A few months ago we saw we saw an article about a café in
Brighton which was using food due to be thrown away because it was after its
best by date. The café takes the food makes it into meals which they then sell
by donation. They were crowd funding to find a permanent residence for the café
which currently is open one day a week at a church in the city. We pledged a
small amount of money to help with the project.
Last week Sue and I went and paid a visit to the church to
have a look at how the project was running we met with the organizer Adam who
showed us some of the food that was being used and we stayed for lunch. There
must have been two hundred people come
in for lunch when they opened the doors and it was all sorts from the homeless
to students and people like myself who
realized that this was the best value for money café in the whole Brighton. Lunch
was amazing, but what really stayed with me was the discussion that I had with
Adam at the beginning when he was telling me how they get the food.
When they first started they would go through the bins of
supermarkets collecting anything that had been thrown away but now they have
established contacts with the supermarkets who now supply them. But what was
truly shocking was the food banks, because of legislation were throwing away massive
amounts of foodstuffs such as tinned food that was more than three months old
obviously tinned food can last for years but such is the ridiculousness of the
wastage due to the capitalist system and the law, where people are starving out
on the streets, food is going to landfill.
This idea of wastage in the system is not confined to just
the food industry, local councils waste extraordinary amounts of money because
of ridiculous bureaucracy and National Health Service waste money because of
ridiculous laws passed by governments who want to make their mark.
The Bluescamp project is supporting the café by putting on a
concert at the church during March of next year, to us this is something that
is an incredibly important aspect of community, where some people are so
willing to help and donate their time to such a worthy cause adding a bit of
music to their promoting may help in some small way to highlight the work. I
have placed beneath the website please check it out.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk Learn to play in a band over three days
