Surplus Food, Hungry Families - The Plan to Fix Food Waste with Melinda Lawton
Every year, 1.7 million tonnes of food are wasted in NSW, the equivalent of 68 Olympic-size swimming pools. Meanwhile, 38% of households in the Illawarra Shoalhaven region are struggling to get enough to eat, with children going to school hungry and parents heading to work on an empty stomach. In this episode, Nicky Sloan speaks with Melinda Lawton, Project Manager at Healthy Cities Australia, about a practical plan to close that gap.
Australia produces enough food to feed its people, yet it isn't getting to those who need it. Surplus happens for many reasons. A bumper season can mean more produce than anyone can sell. Pallets of frozen food may arrive with damaged packaging, or a product line may not sell as well as hoped. Too often, perfectly good food ends up in landfill, where it adds to our carbon footprint and creates further environmental problems.
Melinda explains that food security is a fundamental human right that must be addressed before all else. Because of this, community services meant to focus on housing, mental health or therapy often spend much of their time addressing hunger and simply making sure participants have enough to eat.
Through Food Fairness Illawarra, Healthy Cities Australia is working to establish a Regional Food Hub, nicknamed "The Depot." The hub would collect, sort, store and distribute surplus food to the communities that need it, taking the pressure of logistics and staffing off service providers so they can focus on what they do best.
Surplus food would come from supermarkets, catering firms, cafés and other organisations. Melinda stresses that this is quality, healthy food. It is within its use-by date and meets all food safety requirements, and it's food that would otherwise be thrown away.
In its early phases, The Depot will be a large storage and distribution centre. From there, the vision grows to include school lunch programs, composting and other flow-on initiatives that support people experiencing food insecurity and builds resilience for the community.
The project is already taking shape. Ten MOUs are in place with partner organisations, including OzHarvest, SecondBite, Vinnies and Anglicare. The planning is done. What's needed now is the funding to support the infrastructure, so that agencies can sign up and become eligible to receive food for their communities.
Victoria already has five hubs like this that Melinda and her team have been learning from, but NSW is yet to have it’s first. Melinda sees a great opportunity for the Illawarra to be the first, building resilience and food fairness in the region while cutting waste and environmental impact. Melinda explains the plan and what it will take with a suitable space, refrigerated trucks for transport, operational capacity, with both paid and volunteer staff.
Healthy Cities Australia has launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise the initial $137,000 needed to get the project moving. Realistically, they are pursuing $1.5 million to fully establish the hub and see where it can go from there. Winning the backing of governments and the broader community is a major focus for Melinda and the team.
As Melinda puts it collaboration is key, " We want to take that pressure off and centralise a location and a service that allows food to be donated and disseminated but not have the smaller agencies have to deal with the intricacies and the logistics and the staffing and all of the requirements that food requires.”
Links:
