An innovative new scheme to fight food waste and food poverty is growing with a new London initiative launched this week…
The People’s Fridge (similar to the community fridges championed by Jamie Oliver and Jimmy Doherty on their Friday Night Feast in January) has just moved into Pop Brixton in south London. Following a successful crowdfunding campaign, residents and local businesses are invited to stock it with edible goodies that would otherwise, needlessly, have to be thrown away.
A community fridge can be used by anyone for free – those who want to share food that would be otherwise go to waste, and those for whom access to fresh and free food is hard to come by. Like other community fridges dotted around the country, the Pop Brixton fridge, London’s first, will be helping to solve the pressing problems of food waste and food deprivation.
Did you know that restaurants throw away 900,000 tonnes of food a year, while UK households bin approximately 24 meals’ worth of edible food every month? When an estimated 8.4 million people are living in food insecurity, relying on food banks to feed themselves and their families, The People’s Fridge movement is such as essential, and smart, answer to this problem.
Similar fridges operate in Frome in Somerset and in Derbyshire, with Spain, Germany and India also running similar schemes. If you’d like to see a community fridge set-up in your area, get onto your local council and help drum-up some local support. Next time you’re going away for a few days, you could be putting that milk, cheese, salad or glut of homegrown courgettes into a People’s Fridge for anyone to have. Now that’s cool!
Follow London’s first community fridge via Twitter