JUNK FOOD.
Fiona Cahill
“Let’s REALLY feed the world.” Adam Smith, founder of The Real Junk Food Project. On Friday 13th February 2015, The Real Junk Food Project Doncaster held Doncaster’s first ever Pay As You Feel Café at Little Mo’s Snap Shack in Scawsby. They saved almost 100kg of food from going to landfill (generously donated by Food Aware in Mexborough), made over £90 and boxed up the remaining meals for the M25 homeless shelter. Fiona Cahill talks about the motivations behind the project: Food is fundamental to life, health and happiness. In modern life food production is industrialised and some of the players from the food industry have become incredibly powerful. A third of
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Photography: Warren Draper ©2015
the food we waste goes into landfill and those at the top of the industrialised food chain are largely exempt from responsibility. Food is a basic need and a shared human experience. We need to come together to create and enjoy meals. It is the most fundamental part of our human nature. Sharing food is spiritual within all religions and cultures. Yet we are becoming so disconnected from it and from each other. The effects of that, along with those consequences briefly mentioned above (and many more), in our towns and cities are felt all around us. For me this change began with growing food in my garden and thinking deeply about how to use food to bring people together, to connect us, to share and pool
our efforts, and to counteract some of this damage and waste. I attended community events and projects and out of that we now have a little group of ‘doers’ sharing the same philosophy - helping each other to feel good by helping others feel good. It works. I started a little dinner club event, where we cooked meals for each other and attempted to source waste in the community. We used what we’d grown and any excess. We came together to share our ideas and thoughts. We all had the ambition of creating a ‘pay as you feel’ café and felt this would counter many of the consequences of modern life and fill a need for our community in Doncaster. For me this meant starting where I was, with what I already had access to.