pick from local growers and get donations from allotments. In the autumn we rescue apples going to waste in people’s gardens (80% of which aren’t used while people buy imported apples in the supermarkets….)

Operation Banana Rescue

– 1.4 million bananas wasted every day in the UK. Which means 3,000 in West Berkshire alone.

• We freeze banana slices for smoothies and baking, make lollies and compost the skins

Reducing food waste in the home

• 70% of food waste happens in the home. We encourage people to use up leftovers, store food at the right temperature and not to buy more than they can use.

Food Waste Quiz

• With prizes of food items past their best before dates…

We also hire out a re-usable party box kit to reduce the amount of single-use plastic.

And at our markets on the second Sunday of the month we run a kitchen equipment swap table so people can re-home the stuff lurking at the back of their cupboards that they never use. And we incentivise people to have a reusable coffee cup by giving a 50p discount on hot drinks to anyone who brings their own re-useable cup.

How do we do all this?

We rely on grant funding and have an amazing team of volunteers who help run our markets and our cooking workshops.

We welcome donations and volunteers.

For more details please email hungerfordfoodcommunity@gmail.com or visit hungerfordfoodcommunity.org.

Penny Locke