South Norwood Community Kitchen (SNCK) is a café and community space on Portland Road that turns food waste from businesses into delicious meals and feeds the community with it.

“We have anything from people coming with random vegetables from their allotments, all the way to the upper levels of the scale, where we have delivery partners like Fare Share, City Harvest and The Felix Project. These are all well set-up organisations that redistribute food waste away from businesses, restaurants, supermarkets, events, you name it,” Anne Richardson, a volunteer at South Norwood Community Kitchen (SNCK) told EastLondonLines.

The kitchen was launched in 2017 by a small group of committed locals who wanted to provide food for homeless people. Since then, the SNCK has become more established, and it now welcomes hundreds of people every week. It is still run by volunteers and saves huge amounts of food from being thrown away every year.

An estimated 9.5m tonnes of food is thrown away in the UK each year, and a third of all food produced globally is binned, according to Business Waste Management.

The amount of food wasted in the UK annually is enough to feed 30 million people a year, yet 8.4 million people live in food poverty in the UK. SNCK is working to tackle this, and the majority of the food produced is given away to clients who cannot afford to pay.

SNCK get the ingredients for their meals in a variety of ways, but it shares one thing in common – all of it would have otherwise been wasted: “Out of all of the food that we cook with, 90% would have been thrown in the bin,” Richardson told EastLondonLines.

“You might get 5,000 about to go out of date yoghurts and then some cabbages, or you might get a better spread of items, which will enable you to make meals”.

Richardson also noted that since the cost-of-living crisis kicked in, donations have nosedived. Businesses started to tighten their belts, she said, and became more rigorous about what they were throwing out.

“We really struggled, because our entire model is built on people throwing things out. In an ideal world, people wouldn’t waste anything, and everyone would have enough.

But we don’t live in a fair society where that happens. So that’s how the model has been built, because of inequality that’s existed for years.”

In England, there are currently no mandatory food waste reduction targets. However, there are many voluntary initiatives which have been set up as businesses or charities, that help prevent food waste.

Examples include TooGoodToGo, an app that allows businesses to list food that is about to go out of date for a reduced price and allows customers to come and collect it.

Other groups include The Felix Project and City Harvest, which are central re-distributors. This means they collect large amounts of food waste from businesses, then re-distribute it to smaller groups such as SNCK.

Allotments and home-growing food are also becoming more popular. Growing your own food is not something that needs to be limited to those who have their own garden.

Locations such as The Hive in Coulsdon, and Sutton Community Farm allow locals to grow fruit and vegetables, season dependant.

Wendy Ager, a volunteer at The Hive said: “People should be encouraged to grow their own food at community spaces because it promotes sustainability by reducing food waste, decreasing reliance on transportation for food delivery, and a real-life connection to food.  We ate some of our produce grown in The Hive this year, and considered, instead of food miles, measuring it in snail lengths!

“On a wider scale, encouraging people and businesses to be more sustainable with their food can be achieved through initiatives like promoting local food systems, supporting sustainable growing practices, reducing food waste through education, and encouraging more plant-based diets”.

SNCK also has a community garden, where fresh produce such as courgettes, beans, and lettuce are grown. The produce is grown by volunteers and is used in the delicious meals such as veggie pastries and pasta dishes that SNCK serves.

Gardiner told EastLondonLines: “We are so grateful that we are lucky enough to have outdoor space to grow food. Getting in touch with our roots and remembering where our food comes from is essential for our understanding of the world as well as our own physical and mental health.”