For those of you who have been watching us grow over the months and years, we have something new and exciting to share with you: This week we opened the doors of our very own Sharehouse!

We’ve been very lucky over the past couple of years; a number of organisations have generously loaned us space free of charge, but we’ve just been getting bigger and bigger and none of those spaces on their own was big enough to accommodate us.

A lot of volunteer time was being spent ferrying items between the various locations, and it had reached the point where we needed our own premises in order to efficiently manage the huge volume of donated food and goods we intercept each week.

There’s still plenty of work to be done, but thanks to the amazing hard work of our volunteers, our freshly cleaned and painted Sharehouse is now ready for use!

So, what exactly is a Sharehouse?

We’ve run boutiques and market stalls for some time, but following in the footsteps of Leeds and Sheffield, we have now gone one step further and opened our very own Freegan Supermarket, stocked full of goods that we’ve diverted from landfill!

Open on Tuesdays and Thursdays 9am-4pm, the Sharehouse is for anyone to come and browse and help us to #feedbelliesnotbins!

As usual, all perishable items are offered on a Pay As You Feel basis – that means you donate your time, cash, or skills in return; how you choose to contribute is entirely up to you.

Please take a look here at the many different ways you can get involved and support us!

Now we have the space we’re also able to offer non-perishable items, marked up at very reasonable prices. We have new stock coming in daily and throughout the day, so watch this space!

All we ask is that you please:

• Respect our volunteers and each other
• Food is for personal use
• Only take what you need and leave what you don’t
• 1 basket max per day
• Any questions, just ask

Find out more here- Sharehouse: The Real Junk Food Project Birmingham

Address: Unit 58, Western Business Park
Great Western Close
Birmingham
B18 4QF

Amber

If you are a regular visitor to Ladywood Health and Community Centre, it is very likely that you will have met one of our volunteers, Maev Walsh, seen here foraging at Centre of the Earth in Winson Green last autumn.

It is with great regret that we must report that Maev unfortunately passed away recently at home, following a seizure; an event which shocked and saddened us all.

As a mark of respect to Maev and her mum Gillian, and to enable the many volunteers who wish to attend the funeral on the 19th May to do so, we will be cancelling all services at Ladywood Health and Community Centre for the day.

On Friday 19th May there will be no cafés, boutique or freegan boxes.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience, and hope you understand. Normal service will resume the following week.

Amber

Our friends Birmingham Friends of the Earth currently have a Community Share Offer to renovate their building, The Warehouse. TRJFPB and BFOE have worked together to create a more sustainable Birmingham. One of the very first TRJFPB’s meeting was in BFOE’s Warehouse. TRJFPB regularly run events for Digbeth First Friday in BFOE’s garden in the Warehouse.

BFOE have had the building for 40 years; it is our hub of which we campaign on environmental issues. As well as this The Warehouse also holds a vegetarian Restaurant, a bike shop and a vegan food shop.The Warehouse is an old Victorian building that needs further renovation. BFOE have worked hard in bringing the building up to a B on an EPC, but further work is needed. The building is also not disabled access friendly, we want to complete this much needed work to the Warehouse.

How does the Easter Bunny lose the weight it put on over Christmas?

– Eggsercise!

Just to let you all know that the TRJFP Brum Volunteers will be taking a well-earned rest over the Bank Holiday period.

• Ladywood Café will be closed on Friday 14th April (Good Friday), and
• Kings Heath Café will be closed on Monday 17th April (Easter Monday)
• Hodge Hill Café will only be serving lunch on Thursday 20th April

There will be no Freegan Box deliveries or collections on Good Friday (14th April)

Things will be back to normal from Wednesday 19th April. We hope you have a lovely break.

*****URGENT NOTICE*****
Please be aware, that due to currently overwhelming demand, we are placing new requests for Freegan Box deliveries onto a waiting list. Collection requests will still be processed as normal.

We’re really sorry to have to do this, but we’ve become a victim of our own success!! When we started this, we had a mere 20 boxes to distribute. On Friday 3rd of March, it was 287!! All our drivers are volunteers, and there simply aren’t enough of us to go around.

But don’t worry, we have plans afoot to help us cope with the demand – there’s more than enough waste food, if we can just get enough people to help us collect and distribute it!

If you could help us in any way, please think about joining us as a volunteer.

Thank you for your patience
END OF PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

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Friday’s one of our busiest days here at The Real Junk Food Project Brum. Not only do we have our regular Friday café at Ladywood Health and Community Centre, we also intercept the majority of our fresh fruit and vegetables from the wholesale market and run our ‘Freegan Box’ scheme.

Me and my fellow barrow boy, Sedge, get to the Birmingham wholesale market at about 7.30am, just as trade begins to wrap up for the day. If we’re lucky we have time for a bacon and egg butty in the on-site greasy spoon before we manoeuvre Victorian-style trolleys laden with fruit and vegetables back to the van. This week we intercepted 392.7kg of produce that was all scheduled for destruction. One of the highlights was the juicy watermelons that Earl from Caribbean Produce donated. Feed bellies, not bins!

