When former chef Adam Smith opened a small cafe in Britain’s industrial north two years ago, serving up dishes with food destined for the scrap heap, he had big aspirations — to fight global food waste.
“From day one I set out to feed the world and I intend to do that,” the Yorkshireman said, as he charted the growth of his ethical empire — the Real Junk Food Project (RJFP).
From its humble roots in a community center in the deprived Armley District of Leeds, northern England, the project now has about 120 affiliated cafes worldwide, including Australia, France, South Korea, the US and, most recently, Nigeria.
Photo: AFP
“People are beginning to realize we are a serious organization,” Smith said, having just returned from an awareness-raising event feeding MPs at Britain’s parliament with food saved from garbage bins.
The simple concept involves collecting food that would otherwise have been thrown away — usually because it is “out-of-date” and unsellable under trading rules — and turning it into perfectly edible meals.
Since the project began in December 2013, almost 200 tonnes of food has been “intercepted,” Smith said.
Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, according to the UN.
By offering meals on a “pay-as-you-feel” basis RJFP cafes sidestep food regulations since it is against the law in Britain to actually “sell” food past its use-by date. Smith’s formulation is tantamount to a voluntary donation, with the amount up to the customer, which keeps all on the legal side of matters, he said.
The team is discriminating: Not all food is accepted.
“We make our own judgement, by tasting and smelling, as to whether food is fit for consumption,” he said.
Smith is clear that his vision was not about feeding poor people, but for many communities it is a way of reaching those on low incomes or none.
Helped by about 90 volunteers, retiree Shena Cooper runs “Elsie’s” cafe in the town of Northampton, central England, as part of the RJFP network.
“We want to create a mixed society within the cafe,” she said. “Some people come in for coffee and cake and give a few pounds, but there are people who cannot give anything.”
Volunteers face the challenge of creating tasty dishes from whatever food is available, but this is “part of the joy for them,” Cooper said.
At Elsie’s “binner” event this month, a guest chef transformed discarded local produce into a three-course feast of gourmet crostini with pear salsa, sausage plait with polenta cake, and a chocolate fig dessert.
“You can actually have a conscience about eating cake,” call center worker Heike Mapstone joked after the dinner.
“I think it is a great idea. Why should we waste all this food?” she said.
Cooper knows her cafe is only “scraping the tip of the iceberg,” but hopes collective efforts will “expose the food system for what it is.”
“There is so much wrong with it,” she said. “The fact that we can fly bananas half way around the world and then throw them into landfill is ridiculous.”
Adam Buckingham feeds about 200 people a week at a church-based RJFP cafe in Brighton, where food donations have included legs of cured serrano ham and huge stockpiles of chocolate.
“It shocks people that all this food would have gone in the bin,” he said, adding that a change in attitudes and legislation is needed.
“Unfortunately, we have got to a point where we think it is OK to throw away food and buy more. We’re blinded by convenience,” he said.
In north London, a pair of entrepreneurs have harnessed what they believe is a growing aversion to this mindset.
Tessa Cook and her US business partner Saasha Celestial-One launched a new app — “Olio” — to connect consumers with sources of surplus food.
The app allows donors to upload pictures of items that may be nearing their sell-by-date and users can browse for food and arrange a pick-up via private messaging.
“We did some market research and found that one-third of people were ‘physically pained’ throwing away food. To me that was mind blowing,” Cook said.
So far the pair have signed up 15 “founding merchants” — individuals and businesses willing to share produce. Although currently focused on London, Cook hopes the app will eventually go global.
“The more we looked into it the more we were overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the food being wasted. It seems totally wasteful, irresponsible and immoral,” she said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day