For nearly a year, the Oxford Food Surplus Cafe has been brewing, and on the first weekend of Trinity, its volunteers will be taking over the East Oxford Community Centre for its first event.
The cafe will be offering tasty meals – all made from donated food, otherwise headed for the bin bag. All those wonky carrots or sprouts which no one in the supermarket wanted to buy, but also some of the 30% of vegetables which never even leave the ground because they don’t meet the strict cosmetic standards that supermarkets demand. The initiative reflects the need to address the food imbalance in our country, where nearly 50% goes wasted. Peter Lefort, one of the five Oxford workers behind the idea, says that the project’s long-term ambition is to help shift perceptions of food and waste: “The long-term aim is to not exist. We want to help tackle the very problem which means this can exist in the first place.”
As well as its environmental motives, the initiative seeks to create an open space for community engagement, from town to gown, from the homeless to the high earning. The Food Surplus Cafe’s meals and events will be open to everyone, using a pay as you feel system – buying your meal with cash, art work or whatever else its efforts are worth for you. Although this sounds like an ambitious concept, it reflects a growing movement, following similar models across the country. In Bristol, Leeds and Brighton surplus cafes have seen a huge amount of interest and enthusiasm – where, above and beyond the food they serve, they have provided a centre for the community.
When I went to the project’s first open planning meeting a few months ago, its initiators asked what we would want from its first event. One answer was ‘a place to eat and feel good about it: it seems like the Food Surplus Cafe’s pilot will certainly be offering that.