Earl and I at Caribbean Produce

No matter how early we get to the market we always seem to finish our round at 10:00am, by which time our chefs are ravenous to get their mitts on some of the produce for the Friday lunch service. So our second call is Ladywood Health and Community Centre.

Chef Vinnie handling the goods

The remaining fruit and vegetables are sorted for our ‘Freegan Box’ scheme; our pop-up cafés around Birmingham; and any other events that we have been asked to cater for in the upcoming days.

Left: 25 ‘Freegan Boxes’ sorted and ready to go; Right: A box of goodies

Like all the food we do, the ‘Freegan Boxes’ work on a Pay-As-You-Feel basis. If you like what you see, just click to order your very own.

Once our chefs have been satiated and the food all sorted, it’s time for lunch at Ladywood. We also drop off some of the ‘Freegan Boxes’ at the café for those who want to collect their box. On the menu this week at our Ladywood café was garlic bruschetta to start, topped with courgette and tomato fresh from the market that morning. The main was meat medley stew, with a side of cabbage and new potatoes again from the market. The fruit that was incepted that morning was also made into a fruit salad for desert.

Much needed sustenance

Our destination after a post-lunch cup of tea is the greenhouses at Birmingham City Hospital to pay homage to their hot aerobic composters. Any food that we cannot use is composted there and used by community grow schemes around Birmingham so that none of the food that we intercept goes to waste.

We might get a couple of hours in the afternoon to put our feet up before we deliver the remaining ‘Freegan Boxes’. This week we had 12 deliveries on a 30-mile route around central and south Birmingham, providing fresh fruit and vegetables to families, refugees and hostels.
Marva receiving her ‘Freegan Box’

We finish around 8.30pm, by which time it is time for a pint with some of the other volunteers and for me to beat Sedge at pool.

Thomas Garnham is a volunteer with TRJFP Brum and coordinator of the ‘Freegan Box’ scheme. He is currently working towards his master’s degree in Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham. He is also a gobbler of junk food.

I love food. A lot. I’ll be honest, it’s was my intial reason for getting involved with the Real Junk Food Project, I hate to see it thrown away, because I want to EAT it! Another great love of mine is travel. I’m lucky enough to have visited some beautiful places around the world, met some wonderful people, and obviously most importantly, eaten some marvellous food!

As Brexit started to sink in last week and the horrible backlash against foreigners living in the U.K began I realised that in some way, however piecemeal, the Real Junk Food Project should react to all this, and that our cafes should embrace europeans and european food as a gesture of unity.

So I’m very pleased to say, 2 weeks in, the Real Junk Food Project Brum EU challenge has been a bloody tasty experiment!

The wednesday before last saw Irene Raccanelli(our TRJFP ‘foreign exchange’ person from Turin) make some mouthwatering Stuffed Peppers for lunch, and last week saw our man Ned cooked a mean Saucy Hungarian Chicken dish, all using nothing but TRJFP waste food.

And so, I beseech you all, stay tuned for the imminent release of our EU challenge recipes, and come in to our Ladywood Community Centre cafe on a wednesday to see which country we’ll be visiting next. There are 26 more weeks of deliciousness to go and we’ll culminate in some bangin’ British food(assuming we haven’t left the EU by then!!). Check out Facebook for news of the next one. If I haven’t eaten it all already, that is.

Happy Summer everyone!

A big thankyou to all you patient people who have subscribed and waited for The Real Junk Food Project blog! We hope to unpack for you the bizarro world of food waste as well as give a window into one of Birmingham’s most eclectic volunteering experiences, with a whole host of blog contributors as well as my occasional bits too.

Let me give you a few snapshots of what we do, in this case the various doings of the project across the last week. Last Friday was a pretty exciting and frenetic day for Junk Food Brum, with the reintroduction of our FREEGAN BOXES, our monthly NAKED LUNGS bbq, bands and bards event and our weekly two cafe services at LADYWOOD COMMUNITY CENTRE.
This meant our tireless volunteers Sedge and Thomas not only intercepting a tonne of fruit and veg from Birmingham’s cavernous Wholesale markets, but also reorganising it beautifully into individual boxes to take to addresses across Brum*.

This meant our Bob, Vinny and Liz cooking up a storm in the Ladywood Community Centre kitchen for lunchgoers and ravenous afterschool kids. This also meant Zoe, Judy, Steve and a whole host of others manning the bbq tongs and order pads in the lush setting of Digbeth Community Garden whilst saxophones squeals and poets did their thing.

This meant that 92 people were fed with food that would have been thrown away. This meant 10 people got to volunteer their time with us.

This also meant that we all got to have a bloody good time!

And so, there you have a picture of a Junk Food Brum day. I know every day I spend with this project I count myself lucky. Oh and, crucially, full up!

*get one, they’re Pay-As-You-Feel, follow http://goo.gl/forms/vcQOQhizCbFLujRl2 to order yours!