this is rubbish

Edible Education students win prestigious UN prize

, , , , , , , , 0

Students from Lammas Secondary School in the London Borough of Waltham Forest won third prize in the Think.Eat.Save student challenge to tackle global food waste with their event ‘Eat My Words’. The United Nations and partner organisations, called on students to join the fight to reduce global food waste, estimated at one third annually. Around 470 schools from close to 80 countries took up the call.

The students, who had been selected to take part in the This is Rubbish Edible Education programme, wrote and performed slam poetry and spoken word to spread their message in an event open to parents, teachers and the wider public. This Is Rubbish utilised their contacts with food wholesalers and supermarkets to source surplus food for the event. Six large boxes of produce that would have been wasted was transformed into exotic, healthy snacks and juices. The students from different school years worked collaboratively to exchange ideas, create the invites and line up, make decorations and very importantly, learn new cookery skills using food that would have been wasted. Guests included Aisling Fahey, the Young Poet Laureate for London, who also performed a piece.

Edible Education takes students on a learning journey through the food supply chain and uses cross curricular, interactive learning to empower young people with a positive message for change. The pilot, which has just finished, toured to five schools and through performances, after school clubs and student assemblies reached an audience of 400+ pupils, teachers and parents. The response was fantastic. The broad range of learning activities revealed the values young people hold about food and the environment and the poetry written by the award winning Lammas students referred strongly to themes of social justice and food security. This seems particularly pertinent at a time when the rise and role of UK food banks is being debated. Waltham Forest is home to many families living in poverty and ranks 15th most deprived borough in the country. All the schools TiR Edible Education worked with have the highest proportion of students eligible for free school meals, roughly double the national average.

The TiR Edible Education team has been genuinely inspired by the passionate and thoughtful responses from all the young participants. This is powerful motivation to further these partnerships and we have big ambitions for growing the programme in 2015.

Here’s to a wonderful, wonky 2015!

Obscene levels of food waste – a transformative encounter

, , 0

On Friday 28th August myself and the skipped smoothie retinue Rachel Solnick and Ellie Stevens visited one of the main fruit veg wholesale markets in the UK, serving all of London the Midlands, East Anglia and Kent. We went to reclaim some of the food waste that is generated daily at the market. It was our mission to relocate the misplaced food, mix the ripe and fragrant fruits and virile vegetables into immune boosting smoothies and distribute them for free to attendees of climate camp, using the great tasting smoothies as an example of the ludicrous scale of good food going to waste on a daily basis in the UK. However, before transporting the free and perfectly edible fruit to the Blackheath climate camp, the shock of physically encountering such enormous piles of mouth watering fruit and veg destined for landfill and anaerobic biodigesters jolted me into vowing to examine the UK food production line.

Food consumption in the UK accounts for an average of 1.5tonnes per person of CO2 emissions annually, almost the same quantity of C02 emissions generated from average flying habits of UK residents (1.2tonnes). It is estimated that the UK, EU and America throw away almost half of the food that they produce and import. If the food industry and individuals reduced their food waste by half, then carbon emissions related to food production would be cut by 50%.  However, it is not simply the carbon emissions associated with food waste that are problematic, but also the unnecessary consumption of resources and the social injustice that food waste perpetuates. More

Getting Ready to Feed The 5000

, , , 0

In December This Is Rubbish Will be contributing to Tristram Stuart’s Feeding The Five Thousand event in Trafalgar Square. We will be handing out free smoothies made entirely from fruit that hasn’t passed the exacting aesthetic standards of a major wholesale market.

We are expecting a good number of people * so most of the smoothies will be prepared before hand. But we will also be making smoothies during the event and all the fruit will be stored in our very own mockup skip. Making the point that this good food shouldn’t be in a skip in the first place, eating thrown out food isn’t an ideal, the ideal is a system where good food isn’t thrown out.

*5000 would be a good number of people.