Ladywood café – Alice

For the last two years, Alice and her colleague have been coming along to the Ladywood Community Centre to help with cooking food in the kitchen for the Real Junk Food Project Birmingham café there. Through her work with the charity, Active Well-Being Society, she came to discover the Real Junk Food Project Birmingham and now regularly takes along food to the Active Street events she helps to organise.

Active Streets provide community events to the streets around Birmingham. This involves the closure of the road to traffic and the organisation of events for the residents with the aim of increasing well-being and drawing people together.

The Active Well-Being Society also run Active Parks, which provides free fitness and well-being activity classes and events in parks around Birmingham for the residents.

Alice says she has a general awareness of the food waste issues in the food industry. The issue centres around the discard of huge volumes of perfectly edible food that has simply expired its best before date by supermarkets and the food industry in general. Since volunteering with TRJFPBrum, however, she is now a lot more passionate about this topic and knowledgeable on the facts.

Alice says she loves volunteering at the Ladywood Community Centre kitchen as she gets to interact with a mixture of people from a variety of backgrounds. She has also learned new skills such as preparing and cooking food for the public to food safety standards.

We want to thank Alice for her regular volunteering commitment to our project and the time she took to speak with us. It’s great to connect with other organisations in Birmingham who are providing such a worthwhile service to the community.

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Ladywood café – Justin

“Food breaks down barriers between cultures”

Justin

Justin is a cool guy who loves music and designs his own clothes range called ‘dream n achieve’. Before moving to the area, he lived in Canada for 20 years where his family still are. Being so far away from family can be isolating at times and Justin regularly enjoys coming to our Ladywood Café to find community and conversation. An added bonus is the freshly cooked food.

Justin first heard about The Real Junk Food Project Birmingham from Ann, volunteer coordinator, who he met at his child’s school. He liked the idea of the project and has since become a regular customer. At the café, Justin started meeting people from the local area and made some friends. They support each other when they have bad days and enjoy the good days.

The pay as you feel (payf) concept at our café was new to Justin who works two jobs in industrial cleaning and food preparation usually late at night and early in the morning. His clothing business is currently a side project Justin runs not for profit. He just wants people to like his clothes, but he does not want to profit from them.

Justin is not on social media and feels that face to face conversations with people is so much more real than pretending to be someone else on Facebook. The TRJFPBrum café at Ladywood community centre enables him to have those real conversations and he loves to tell his friends about TRJFPBrum. He asked why Ladywood was not open 5 days a week instead of only Wednesdays to Fridays.

We want to thank Justin for his regular financial contribution to our project and for his time to speak with us. Without cash we can’t pay for our sharehouse, where we store food donations, and the van we use to transport the food.

Irian – a volunteer from Tahiti

There are moments in your life where you need to give your time to other people.

Irian

Soon we will say goodbye to volunteer Irian, a young man who grew up in Tahiti, an island part of French Polynesia in the Central South Pacific Ocean. It’s a French version of Hawaii, Irian says. In total, the islands together have a population of just 275k people. He currently studies Business Studies in France as he was keen to experience a ‘big country’.

A friend of his who had volunteered with us last year told Irian about the Real Junk Food Project Birmingham. Irian wanted to come and help people in Birmingham because it’s something he knows from his home country. In Tahiti people cook for each other and do a lot of charity work and Irian was drawn to our project to feed bellies not bins. Also, his degree requires him to do a 6 week internship and Irian liked the idea of improving his English while feeding and helping people in Birmingham.

Irian has worked at a range of TRJFP Birmingham venues during his internship including:

He was shocked at how much food would go to waste if we didn’t intercept it and feels inspired to introduce The Real Junk Food Project to Tahiti.

Irian’s English has improved a lot during his time with us and he enjoyed speaking to all the different people he met through the project and felt that he was able to make a difference to their lives.

People think where he is from is paradise but Tahiti has all the same problems we have including poverty and excessive wealth.

We’d like to thank Irian for his hard work with the project and wish him well for his future studies and travels!

Christmas Opening Times

Festive greetings to you all. Thank you for your continued support.


Kings Heath:

Last café, Monday 17th December

Open again, Monday 14th January

Ladywood:

Last café, Wednesday 19th December

Open again, Wednesday 9th January

Bishop Latimer:

BOUTIQUE ONLY Thursday 20th December

CAFÉ and BOUTIQUE OPEN Thursday 10th January

Hodge Hill:

Last café, Thursday 13th December

Open again, Thursday 10th January

Hobs Moat:

Last café, Thursday 20th December

Open again, Thursday 10th January

Zero Waste – Incredible Taste – Monday 3rd September

Where will you be having dinner this evening? Why not join us at 100 Trades?

In conjunction with TRJFP Brum and Slow Food Birmingham, 1000 Trades are hosting a series of one day pop-ups in Zero Waste Week 3 – 8 September, and we’re catering on Monday 3rd! We’ll all be using ingredients from sources that actively reduce food waste to create delicious, varied dishes that aim to inspire.

Love food not wasteThere will be Craddocks Wasted Pale Ale on tap; a beer that has been made using surplus bread, with some of the profit going direct to The Real Junk Food Project Birmingham.

If you’re a gin fan there will also be a Rhubarb infused gin made with surplus from a community garden… the rhubarb not the gin! 

On Monday it’s us in the kitchen.

Tuesday is a Surplus Pan Asian Vegan feast from Change Kitchen that doesn’t cost us the earth.

On Wednesday Kitchen Supper Club will delight us with three courses of foraged fare from Birmingham – urban dining at its best!

Thursday‘s menu focuses on bread – our most often wasted food, Slow Food Member Suzie from Artisan Epicurean has also included some Ark of Taste products within her four course menu.

Friday and Saturday‘s menu from Ox and Origin feature food that is seldom seen…

As part of our efforts to encourage you to rethink food waste we will also have a few recipes from the week along with some ways you can make a change that makes a difference on our website.

And if all of that is not enough reason to rally your friends and celebrate Zero Waste, our friends over at The Clean Kilo are giving away a discount voucher to shop with them each night to one lucky diner, chosen at random. And you can eat with us knowing that part of your ticket price is also supporting Slow Food Birmingham’s mushroom project & fundamental cooking classes.

So, click here to find out more: https://www.facebook.com/events/907704052747325/permalink/907718249412572/